But of course the most interesting of all are the relics of pure literature, of poems and plays. Whence have arisen all the anxious searches and disappointments, and the bitter contests, and the rare triumphs, about the early editions of Shakespeare, separately or collectively, save from this, that they passed from one impatient hand to another, and were subjected to an unceasing greedy perusal, until they were at last used up and put out of existence? True it was to be with him—

But his tuneful companions who had less vital power have lain like some ancient cemetery or buried city, in which antiquaries have been for a long age digging and searching for some fragment of intellectual treasure.

One book, and that the most read of all, was hedged by a sort of divinity which protected it, so far as that was practicable, from the dilapidating effects of use. The Bible seems to have been ever touched with reverent gentleness, and, when the sordid effects of long handling had become inevitably conspicuous, to have been generally removed out of sight, and, as it were, decently interred. Hence it is that, of the old editions of the Bible, the copies are so comparatively numerous and in such fine preservation. Look at those two folios from the types of Guttenburg and Fust, running so far back into the earliest stage of the art of printing, that of them is told the legend of a combination with the devil, which enabled one man to write so many copies identically the same. See how clean and spotless is the paper, and how black, glossy, and distinct the type, telling us how little progress printing has made since the days of its inventors, in anything save the greater rapidity with which, in consequence of the progress of machinery, it can now be executed.

The reason of the extreme rarity of the books printed by the early English printers is that, being very amusing, they were used up, thumbed out of existence. Such were Caxton's Book of the Ordre of Chyualry; his Knyght of the Toure; the Myrour of the World; and the Golden Legende; Cocke Lorell's Bote, by De Worde; his Kalender of Shepeherdes, and suchlike. If any one feels an interest in the process of exhaustion, by which such treasures were reduced to rarity, he may easily witness it in the débris of a circulating library; and perhaps he will find the phenomenon in still more distinct operation at any book-stall where lie heaps of school-books, odd volumes of novels, and a choice of Watts's Hymns and Pilgrim's Progresses. Here, too, it is possible that the enlightened onlooker may catch sight of the book-hunter plying his vocation, much after the manner in which, in some ill-regulated town, he may have beheld the chiffonniers, at early dawn, rummaging among the cinder heaps for ejected treasures. A ragged morsel is perhaps carefully severed from the heap, wrapped in paper to keep its leaves together, and deposited in the purchaser's pocket. You would probably find it difficult to recognise the fragment, if you should see it in the brilliancy of its resuscitation. A skilled and cautious workman has applied a bituminous solvent to its ragged edges, and literally incorporated, by a sort of paper-making process, each mouldering page into a broad leaf of fine strong paper, in which the print, according to a simile used for such occasions, seems like a small rivulet in a wide meadow of margin. This is termed inlaying, and is a very lofty department in the art of binding. Then there is, besides, the grandeur of russia or morocco, with gilding, and tooling, and marbling, and perhaps a ribbon marker, dangling out with a decoration at its end—all tending, like stars, and garters, and official robes, to stamp the outer insignia of importance on the book, and to warn all the world to respect it, and save it from the risks to which the common herd of literature is liable. The French have, as usual, dignified the process which restores diseased books to health and condition by an appropriate technical name—it is Bibliuguiancie; and under that title it will be found fitly and appropriately discussed in the Dictionnaire de Bibliologie of Peignot, who specially mentions two practitioners of this kind as having conferred lustre on their profession by their skill and success—Vialard and Heudier.[62]

I have recourse to our old friend Monkbarns again for a brilliant description of the prowler among the book-stalls, in the performance of the function assigned to him in the dispensation of things,—renewing my already recorded protest against the legitimacy of the commercial part of the transaction:—

"'Snuffy Davie bought the game of Chess, 1474, the first book ever printed in England, from a stall in Holland, for about two groschen, or twopence of our money. He sold it to Osborne for twenty pounds, and as many books as came to twenty pounds more. Osborne resold this inimitable windfall to Dr Askew for sixty guineas. At Dr Askew's sale,' continued the old gentleman, kindling as he spoke, 'this inestimable treasure blazed forth in its full value, and was purchased by royalty itself for one hundred and seventy pounds! Could a copy now occur, Lord only knows,' he ejaculated, with a deep sigh and lifted-up hands,—'Lord only knows what would be its ransom!—and yet it was originally secured, by skill and research, for the easy equivalent of twopence sterling. Happy, thrice happy, Snuffy Davie!—and blessed were the times when thy industry could be so rewarded!'"

