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The Bibliographer,
Book-Lore,
and The Bookworm
by
Arthur Sherbo
The subtitles and vital statistics of the periodicals of my title are, in order: A Journal of Book-Lore, 6 vols., 1881-84; A Magazine Devoted to Old Time Literature, 6 vols., Dec. 1884-Nov. 1887; An Illustrated Treasury of Old Time Literature, 7 vols., 1888-94.[1] One is struck by the repetitions in titles and subtitles and by the chronology, one periodical taking up where the previous one left off. All were published by Elliott Stock of London. Henry Benjamin Wheatley was editor of The Bibliographer and W. E. A. Axon of Book-Lore. I should add here that none of the three periodicals is so much as listed in the two editions of the CBEL, Wheatley's editorship of The Bibliographer also being ignored, as, indeed, it is in the British Museum catalogue of printed books. Contributors to these periodicals include F. J. Furnivall, T. J. Wise, Henry Bradshaw, J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, L. Toulmin Smith, William Blades, H. R. Plomer, William Roberts, F. Madan, Nicholas Pocock, G. L. Gomme, Leonard A. Wheatley, C. A. Ward, T. N. Postlethwaite, W. P. Courtney, W. Carew Hazlitt, as well as contributors from Canada, New York, Brisbane, among other places. Most of the signed contributions occur in The Bibliographer, relatively few in The Bookworm. Some of the
In what follows I proceed chronologically through the three periodicals, recording what I have gleaned of the hitherto unremarked without reference to order of magnitude. Relatively little emerged from The Bibliographer, a letter of Thomas Bewick's with proposals for his History of Quadrupeds being first printed there (I [December 1881], 20-21) and now available in Sydney Roscoe's bibliographie raisonné of some of Bewick's works issued in his lifetime (1953), pp. 7-9. William Beckford, author of Vathek, was, it is well known, an avid collector of books. What is more, he had a penchant for writing comments or copying passages from his books on their flyleafs or in their margins. Many of the books with his marginalia have been identified[3] but not among them those described by an anonymous contributor to the second volume of The Bibliographer in an account of the "Beckford Library" (July 1882, pp. 25-27). Here is the pertinent part of the account:
Volume five (December 1883, p. 19) yielded a paragraph from a letter of a friend of Byron's who described the delight the poet expressed in Sir Walter Scott's Quentin Durward. Byron and Scott were friends, and Byron more than once praised Scott's novels, but I have found no reference to this letter. I quote the whole item:
Book-Lore proved slightly more rewarding, although none of the gleanings will generate much excitement. In volume one there were three items of interest to students of the life and works of Samuel Johnson, none of which is listed in the Clifford/Greene bibliography (1970). The first is titled "Johnson Bibliography" (December 1884, p. 26) and in it R. H. suggests, "I think that we may add [to Boswell's list] the preface to A New Compendious Grammar of the Greek Tongue, by W. Bell, A. B. London, 1775. This reads Johnsonian:—'That the knowledge of the Greek language is a valuable and necessary accomplishment for all who desire to be useful to the literary world, none will deny' etc." Furthermore he was of opinion that "The preface to [William] Guthrie's General History of the World, 1764, was probably by Johnson." Neither of these is mentioned in Allen Hazen's Samuel Johnson's Prefaces and Dedications (1937), the definitive work. The second item is entitled "Johnsoniana" (January 1885, pp. 39-40) and in it reference is made to
The richest harvest came in The Bookworm, beginning with an anonymous contribution to volume two entitled "Pope and Hughes" (1889, pp. 104-105) in which "Under date January 20, 1832 the late Mr. J. Payne Collier has given the following interesting facts in relation to Pope and Hughes," i.e. that he bought "a nice clean copy of Hughes' 'Calypso and Telemachus,' 8 vo., 1712" and found two fly-leaves covered with writing in a hand he "recognized in an instant." I allow him to continue.
