LIBRARIES AND THEIR FOUNDERS.*
Ma. EDWARDS is the elder Disraeli of libraries. He has already written their lives; this time he gives us their curiosities and their genealogy ; we shall soon have their quarrels and their calamities; on both of which topics there is much to be said. It is unfor- tunate that works of this class should be written for such a limited public. We might suppose that all who care for books would care to read about books, but this is far from being the case. Readers of the present day may be divided into four classes, —the student, who devotes himself to what is learned ; the man of letters, who reads everything ; the reading public, which prefers lighter literature ; and the professedly reading public, which con- fines itself to the reviews in The Times. Mr. Edwards can only look to the first two, but if his opus had been equal to his materia he might have iucluded much of the third. As it is, his book is a huge and somewhat undigested pudding, from which the lover of anecdote may dig a copious stock of plums, while the student will put the plums aside and stuff himself with the suet. Our present task is to combine as much of both as will go together in a very small compass, and as we may fairly conclude that those specially interested in the subject will pass on to the volume, we shall address ourselves principally to its more general aspects.
The introductory chapters of Libraries and their Founders are reprinted with alterations from the Encyclopedia Britannica, and dealing chiefly with ancient and mediteval libraries, are necessarily scanty. But from these we proceed to monastic libraries abroad and at home, to the libraries of famous authors, including Petrarch's, Montaigne's, Da Thou's, Swift's, Goethe's, Scott's, and Southey's ; and of famous monarchs, chiefly Frederick the Great and Napoleon ; to the old Royal Library of England, the State Paper Office, and the Public Records ; and the Maecles-
Sunderlaad, and Spencer Libraries. As an appendix we
• Libraries eel 7banddra ofLibrariaa By Eaward Eiwards. loudoa: Traboar, and Co. have a classification and synopsis of the public records of the realm, which Mr. Edwards ought to extend into a handbook and publish separately, for the use of his fellow-labourers. Indeed we are not sure if it would not have been better to comprise the whole history of the State Paper Office and the Public Records in a single volume. So much interest is attached to the investiga- tion of archives throughout Europe, that records and State papers have become a distinct branch of study. No historian can afford to neglect them. No modern Hume can write on a sofa, or expose himself, as Hume did so exactly, to Juvenal's taunt against his- torians as "genus ignavum, guod lecto gaudet" Mr. Edwards alludes to this laziness, which is now a thing of the past, in the paragraph summing up the story of the records down to the beginning of this century :— "There is, at first sight, a discouraging sort of monotony about the story of the Records. Labourer after labourer appears on that small nook of the vast arena on which it is appointed for man to strive with his work. Some of them are soon appalled at the difficulty of their task. Others grapple with it vigorously. In the Record Tower we have seen Lord Stafford, Bowyer, Lam barde, Prynne, Petyt, trying hard, one after the other, to bring order out of chaos. Two or three centuries roll on. And, after all those successive labours, Lysons, in 1803, finds a chaotic mass of documents, lying in neglect and in filth, and calling aloud for busy hands, and a clear head to make them serviceable to the historians to come. There have been eight or ten generations of workers struggling with the task in turn ; nevertheless, if a David Hama of the nineteenth century, about to narrate our early history, had then been brought face to face with some of his best materials, he might still have said, as the Hume of the eighteenth is reported to have said,—in similar circumstances, and with notorious results,—' Ah ! my publisher won't wait.'" But the historians were not the only ones in fault. The diffi- culties of searching the records before Lord Lang,dale's time, the carelessness With which they were kept, the -negligence of the keepers, and the enormous fees payable to officials, barred the way against the most persevering students. Cromwell had ordered that the State papers should be in English, and should be plainly written, but Charles II. restored "barbarous Latin and more barbarous Courthand." Mr. Edwards is severe on the "uncouth legistic terminology," which he considers one of the greatest im- pedim ants to the study of the records, and he enumerates the for- midable names under which the contents of tharecords have been skilfully concealed—" The Arrow Bundles, Cardinals' Bundles, Pot Bundles, and Stool Bundles, the Misx Rolls, the Nichil Rolls, the None Rolls, the Pipe Rolls, and the Ragman Rolls, the Monstrans de Droit, the Ouster le Mains, the Originalia, the Parliamentary Pawns, the Black Book,s, the Red Books, and the Pye Books." Is there no way of tracing the derivation of these titles? Some of them have an apparent meaning, but we should be sorry to have them set Wi in a competitive examination. Others seem to be suggested by the old way of marking the cases of the records in Bishop Stapledon's "Calendar" of 1323. In this, says Mr. Edwards, "papers relating to rebellions would be marked suggestively with a gallows ; papers relating to marriages with clasped hands; papers on the woollen manufactures with a pair of shears ; docu- ments about Peter's pence with a key ; documents relating to remote countries with a Saracen's head of great fierceness." Many of these symbols are most elaborately made, proving the extreme leisure of the clerks, and what between their devices for puzzling the public and their indifference to their duties they succeeded fully in making themselves useless. A Keeper of State Papers in 1763 admitted candidly, "I found my office a sinecure, and I have allowed it to continue so," a Gibbonian sentence which ought to have reminded Mr. Edwards that the Mr. Porten, afterwards Sir Stanier Porten, who uttered it was the uncle of Gibbon.