In such manner is it that books are saved from annihilation, and that their preservers become the feeders of the great collections in which, after their value is established, they find refuge; and herein it is that the class to whom our attention is at present devoted perform an inestimable service to literature. It is, as you will observe, the general ambition of the class to find value where there seems to be none, and this develops a certain skill and subtlety, enabling the operator, in the midst of a heap of rubbish, to put his finger on those things which have in them the latent capacity to become valuable and curious. The adept will at once intuitively separate from its friends the book that either is or will become curious. There must be something more than mere rarity to give it this value, although high authorities speak of the paucity of copies as being everything. David Clement, the illustrious French bibliographer, who seems to have anticipated the positive philosophy by an attempt to make bibliography, as the Germans have named it, one of the exact sciences, lays it down with authority, that "a book which it is difficult to find in the country where it is sought ought to be called simply rare; a book which it is difficult to find in any country may be called very rare; a book of which there are only fifty or sixty copies existing, or which appears so seldom as if there never had been more at any time than that number of copies, ranks as extremely rare; and when the whole number of copies does not exceed ten, this constitutes excessive rarity, or rarity in the highest degree." This has been received as a settled doctrine in bibliography; but it is utter pedantry. Books may be rare enough in the real or objective sense of the term, but if they are not so in the nominal or subjective sense, by being sought after, their rarity goes for nothing. A volume may be unique—may stand quite alone in the world—but whether it is so, or one of a numerous family, is never known, for no one has ever desired to possess it, and no one ever will.

But it is a curious phenomenon in the old-book trade, that rarities do not always remain rare; volumes seeming to multiply through some cryptogamic process, when we know perfectly that no additional copies are printed and thrown off. The fact is, that the rumour of scarcity, and value, and of a hunt after them, draws them from their hiding-places. If we may judge from the esteem in which they were once held, the Elzevirs must have been great rarities in this country; but they are now plentiful enough—the heavy prices in the British market having no doubt sucked them out of dingy repositories in Germany and Holland—so that, even in this department of commerce the law of supply and demand is not entirely abrogated. He who dashes at all the books called rare, or even very rare, by Clement and his brethren, will be apt to suffer the keen disappointment of finding that there are many who participate with him in the possession of the same treasures. In fact, let a book but make its appearance in that author's Bibliothèque Curieuse, Historique, et Critique, ou Catalogue Raisonné des Livres difficiles à trouver; or in Graesses's Trésor des Livres Rares et Précieux; or in the Dictionnaire Bibliographique des Livres Rares, published by Caileau—or let it be mentioned as a rarity in Eibert's Allgemeines Bibliographisches Lexicon, or in Debure, Clement, Osmont, or the Repertorium Bibliographicum,—such proclamation is immediate notice to many fortunate possessors who were no more aware of the value of their dingy-looking volumes than Monsieur Jourdain knew himself to be in the habitual daily practice of talking prose.

So are we brought again back to the conclusion that the true book-hunter must not be a follower of any abstract external rules, but must have an inward sense and literary taste. It is not absolutely that a book is rare, or that it is run after, that must commend it to him, but something in the book itself. Hence the relics which he snatches from ruin will have some innate merits to recommend them. They will not be of that unhappy kind which nobody has desired to possess for their own sake, and nobody ever will. Something there will be of original genius, or if not that, yet of curious, odd, out-of-the-way information, or of quaintness of imagination, or of characteristics pervading some class of men, whether a literary or a polemical,—something, in short, which people desirous of information will some day or other be anxious to read,—such are the volumes which it is desirable to save from annihilation, that they may find their place at last in some of the great magazines of the world's literary treasures.

Librarians.

It will often be fortunate for these great institutions if they obtain the services of the hunter himself, along with his spoils of the chase. The leaders in the German wars often found it an exceedingly sound policy to subsidise into their own service some captain of free lances, who might have been a curse to all around him. Your great game-preservers sometimes know the importance of taking the most notorious poacher in the district into pay as a keeper. So it is sometimes of the nature of the book-hunter, if he be of the genial sort, and free of some of the more vicious peculiarities of his kind, to make an invaluable librarian. Such an arrangement will sometimes be found to be like mercy twice blessed,—it blesseth him that gives and him that takes. The imprisoned spirit probably finds freedom at last, and those purchases and accumulations which, to the private purse, were profuse and culpable recklessness, may become veritable duty; while the wary outlook and the vigilant observation, which before were only leading a poor victim into temptation, may come forth as commendable attention and zealous activity.