On His Opera';
"'When, dearest Hughes, you strike the tunefull strings,
And, taught by you, our British Opera sings,
Th' Italian Muse is forc'd to quit the stage,
Whilst charms superior captivate the age:
Music and Verse no longer disagree,
Nor's Sense thought useless now to Harmony.
In your Telemachus both parts unite,
And charming sounds are joyn'd with solid wit.
These Nature studied, and those powerfull arts
Which strike the secret springs that guide our hearts.
Sooth'd with your verse, fierce factions peace proclaim,
Rough Whiggs grow mild, and hottest Torys tame:
At your command their conquer'd passions move,
With you they rage, they pity, hate and love.
Then such instructions flow from Mentor's tongue,
Minerva only could inspire the song:
Whilst each description shines so clear and bright,
We fancy every thing before our sight.
How gayly drest the first bright scene appears,
What wanton beautys all the island wears!
Methinks I hear the murmuring waters flow,
And echoing rocks repeat Calypso's woe.
Now the fond Goddess lost Ulysses mourns,
But quickly for the younger hero burns:
What art doth she not try? what charms put on?
To make the beateous haughty youth her own.
Then, what fierce furys in her bosom rise,
To find the prince her proffered love despise.
See in Telemachus the best of sons,
With what true filial piety he mourns;
Whence Eucharis coquet, gay, young and fair,
Finds means to trap him in th' enchanted snare:
With greedy looks he draws his ruin on,
Sucks in the charm, and hastes to be undone.
Here Mentor for a while withdraws his face;
And let's him feel the danger of the place,
But as he seems just sinking in the waves,
Exerts the goddess, and the hero saves.'"
Volume three contains a letter from Thomas Moore to a Mrs. Wyke which is not included in the collected Letters, edited by Wilfred S. Dowden, 2 vols. (1964). Mr. C. M. Collins of Brisbane sent the copy of the letter in his possession, noting that "the letter is addressed on the outside leaf to 'Mrs. Wyke, 20, Above Bar, Southampton,' and bears the Devizes postmark" (III [1890], 79). I quote the letter in full.
Stoperton Cottage Devises
March 4th 1819
I am most sincerely sorry to think I should have given one moment's pain to a heart which, I fear, is destined to pay the usual tax of genius, and feels everything in this life much more deeply than it ought. But the truth is that on first reading the letter which inclosed your daughter's beautiful lines on my little boy, I thought you expressed an intention of going to Brighton immediately, and as no address there was mentioned, I looked upon an answer from me as out of the question. Some time after however, (though too late), I perceived, upon re-perusing your letter, that some weeks were to elapse before your departure for Brighton, during all which time my answer must, of course, have been expected.—Pray explain all this to Miss Wyke and tell her I am the last person in the world to be guilty of neglect to a young poetess, [non sic in original] such as I fancy her to be. I am, however the less sorry for this accident as it has been the means of producing such lines as I have just received from her, which I prefer to any she has done me the honour of sending me yet, as they possess more feeling and less attempt at brilliancy, (a fault into which, I rather fear, my example may have seduced her), than most of the others.
Yours, my dear Madam, very faithfully
Thomas Moore.
Mr. Collins further noted that "in 1830, 'Bertha, a Tale of the Waldenses, and Other Poems,' by Anne Wyke, was printed and published at Shrewsbury by Charles Hulbert, and sold in London by Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, and this may have been the 'young poetess' to whom Moore refers." There is no entry under "Wyke" in the index to the Letters nor in that to the 1977 biography by Terence de Vere White. Miss Wyke, incidentally, wrote no more. In the same volume there is a short letter of Algernon Charles Swinburne's (1890, pp. 171-172) that is not in The Swinburne Letters, edited by Cecil Y. Lang (1959-62). It was one of a collection of autographs sold by Sotheby, Wilkinson, and Hodge on May 21, 1890. The letter, dated December 20, 1871, is to an unidentified magazine editor; he was, however James Rice, owner and editor of Once a Week, 1868-72.[6] Here is the letter.