In his "Compendium of Records," completed in 1610, Arthur Agarde said that there were four great enemies of records, fire, water, rats and mice, and misplacing. The English State papers suffered from all four, yet the enemy could not have penetrated but for the negligence, of' their own officers. In one place the records were eaten by lime. In another they were buried under cob- webs, dust, and filth. In another they perished by damp. In another skeletons of cats were found imbedded among them. Some were burnt. Some were flooded. Some suffered shipwreck. They were kept in twenty different parts of London, and in all these places the officials were " sharpirtg for fees." And the fees to which they were entitled, or to which they made themselves entitled, were so enormous that on one occasion the cost of hav- ing a copy of a single paragraph was stated to be 145/. Com- pared with this the calamities of libraries, so far as Mr. Edwards touches on them here, are small indeed. The grass-grown library of Monte Cassino when Boccaccio visited it, and Petrarch's library which he presented to St. Mark, and which St. Mark left to petriff) are the great instances of librarians' neglect. But if the former Keepers of Records do not compare advantageously with SirJohn Romilly, the old librarians fall equally short of Mr. Panizai. in the old Royal Library of England the books were included in the inventories of household furniture, and even when the cataloguers got beyond such entries as "a book called Textus in a case of leather, on- which the magnates are wont to be sworn ; unus Liber de Re- mateate," &c., &c., their efforts were often less exact than ludicrous. In the library of Henry VII. there was a " Genealogia Regum Anglin ab Adamo ;"' in that of Henry VIII. " Danti's works in the Castilian tongue ;" in that of Charles I. a curious entry of "Book in fol. of wood Prince of Alberdure [i. e., wood prints of Albert Darer], being ye inscription in high Dutch of the proportions of men." And it is worth noting that "even in the reign of Elizabeth the office of Keeper of Books' was con-
joined with that of of Odoriferous Herbs,' and that the worthy plurklist had a better salary as a perfumer than as a librarian."
We take an enormous stride when we pass from the days when books were household articles and librarians perfumers to the time of modern collectors and the founders of great private libraries. The rivalry of book-hunters is illustrated by several stories of Lord Spencer, and the mole of some of his acquisitions ii almost as curious as their history. After the White Knight's sale in.1819, Lori Spencer bought for 750/. the unique copy of the Valdarfer Boccaccio, for which-he had vainly offered. 2,250/. seven years earlier at the Roxburghe sale. The Valdarfer Boccaccio is the only perfect copy of the Decameroue of 1471, and it was saved. from the flames by being lettered " Concilium Tridenti." At the Roxburghe sale Lord Spencer had resolved to go up to the date of the year (1812), but before the sale he got what he called a windfall of rather more than 4001., and he added this to his former .limit. The book was knocked down to Lord Bland- ford for 101. more than Lord Spencer bid, but he had fixed his limit, and he stuck to it. Seven, years after Lord Bland- ford's Berkshire library was brought to the hammer ; Lord Spencer stopped at 7001., and afterwards bought the Boccac- cio. from Messrs. Longman at the price they had given for it There, are other instances of books varying in price. and'of subsequent sales redressing former extravagances. At Southey's sale in 1844 a book which had fetched 75/. at the White. Knights sale in. 1819 went for 6/. 15s. Coleridge's notes raised the price of some books to as many- guineas as they usually sold for shillings. Of course there can be no rule to fix the price of a book at any auction. If two rival collectors have set their heart on anything it may go to a fabulous height, and the Boccaccio at the Roxburghe sale was contested by the owners of Althorp, Blenheim, and Chatsworth. But there would seem to be an advan- tage in waiting, in retiring from the contest when it grows too hot, and living to fight another day. By observing this rule Lord Spencer saved 1,500/. on his Boccaccio, while Lord Blandford paid the same sum for having it only seven years in his possession. A rival book-buyer noted down the Earl of Sunderland's death in his diary as a fortunate event for his own library, as even if his books were not sold there would beone competitor the less at future auctions. Bat if we want to sea the zeal of collectors outdone by simple greediness, we must turn to the Restoration, when a certain Nicholas Bowdon petitioned the King to grant him the law-books of John Bradshawe, because his own law-books had been carried off in the evil days by John Selden. The naive way in which the similarity of Christian names is converted into responsibility for past actions reminds us of the Frenchman who asked if the member for Lambeth was descended from the divine Williams.