Sometimes mistakes have been made in selections on this principle, and a zeal has been embarked which has been found to tend neither to profit nor edification; for there have been known, at the head of public libraries, men of the Cerberus kind, who loved the books so dearly as to be unable to endure the handling of them by the vulgar herd of readers and searchers—even by those for whose special aid and service they are employed. They who have this morbid terror of the profanation of the treasures committed to their charge suffer in themselves the direst torments—something like those of a cat beholding her kittens tossed by a dog—whenever their favourites are handled; and the excruciating extent of their agonies, when any ardent and careless student dashes right into the heart of some editio princeps or tall copy, or perhaps lays it open with its face on the table while he snatches another edition that he may collate a passage, is not to be conceived. It is then the dog worrying the kittens. Such men will only give satisfaction in great private libraries little disturbed by their proprietors, or in monastic or other corporate institutions, where it is the worthy object of the patrons to keep their collection in fine condition, and, at the same time, to take order that it shall be of the least possible service to education or literature. Angelo Maï, the great librarian of the Vatican, who made so many valuable discoveries himself, had the character of taking good care that no one else should make any within his own strictly preserved hunting grounds.

In the general case, however, a bibliophile at the head of a public library is genial and communicative, and has a pleasure in helping the investigator through the labyrinth of its stores. Such men feel their strength; and the immense value of the service which they may sometimes perform by a brief hint in the right direction which the inquiry should take, or by handing down a volume, or recommending the best directory to all the learning on the matter in hand, has laid many men of letters under great obligations to them.

The most eminent type of this class of men was Magliabecchi, librarian to the Grand-Duke of Tuscany, who could direct you to any book in any part of the world, with the precision with which the metropolitan policeman directs you to St Paul's or Piccadilly. It is of him that the stories are told of answers to inquiries after books, in these terms: "There is but one copy of that book in the world. It is in the Grand Seignior's library at Constantinople, and is the seventh book in the second shelf on the right hand as you go in." His faculties were, like those of all great men, self-born and self-trained. So little was the impoverished soil in which he passed his infancy congenial to his pursuits in after life, that it was not within the parental intentions to teach him to read, and his earliest labours were in the shop of a greengrocer. Had his genius run on natural science, he might have fed it here, but it was his felicity and his fortune to be transferred to the shop of a patronising bookseller. Here he drank in an education such as no academic forcing machinery could ever infuse. He devoured books, and the printed leaves became as necessary to his existence as the cabbage-leaves to the caterpillars which at times made their not welcome appearance in the abjured greengrocery. Like these verdant reptiles, too, he became assimilated to the food he fed on, insomuch that he was in a manner hot-pressed, bound, marble-topped, lettered, and shelved. He could bear nothing but books around him, and would allow no space for aught else; his furniture, according to repute, being limited to two chairs, the second of which was admitted in order that the two together might serve as a bed.

Another enthusiast of the same kind was Adrien Baillet, the author, or, more properly speaking, the compiler, of the Jugemens des Savans. Some copies of this book, which has a quantity of valuable matter scattered through it, have Baillet's portrait, from which his calm scholarly countenance looks genially forth, with this appropriate motto, "Dans une douce solitude, à l'abri du mensonge et de la vanité, j'adoptai la critique, et j'en fis mon étude, pour découvrir la vérité." Him, struggling with poverty, aggravated with a thirst for books, did Lamoignon the elder place at the head of his library, thus at once pasturing him in clover. When the patron told his friend, Hermant, of his desire to find a librarian possessed of certain fabulous qualifications for the duty, his correspondent said, "I will bring the very man to you;" and Baillet, a poor, frail, attenuated, diseased scholar, was produced. His kind patron fed him up, so far as a man who could not tear himself from his books, unless when nature became entirely exhausted, could be fed up. The statesman and his librarian were the closest of friends; and on the elder Lamoignon's death, the son, still more distinguished, looked up to Baillet as a father and instructor.

Men of this stamp are generally endowed with deep and solid learning. For any one, indeed, to take the command of a great public library, without large accomplishments, especially in the languages, is to put himself in precisely the position where ignorance, superficiality, and quackery are subjected to the most potent test, and are certain of detection. The number of librarians who have united great learning to a love of books, is the best practical answer to all sneers about the two being incompatible. Nor, while we count among us such names as Panizzi, Birch, Halkett, Naudet, Laing, Cogswell, Jones, Pertz, and Todd, is the race of learned librarians likely to decay.