What may possibly be more important than any other bit gleaned from The Bookworm is a series of three communications by a James Hayes on "Sir Robert Walpole as a Collector of Pamphlets" (IV [1891], 81-84, 149-151, 217-220). While this is not my line of country, I find no mention of these pamphlets and of Sir Robert's marginalia in some of them in J. H. Plumb's two-volume biography (1956) nor in subsequent literature on Sir Robert. I quote the first paragraph of the first communication.
Hayes writes that Sir Robert's comment on pamphlet number seven "is well worth remembering, and as he places it before title, I shall follow his example. It is 'When au't is not encoridged then it goes to decay.' 'Proposals for printing a Book entituled Longitude found out by the accurate goeing of a new invented AUTOMATON by John Carte, English Watchmaker at the Corner of the Ness over against the Kaysers Hoff in Hamburgh.' The above consists of 12 pp. 4to, without date or imprint" (IV. 82). Hayes notes that it is number fifteen of the series to which Sir Robert pays most attention and then goes on,
Hayes states, in his second installment, of the nine remaining pamphlets not commented upon, that "space will not admit of more than a cursory glance of each" (IV. 149), and that is about all he allots them. Of number twelve, "England must pay the Piper. Being a seasonable discourse about Raising of money this Session," he writes, "This ably written tract is by 'Sir R(obert) W(alpole)'. There is, for prudent reasons, no imprint, 12 pp." Sir Robert's youngest son, Horace, included his father in his Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England, With Lists of their Works, prefacing the list of twelve items with the statement that "About the end of Queen Anne's reign, and the beginning of George the First, he wrote the following pamphlets." "England must pay the Piper" is not in that list. However, the only pamphlet of that name, England must pay the Piper, tout court, is dated 1691 in the Short Title Catalogue, and Robert Walpole was born in 1676. In the third installment Hayes tells of "a companion octavo volume of pamphlets to that described in the February and April numbers of the BOOKWORM," several of which he believed would "command attention" (IV. 217). The first of these pamphlets is mistakenly attributed to Sir Robert. It is Two Letters to the Right Hon. Lord. Visc. Townshend . . . (1714), by R. W. who, according to the British Museum catalogue of printed books, is Robert Watts, not Robert Walpole. On what is insufficient evidence, then, James Hayes was of the opinion that "So far as the writings of Sir Robert noticed in these articles are concerned, I find self-assertion not to be his forte; but he does not conceal the fact that he has been the stayer and capable weight-carrier of his party, and the chief moulder and propagandist of the Policy of the Whigs from the Start" (IV. 219).
A brief note in volume six (1893) entitled "Letters of Mrs. Browning" (pp. 100-101) begins, "An exceedingly interesting and important series of letters of Miss Elizabeth Barrett, who subsequently became wife of Robert Browning, came under the hammer at Messrs. Puttick Simpson's sale recently. They are all written between 1842 and 1845, to Mr. Cornelius Mathews of New York." The fourteen letters in the lot fetched a total of £61 4s. The anonymous contributor of the note gives some details of, and quotes from, but seven of the fourteen.
The first is a charming epistle, dated November 3, 1842, in which the writer says: "It is delightful and encouraging to me to think that there, among the cataracts and
"'There is delight in singing though none hear
Beside the singer, and there is delight
In praising, though the praiser sit alone
And see the praised far off him, far above.'"
&c., &c.
The letter concludes—
"Mr. Tennyson has a pension, you see, but for the rest, is said rather to smoke than to make poems. . . . Dickens is about to cast himself headlong into the doubtful undertaking of the new daily paper The Daily News."
The fourteen letters realised a total of £61 4s.
Only the letters of April 28, 1843, and October 1, 1884, are included in F. G. Kenyon's edition of Mrs. Browning's Letters (2 vols. 1897); that for November 3, 1842 was printed in Thomas Powell's Pictures of the Living Authors of Britain (New York 1849; London, 1851) and then reprinted in Notes and Queries for November 18, 1944. Some Browning scholar should take it upon himself to trace the descent of these letters. One of the unidentified seven letters may be that to Mathews of date Nov. 14, 1844 (Letters, I. 213-215).