Montaigne, Swift, Goethe, ,and Scott, are the chief authors classed by Mx. Edwards among founders of libraries, but the use he makes of them is not always to be commended. We think he goes out of his way to reflect on Swift's character, and that in assigning Swift his rank among authors he is guilty of the logical fault of begging the question. All that remains of Montaigne's library are the inscriptions on the beams and raft= which he burnt in with, branding-irons. The chief point to be neticed about Scott's library is the strange imperfection of the catalogue printed after his death. Under the heading of "English History, Topography, and Antiquities," it enters Burton's "Nine. Wor- thies of the World," and Swifts "Tale of a Tub;" under "American. History and Works on the Colonies," Patetson's "National Character of the Athenians," and Auldjo's "Ascent of Mont Blanc." Works relating to Scottish history, early poetry, and early romantic prose, fiction, demonology, and witchcraft were the principal features of the Abbotsford library ; there do not seem to have been many works on the period of French history which Scott was unfortunate in undertaking. Mr. Edwards has very properly supplied Scott's deficiencies in his account of Napoleon's studies, from which many interesting details may be chosen. Napoleon's early papers contain copious extracts from a multitude of writers, both ancient and modern ; passages from Rousseau, with sharp comment and criticism ; notes on the liberties of the G-allican Church, the Bull Unigenitus, and the history of the Sorbonne. There is a paper on geography which ends, strangely enough, with Sainte Hilene—petite lie. As proofs of his English studies we have a most apocryphal story of his winning the.battle of Austerlitz by a recollection of Satan's disposal of his artillery during the war in heaven, and an English letter recording his then progress in the language :— " Connt Las Cases,—Since six weeks I learn the English, and I do irnake] not any progress. Six week do [make] fourty and two day. If I might have learn fifty word for day, I could know two thousand two hunderd. It is in the dictionary more of fourty thousand. After this you shall agree that to study one tongue is a great labour."
. Is not this an exact reproduction of our excellent friend Florae? When Napoleon wrote French he did not yield to such obstacles, but bent the language to his will, and in all his dealings with literature he was equally despotic. His instructions for the for- mation of a camp library, which was to be printed expressly for him, are like his orders of the day ; he makes and deposes authors as he made and deposed kings. In religion he wanted the Bible,. a selection of the Fathers,, the Koran, and a good book or two on mythology. There were to be 140 volumes of poetry, the epics were to include Homer, Lucan, Tasso, Telthnague, and the . Henriade, but the .2Eneid and Milton were to be in prose transla- tions. A certain number of men of letters and of taste were to revise and correct the historical works, and were to suppress every- thing that was useless, such as editorial notes and the Greek or Latin texts.
To his antiquarian readers these modern details may seem un- pardonable trifling in Mr. Edwards. We are by no means of that opinion. We have noticed traits in hint which we think laudable in a writer, professing to be a book-worm, and we are glad to remark that he does not possess the blind reverence for antiquity which is so often fatal to students of his subjects. His stock of reading is various besides being vast, and in his descrip- tion of curiosities he goes to fly-leaves as well as title pages. One of his beat stories is a quotation from a family Bible at Althorp, to the effect that a lady of the Villiers family drank on the day of her death nineteen tumblers of claret, besides some "-gineva in green tea." He is sufficiently awake to the imperfections of book- hunters to doubt whether Dibdin, Lord Spencer's librarian, understood the difference between two men, both of whom were " Roxburghiems " and editors of black-letter rarities—Walter Scott and Joseph Haslewood. And we almost admire the self-denying hardihood with which he foregoes the temptation of verifying a passage in Milton, and tells um that it is to be fouad either in the " Iconoclastea " or the " Defensio."
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