It will be worth while for the patrons of public libraries, even in appointments to small offices, to have an eye on bookish men for filling them. One librarian differs greatly from another, and on this difference will often depend the entire utility of an institution, and the question whether it is worth keeping it open or closing its door. Of this class of workman it may be said quite as aptly as of the poet, that he is born, not made. The usual testimonies to qualification—steadiness, sobriety, civility, intelligence, &c.—may all be up to the mark that will constitute a first-rate book-keeper in the mercantile sense of the term, while they are united in a very dreary and hopeless keeper of books. Such a person ought to go to his task with something totally different from the impulses which induce a man to sort dry goods or make up invoices with eminent success. In short, your librarian would need to be in some way touched with the malady which has been the object of these desultory remarks.

Bibliographies.

The best general name for the class of books which I refer to, is that of Bibliographies, given to them by the French. Like most other products of human ingenuity, they are varied in their objects and their merits. At the one end of the scale is the Leipsic Bibliotheca Horatiana, ambitious only of commemorating the several editions of Horace, or Kuster's Bibliotheca Historica Brandenburgica, sacred to the histories of that duchy; while the other extremity aims at universality, an object which has not yet been accomplished, and seems every day fleeing farther off from those who are daring enough to pursue it. In 1545, when the world of literature was rather smaller than it now is, Conrade Gesner, in his Bibliotheca, made the first attempt at a universal bibliography. The incompleteness of the result is confessed in the Epitome of the Bibliotheca, printed five years afterwards, which professes only to record nearly all the books written since the world began, and yet boasts of adding more than two thousand names of authors to the number mentioned in the original Bibliotheca.[63]

Of what any list of all the books that have appeared in the world might be, one may form some conception by the effort of Dr Watt, accomplished nearly fifty years ago. The work is said to have killed him; and no one who turns over the densely printed leaves of his four quartos, can feel surprised at such a result. It is by no means perfect or complete, even as a guide to books in the compiler's native tongue, yet stands in honourable contrast with the failure of several efforts to continue this portion of it down to later days. The voluminous France Littéraire of Quérard confesses its imperfections even to accomplish its limited object, by professing to devote its special attention to books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

As to bibliographies of the present century aiming at universality, the Allgemeines Gelehrten Lexicon of Jöcher—when accompanied by Adelung's supplement, which is its better-half—for scholarship and completeness casts into shade anything produced either in France or here. It is a guide which few people consult without passing a compliment either internally or aloud on the satisfactory result. That it contains an account of every, or nearly every, book is at once contradicted by its bulk, yet it is often remarked that no one appeals to it in vain—a specialty which seems to have arisen from the peculiar capacity of its editors to dive, as it were, into the hearts of those likely to seek their aid.

Naturally, the most satisfactory of bibliographies are those limited to books of a special class. These are frequent in law and divinity, but are most numerous in history. Hence have we such valued guides as Lelong, Dupin, Dufresnoy, and our own dynasty of historical bibliographers, which, including Leland, Bale, Pitts, and Tanner, reached its climax in Bishop Nicholson, whose introduction to the sources of British history, hitherto so valuable, will be superseded for most practical purposes on the completion of Mr Duffus Hardy's Descriptive Catalogue of Materials relating to the History of Great Britain and Ireland. Science, though it can boast of the great compilations of Haller, and of other sources of reference to its literature, takes less aid from such guides than other departments of intellectual labour, for the obvious reason that, except to the few who are pursuing its history through its dawn and progress, the latest books on any department generally supersede their predecessors. They are, in fact, themselves the guides which show the scientific inquirer his work, not lying like that of the historian and divine in old books, but in existing things and practical experiments. Of books intended to show what is to be found in others, an extremely curious history attaches to one, the Bibliotheca of Photius. It is known of course to all divines, but not necessarily, perhaps, to every other person, that this turbulent and ambitious patriarch, during what he calls his embassy to Syria, occupied himself in taking down notes of the contents of theological treatises by his predecessors and contemporaries, with his judgments on their merits. Being a man of controversial propensities, he selected for criticism the works of the authors with whom he was at war. Ranking himself among the orthodox, he thus collected notes of the works of heterodox writers, and, among these, of several eminent Arians; and the rather startling result of his labours is, that a considerable quantity of Arian literature has thus been preserved, which, but for the exertions of the man who intended to exterminate it by his censure, would have been entirely lost to the world.