Edmund Gosse was Clark lecturer of Trinity College, Cambridge from 1885-90, but his association with Cambridge did not end in that latter year. Evan Charteris writes that after Gosse's tenure as Clark lecturer a "series of uneventful years followed. He had much leeway to make up; patience and assiduity were needed. He turned with redoubled eagerness to his friends, courting, and not in vain, encouragement and support. For the rest, he continued his literary activities and his lectures."[7] There is no mention of a lecture on "the Literary Movement in England during the last hundred years" which he gave at "the summer meeting of the University Extension Society, at Cambridge, in August [1893]." His lecture, there given the title "The Literature of the Century," appeared in the sixth volume of The Bookworm (1893, pp. 357-360), submitted by an anonymous contributor who may have been at the lecture. If the lecture exists in print in toto I have been unable to find any reference to it. I quote the whole.
On occasion of the summer meeting of the University Extension Society, at Cambridge, in August, Mr. Edmund Gosse lectured on the Literary Movement in England during the last hundred years. The lecturer expanded the view that since the revolt of the romantic system against the classic, in the beginning of the hundred years, no radical change had taken place in English literature up to the present time. He remarked:—"The first thing we need to obtain, if we are trying to analyse the literary movement of the century, is a clear sane impression, proportionate in all its parts, of what that movement has been. If Clough was part of it—why, so is Mr. Kipling; if the German philosophers influenced one end of it, it is quite equally certain that Ibsen and Norwegian drama influences the other end. It is very hard to do, but we should at least try to see the second just as plainly as the first. What we cannot, of course, attain, but what we should endeavour to climb towards, is a sort of Pisgah-height from which we can look at the hundred years of nineteenth-century literature winding like a river at our feet—one part as near, as distinct, as unclouded as another. As I say, we cannot quite manage to do this; but that is the attitude of mind desirable.
"Well, if in measure, and so far our prejudiced and imperfect optics will permit, we do look down upon the literary history of England from 1793 to 1893 in this way, what do we see? I think I shall perhaps startle you a little if I confess that what I seem to see is a vast cascade, a sort of Niagara, at one end, and a remarkably calm and unruffled tide proceeding from the fall of this cascade to our very feet. To my vision, the first thing that strikes the attention is precisely this short and violent crisis or cataclysm, followed by a long stretch of almost unmodified calm.
"You will immediately ask me if I am so blind as to see no individuals of genius breaking through the surface of the literary movement during, let us say, the last seventy years? Am I one of those, for instance, who declare that English poetry stopped with Crabbe, and that Sir Walter Scott was the last genuine novel-writer? Most certainly that is not my foible. I am no praiser of bygone days at the expense of our own, and I think that the middle of the nineteenth century was unusually full of great original names in literature. But this is not the point in question. We are speaking of the tendency of literary movement, and that is often curiously independent of personal genius. I will remind you of a very striking instance of this. If there is in English poetry a name which appears to every one of us synonymous with originality, with individuality, with genius in all its forms, it is that of Milton. But Milton is positively a negligible quantity, if we are considering the literary movement
"But I must now ask you what is to be the limit of our one hundred years—are we going to be very exact, and begin with 1793, or are we to take 1800 for our starting-point? The detail is an important one; for, according to my telescope, looking backwards from our Pisgah, the great crisis of movement took place during those seven years. Will you think me very paradoxical if I say that it seems to me that there was a more complete change made in English literature between 1793 and 1800 than between 1800 and 1893?
"Let us now think for an instant what that change was. In 1793 the eighteenth century in literature, the old régime, was still alive; it showed no sign of change, no threatening of decay. Down through those seven years there continued to be whole bodies of intelligent and attentive persons who remained positively untouched by a single new idea. There is a very curious, and in its way a very charming, book which used to be a great favourite with our grandfathers—'The Diary of a Lover of Literature.' That journal was begun in 1796, and carried on for many years, by a young man called Thomas Green. The chief interest to us now in that book is that it belongs entirely to the old world, the world of Addison and Pope and Johnson, and that not a single sign exists in it to show that the very clever and erudite author had an idea that the standards of literary taste would ever be undermined. And yet, as we look back to those years in which he wrote, they seem to us not merely undermined but crashing about his ears. The blind forces of Romance took the pillars of the eighteenth century in their hands, and swayed to and fro, until the whole edifice crumbled in atoms."