There are among bibliographers many highly meritorious leaders through the mysteries of occult literature—as, for instance, those who, like Placcius, Mylius, Barbière, and Melzi, have devoted themselves to the discovery and publication of the authorship of anonymous works. Their function is, on the whole, a rather cruel one, and suggests that those who betake themselves to it are men of austere character. Sometimes, to be sure, it falls to their lot to place the laurel wreath of fame on the deserving brow, but very seldom before the grave has closed over it. The resuscitation of books which have passed unnoticed because they were beyond their age, or failed to touch its sympathies, has been the class of instances in which honour has been thus conferred; and it has seldom fallen to the lot of the living, for the reason that it is the nature of the human being not very resolutely to conceal from an inquiring public those of his actions which receive the approval of his own conscience and taste. In dealing with the living, and often the recently departed, it is the function of this class of investigators to expose the weaknesses and inconsistencies of the wise and great. It is they who have told the world about the youthful Jacobitism of the eminent pillar of the constitution; of the early Radicalism of the distinguished Conservative; of the more than questionable escapades of the popular, yet sedate divine, whose works are the supreme model of decorous piety. In this wise, indeed, the function of the bibliographer of the anonymous much resembles the detective's. Like that functionary, he must not let feelings of delicacy or humanity interfere with the relentless execution of his duty, for of those who have achieved eminence as public teachers, all that they have ever told the world is the world's property. Whatever mercy may be shown to the history of their private life, cannot be claimed for the sayings which they have made or tried to make public. If they have at other times uttered opinions different from those which have achieved for them fame and eminence, those early utterances are an effective test of the value and sincerity of the later, and were it for this object only, the world is entitled to look at them. This is one of the penalties which can only be escaped by turning aside from the path to eminence.[64]

Passing from this class of interesting though rather unamiable elucidations, I come to another class of bibliographies, of which it is difficult to speak with patience—those which either profess to tell you how to find the best books to consult on every department of learning, or undertake to point out to you the books which you should select for your library, or for your miscellaneous reading. As to those which profess to be universal mentors, at hand to help you with the best tools for your work, in whichever department of intellectual labour it may happen to be, they break down at once. Whoever has set himself to any special line of investigation, cannot open one of those books without discovering its utter worthlessness and incapacity to aid him in his own specialty. As to the other class of bibliographers, who profess to act the guide, philosopher, and friend to the collector and the reader, I cannot imagine anything more offensively audacious than the function they assume. It is an attempt of the pedagogue to assert a jurisdiction over grown intellects, and hence such books naturally develop in flagrant exaggeration the pragmatical priggism which is the pedagogue's characteristic defect. I would except from this condemnation a few bibliographers, who, instead of sitting in the schoolmaster's chair and dictating to you what it is proper that you should read, rather give you a sly hint that they are going a-vagabondising through the byways of literature, and will take you with them if you like. Among these I would chiefly be inclined to affect the company of Peignot, whose wild and wayward course of reading provides for you something like to a ramble over the mountains with an Alpine hunter, the only kind of guide to whom the thorough pedestrian wanderer should give up his freedom. One of Peignot's books, called Predicatoriana, ou Révélations Singulières et Amusantes sur les Prédicateurs, brings one into scenes apt to shock a mind not tolerably hardened by eclectic reading. It is an anonymous publication, but has been traced home by the literary detectives. It may be characterised as a collection of the Buffooneries of Sermons. A little book enlivened by something like the same spirit, called The Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence, is known among ourselves; and there is an answer to it assailing the Episcopal Church of Scotland, in a tone which decidedly improves on the lesson of sarcasm and malignity taught by the other side. Both writers are dishonest in the statements they make and the passages they quote from their adversaries, and both are grotesque and profane. Peignot, not being influenced by polemical rancour, is no doubt honest in his quotations, and tells you that the persons who preached the passages quoted by him uttered them in all religious sincerity. Yet wide as the Christian world stretches beyond our corner of it, by so far does the Frenchman's book in grotesqueness and profanity out-shadow the attempts of the Scottish polemical combatants.

Of that highly patrician class of bibliographies which offer their services exclusively to the collectors of rare, curious, and costly books, there are so many notices dotted over this volume, that I shall only stop here to mark the recentness of their appearance in literature. To judge from the title-page, one might trace them as far back as 1676, in John Hallervord's Bibliotheca Curiosa, in which the editor professes to indicate many authors which are very rare and known to few; but this book would give no satisfaction to pure rarity seekers. Hallervord takes curious in its old sense, which corresponds in some measure with the present use of the word interesting; and the specialty of the books being known to few, seems to refer to their profundity and the rarity of learning sufficient to sound their depths. Nor does the list published a few years later by the London bookseller Hartley, though it professes to signalise very rare books, show that nice sense which discriminates game of a high order from the vulgar and useful.[65] I suspect that before we reach the dawn of this class of literature proper, we must descend at once to the year 1750, distinguished by the simultaneous appearance of Clement's Bibliothèque Curieuse, and Freytag's Analecta de Libris Rarioribus.[66]

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PART III.—HIS CLUB.

Clubs in General.

An author of the last generation, professing to deal with any branch of human affairs, if he were ambitious of being considered philosophical, required to go at once to the beginning of all things, where, finding man alone in the world, he would describe how the biped set about his own special business, for the supply of his own wants and desires; and then finding that the human being was, by his instincts, not a solitary but a social animal, the ambitious author would proceed in well-balanced sentences to describe how men aggregated themselves into hamlets, villages, towns, cities, counties, parishes, corporations, select vestries, and so on. I find that, without the merit of entertaining any philosophical views, I have followed, unconsciously, the same routine. Having discussed the book-hunter as he individually pursues his object, I now propose to look in upon him at his club, and say something about its peculiarities, as the shape in which he takes up the pursuit collectively with others who happen to be like-minded to himself.

Those who are so very old as to remember the Episcopal Church of Scotland in that brief period of stagnant depression when the repeal of the penal laws had removed from her the lustre of martyrdom, and she had not yet attained the more secular lustre which the zeal of her wealthy votaries has since conferred on her, will be familiar with the name of Bishop Robert Jolly. To the ordinary reader, however, it may be necessary to introduce him more specifically. He was a man of singular purity, devotedness, and learning. If he had no opportunity of attesting the sincerity of his faith by undergoing stripes and bondage for the Church of his adoption, he developed in its fulness that unobtrusive self-devotion, not inferior to martyrdom, which dedicates to obscure duties the talent and energy that, in the hands of the selfish and ambitious, would be the sure apparatus of wealth and station. He had no doubt risen to an office of dignity in his own Church—he was a bishop. But to understand the position of a Scottish bishop in those days, one must figure Parson Adams, no richer than Fielding has described him, yet encumbered by a title ever associated with wealth and dignity, and only calculated, when allied with so much poverty and social humility, to deepen the incongruity of his lot, and throw him more than ever on the mercy of the scorner. The office was indeed conspicuous, not by its dignities or emoluments, but by the extensive opportunities it afforded for self-devotion. One may have noticed his successor of later times giving lustre to newspaper paragraphs as "The Lord Bishop of Moray and Ross." It did not fall to the lot of him of whom I write to render his title so flagrantly incongruous. A lordship was not necessary, but it was the principle of his Church to require a bishop, and in him she got a bishop. In reality, however, he was the parish clergyman of the small and poor remnant of the Episcopal persuasion who inhabited the odoriferous fishing-town of Fraserburgh. There he lived a long life of such simplicity and abstinence as the poverty of the poorest of his flock scarcely drove them to. He had one failing to link his life with this nether world—he was a book-hunter. How with his poor income, much of which went to feed the necessities of those still poorer, he should have accomplished anything in a pursuit generally considered expensive, is among other unexplained mysteries. But somehow he managed to scrape together a curious and interesting collection, so that his name became associated with rare books, as well as with rare Christian virtues.

When it was proposed to establish an institution for reprinting the works of the fathers of the Episcopal Church in Scotland, it was naturally deemed that no more worthy or characteristic name could be attached to it than that of the venerable prelate who, by his learning and virtues, had so long adorned the Episcopal chair of Moray and Ross, and who had shown a special interest in the department of literature to which the institution was to be devoted. Hence it came to pass that, through a perfectly natural process, the association for the purpose of reprinting the works of certain old divines was to be ushered into the world by the style and title of The Jolly Club.