After a rapid survey of the condition of English literature at various moments in the course of the century, Mr. Gosse closed his discourse as follows:—
"Let no one persuade us, inspired by antiquarianism on the one hand or by a cheap cynicism on the other, to underrate the richness, the variety, the splendid fulness and accomplishment of these hundred years. To have lived through our share of this magnificent time is, if our ears and eyes have been open, to have lived broadly and loftily. Nowhere else in the history of the world—not under Pericles or Augustus, not under Elizabeth or Louis XIV.—was so delicate and so various a literary banquet spread before the hunger of readers. In several solitary instances, without doubt—so far, at least, as we are able to trust our present impressions—a greater altitude has been reached by writers of bygone times. But nowhere in past history do we find so high a general level, nowhere such a persistency, for generation after generation, in moving with strenuous variety along the same great line of literary tendency.
"To us all, however, the practical service of such a train of reflection as we have sought to follow to-night must be measured by the degree in which it adds pleasure and profit to our private reading. I am in hopes that a perception of the continuity in nineteenth-century authorship, which I have attempted to dwell upon, may add an enjoyment to your course of more extended study. To take a book and to read it as an isolated production, to absorb what entertainment and instruction it offers without regard to its relation to other books, may be a very delighful thing. But that delight is immensely increased, is made part of an organised system or a vertebrate structure, when we take the book in connection with what preceded and what followed it, as a link, in fact, in the long and beautiful chain of 'sweetness and light.'
"I cannot help hoping that a consideration of the unity of purpose which marks all the most vital literature of the nineteenth century, its deliberate and persistent pursuit of what is genuine, natural, and vigorous, and its rejection of mere rhetoric and superficiality, will add to your pleasure in reading Coleridge and Browning, Thackeray and Stevenson, Charles Lamb and Carlyle. You will enjoy the characteristic
Students of nineteenth-century English literature will make of this what they will. Extracts from Thomas Green's Diary were published in 1810 in Ipswich, his native city, and were continued in the Gentleman's Magazine from January 1834 to June 1843.
William Roberts, described in the British Museum catalogue of printed books as "Writer on English Bookselling," was a fairly frequent contributor to at least the last two of the three periodicals under discussion. Of especial interest is a contribution to the last volume of The Bookworm (VII [1894], 81-82). It is entitled "A New Letter of Montaigne" and tells of a letter from Montaigne to Henri III of France in the Bibliothéque Nationale. The date of the letter is July 7, 1583, which places it before that of August 31, 1583, also to Henri III, described by Donald M. Frame as "Letter of Remembrance from the Mayor [Montaigne, of course] and Jurats of Bordeaux."[8] I quote the letter and Roberts's comments.
The letter quoted below is dated July 7, 1583, and was written at that period of his life when his compatriots, recognising the value of his past services, elected him, for the second time, Mayor of Bordeaux. It was evidently in this year that Montaigne made a journey to the court to obtain from the king, in the interest of his city, an absolute suppression of the "traite foraine"—that is to say, the custom-house duty imposed on the imports into and exports from Bordeaux; and the desired order seems to have taken effect in July, 1583. Neither M. Alphonse Grün, "Vie Publique de Montaigne," nor M. Payen, in his "Recherches," makes any reference to Montaigne's Itinerary during the year 1583. The date and subject of the letter therefore furnish future biographers of the great essayist with the groundwork of some fresh materials.