There happened to be amongst those concerned, however, certain persons so corrupted with the wisdom of this world, as to apprehend that the miscellaneous public might fail to trace this designation to its true origin, and might indeed totally mistake the nature and object of the institution, attributing to it aims neither consistent with the ascetic life of the departed prelate, nor with the pious and intellectual objects of its founders. The counsels of these worldly-minded persons prevailed. The Jolly Club was never instituted,—at least, as an association for the reprinting of old books of divinity, though I am not prepared to say that institutions more than one so designed may not exist for other purposes. The object, however, was not entirely abandoned. A body of gentlemen united themselves together under the name of another Scottish prelate, whose fate had been more distinguished, if not more fortunate; and the Spottiswoode Society was established. Here, it will be observed, there was a passing to the opposite extreme; and so intense seems to have been the anxiety to escape from all excuse for indecorous jokes or taint of joviality, that the word Club, wisely adopted by other bodies of the same kind, was abandoned, and this one called itself a Society. To that abandonment of the medio tutissimus has been attributed its early death by those who contemn the taste of those other communities, essentially Book Clubs, which have taken to the devious course of calling themselves "Societies."

In fact, all our societies, from the broad-brimmed Society of Friends downwards, have something in them of a homespun, humdrum, plain, flat—not unprofitable, perhaps, but unattractive character. They may be good and useful, but they have no dignity or splendour, and are quite destitute of the strange meteoric power and grandeur which have accompanied the career of Clubs. Societies there are, indeed, which identify themselves through their very nomenclature with misfortune and misery, seeming proudly to proclaim themselves victims to all the saddest ills that flesh is heir to—as, for instance, Destitute Sick Societies, Indigent Blind Societies, Deaf and Dumb Societies, Burial Societies, and the like. The nomenclature of some of these benevolent institutions seems likely to test the etymological skill of the next generation of learned men. Perhaps some ethnological philosopher will devote himself to the special investigation and development of the phenomenon; and if such things are done then in the way in which they are now, the result will appear in something like the following shape:—

"Man, as we pursue his destiny from century to century, is still found inevitably to resolve himself into a connected and antithetic series of consecutive cycles. The eighteenth century having been an age of individuative, the nineteenth necessarily became an age of associative or coinonomic development. He, the man—to himself the ego, and to others the mere homo—ceased to revolve around the centre of gravity of his own personality, and, following the instincts of his adhesive nature, resolved himself into associative community. In this necessary development of their nature all partook, from the congresses of mighty monarchs down to those humbler but not less majestic types of the predominant influence, which, in the expressive language of that age, were recognised as twopenny goes. It is known only to those whose researches have led them through the intricacies of that phase of human progress, how multifarious and varied were the forms in which the inner spirit, objectively at work in mankind, had its external subjective development. Not only did associativeness shake the monarch on his throne, and prevail over the counsels of the assembled magnates of the realm, but it was the form in which each shape and quality of humanity, down even to penury and disease, endeavoured to express its instincts; and so the blind and the lame, the deaf and dumb, the sick and poor, made common stock of their privations, and endeavoured by the force of union to convert weakness into strength," &c.

When the history of clubs is fully written, let us hope that it will be in another fashion. If it sufficiently abound in details, such a history would be full of marvels, from the vast influences which it would describe as arising from time to time by silent obscure growth out of nothing, as it were. Just look at what clubs have been, and have done; a mere enumeration is enough to recall the impression. Not to dwell on the institutions which have made Pall Mall and its neighbourhood a conglomerate of palaces, or on such lighter affairs as "the Four-in-Hand," which the railways have left behind, or the "Alpine," whose members they carry to the field of their enjoyment: there was the Mermaid, counting among its members Shakespeare, Raleigh, Beaumont, Fletcher, and Jonson; then came the King's Head; the October; the Kit-Cat; the Beef-Steak; the Terrible Calves Head; Johnson's club, where he had Bozzy, Goldie, Burke, and Reynolds; the Poker, where Hume, Carlyle, Ferguson, and Adam Smith took their claret.

In these, with all their varied objects—literary, political, or convivial—the one leading peculiarity was the powerful influence they exercised on the condition of their times. A certain club there was with a simple unassuming name,—differing, by the way, only in three letters from that which would have commemorated the virtues of Bishop Jolly. The club in question, though nothing in the eye of the country but an easy knot of gentlemen who assembled for their amusement, cast defiance at a sovereign prince, and shook the throne and institutions of the greatest of modern states. But if we want to see the club culminating to its highest pitch of power, we must go across the water and saturate ourselves with the horrors of the Jacobin clubs, the Breton, and the Feuillans. The scenes we will there find stand forth in eternal protest against Johnson's genial definition in his Dictionary, where he calls a club "an assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions."

The Structure of the Book Clubs.