The letter is as follows:—
Sire par ladvertissement que Jay eu en ce lieu de Moncornet Il semble que la fortune soffre a vous descharger de la promesse que vre bonte et liberalite ma faicte depuis peu de jours car Jay trouve entre les mains de mons' pinart une lre cy Incluse par laquelle on mande que le priore de Provins est vacquant par le trespas de Me Maurice de Commarcis et peut valoir de mil a douze cens livres ainsi que dit celuy qui en escrit. Il est au pays de Loudounois et a la nomination de vre majte qui nen fera pas seulement un prieur si elle le me donne dautant que ce sera pour moy un duche ou conté qui sera tousiours garny de gros et bons chapons quand vous les aymerez autant que les cailles. Je no pretens en cecy rompre la deliberation que vre majte a faite quand au departement de ses bienfaitz car celuy qui a atendu tantost vintcinq ans ses maitresses atendra bien deux mois encores que ce soient ans pour petites gens et afin que ma lre ne soit plus longere que moy mesme et que elle ne vous soit Importune Je finiray en supliant tres humblement vre majte rejecter ceste hardiesse et presumtion de vous escrire sur la necessite qui menasse aussi bien gens de basse taille que les plus grans. Je suplie dieu de tout mon cueur quil luy plaise prospérer.
Vre majeste autant et plus quil soit jamais Roy de France.
De Moncornet le VIIme Juliet 1583.
Vre tres humble serviteur et suject
Montaigne.
The foregoing letter presents several questions not easily answered. There are (or were), for example, three Moncornets—one in the Aisne, a second in the Ardennes, and a third on the Oise.
M. le Baron de Ruble, in his "Mémoires de la Huguerye" (1877-80), makes an interesting reference to the "pinart" of Montaigne's letter. Claude Pinard, Baron de Cremailles and secretary of the Maréchal Saint-André and of the king, was a favourite with Catherine de Medicis, and became Secretary of State in 1570. He was in great favour with Henri III., and often employed in diplomatic matters. He died on September 14, 1605. Maurice de Commartin, to whom Montaigne refers as Maurice de Commercis, was a prior.
In regard to the word "prospérer" which occurs in Montaigne's letter, Littre, in his "Dictionnaire," only cites one example of its use in the sense here employed by Montaigne, namely, from the "Mémoires de Villeroy." The above letter therefore furnishes a second instance of the employment of this word in the sense of the Latin "prosperare."
W. Roberts.
Since Professor Frame did not know of the existence of this letter he could not address himself in his biography of Montaigne (1965) to the problems raised by it. I have made no effort to ascertain if there was post-1965 knowledge of the letter, my primary purpose being to redirect attention to these and other periodicals.
Finally, in volume seven, in Part II of W. Carew Hazlitt's "English and Scottish Book Collectors" (1894, pp. 97-106), there is this notice under the name of Alexander Pope (p. 104):
We have a very imperfect knowledge of the contents and extent of the poet's library. Books with his autograph sometimes occur. He is supposed to have had in his possession the unique copy of the old "Taming of a Shrew." 4to, 1594, now in the Devonshire Collection. Comp. Bibliographer for Oct.-Nov., 1884.
Boissard (J. J.). Romanæ Urbis Topographia. Folio, Frankfort, 1597-8. On flyleaf: "Ex Libris Alex. Pope."
These two titles may be added to Professor Maynard Mack's essay on Pope's books in English Literature in the Age of Disquise (1977), pp. 209-303, and in the revised list in his Collected in Himself (1982).[9]
Notes
There are useful indexes to the articles in The Bibliographer and Book-Lore in The Bulletin of Bibliography, Vol. III, pp. 121-124 (Jan. 1904) and pp. 136-139 (April 1904).
See the preface to the bibliography edited by W. A. Speck in 1978, published in Lawrence, Kansas.
It is not in the fullest account of Dr. Johnson and Dr. William Samuel Johnson, Maurice J. Quinlan's "Johnson's American Acquaintances" in Johnson, Boswell, And Their Circle. Essays Presented to Lawrence Fitzroy Powell in Honour of His Eighty-Fourth Birthday (1965), pp. 201-206.
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