I hope no one is capable of reading so far through this book who is so grossly ignorant as not to know that the Book Clubs are a set of associations for the purpose of printing and distributing among their members certain books, calculated to gratify the peculiar taste which has brought them together and united them into a club. An opportunity may perhaps be presently taken for indulging in some characteristic notices of the several clubs, their members, and their acts and monuments: in the mean time let me say a word on the utilitarian efficiency of this arrangement—on the blank in the order of terrestrial things which the Book Club was required to fill, and the manner in which it has accomplished its function.

There is a class of books of which the production has in this country always been uphill work;—large solid books, more fitted for authors and students than for those termed the reading public at large—books which may hence, in some measure, be termed the raw materials of literature, rather than literature itself. They are eminently valuable; but, since it is to the intellectual manufacturer who is to produce an article of saleable literature that they are valuable, rather than to the general consumer, they do not secure an extensive sale. Of this kind of literature the staple materials are old state papers and letters—old chronicles—specimens of poetic, dramatic, and other literature, more valuable as vestiges of the style and customs of their age than for their absolute worth as works of genius—massive volumes of old divinity—disquisitions on obsolete science, and the like.

It is curious, by the way, that costly books of this sort seem to succeed better with the French than with us, though we do not generally give that people credit for excelling us in the outlay of money. Perhaps it is because they enjoy the British market as well as their own that they are enabled to excel us; but they certainly do so in the publication, through private enterprise, of great costly works, having a sort of national character. The efforts to rival them in this country have been considerable and meritorious, but in many instances signally unfortunate. Take, for instance, the noble edition of Hollingshed and the other chroniclers, published in quarto volumes by the London trade; the Parliamentary History, in thirty-six volumes, each containing about as much reading as Gibbon's Decline and Fall; the State Trials; Sadler's and Thurlow's State Papers; the Harleian Miscellany, and several other ponderous publications of the same kind. All of them are to be had cheap, some at just a percentage above the price of waste paper. When an attempt was made to publish in the English language a really thorough Biographical Dictionary, an improvement on the French Biographie Universelle, it stuck in letter A, after the completion of seven dense octavo volumes—an abortive fragment bearing melancholy testimony to what such a work ought to be. Publications of this kind have, in several instances, caused great losses to some, while they have brought satisfaction to no one concerned in them. A publisher has just the same distaste as any other ordinary member of the human family to the loss of five or ten thousand pounds in hard cash. Then, as touching the purchasers,—no doubt the throwing of a "remnant" on the market may sometimes bring the book into the possession of one who can put it to good use, and would have been unable to purchase it at the original price. But the rich deserve some consideration as well as the poor. It will be hard to find the man so liberal and benevolent that he will joyfully see his neighbour obtain for thirty shillings the precise article for which he has himself paid thirty pounds; nor does there exist the descendant of Adam who, whatever he may say or pretend, will take such an antithesis with perfect equanimity. Even the fortunate purchasers of portions of "the remnant," or "the broken book," as another pleasant technicality of the trade has it, are not always absolutely happy in their lot. They have been tempted by sheer cheapness to admit some bulky and unwieldy articles into their abodes, and they look askance at the commodity as being rather a sacrifice to mammon than a monument of good taste.

It has been the object of the machinery here referred to, to limit the impressions of such works to those who want and can pay for them—an extremely simple object, as all great ones are. There is, however, a minute nicety in the adjustment of the machinery, which was not obvious until it came forth in practice—a nicety without which the whole system falls to pieces. It was to accomplish this nicety that the principle of the club was found to be so well adapted. A club is essentially a body to which more people want admission than can gain it; if it do not manage to preserve this characteristic, it falls to pieces for want of pressure from without, like a cask divested of its hoops. To make the books retain their value, and be an object of desire, it was necessary that the impressions should be slightly within the natural circulation—that there should be rather a larger number desirous of obtaining each volume than the number that could be supplied with it. The club effected this by its own natural action. So long as there were candidates for vacancies and the ballot-box went round, so long were the books printed in demand and valuable to their possessors. If there were 110 or 120 people willing to possess and pay for a certain class of books, the secret of keeping up the pressure from without and the value of the books, was to limit the number of members and participators to 100. There is nothing noble or disinterested in this. The arrangement has no pretension to either of these qualities; nor, when we come to the great forces which influence the supply and demand of human wants, whether in the higher or the humbler departments, will we find these qualities in force, or indeed any other motive than common selfishness. It is a sufficient vindication of the arrangement that it produced its effect. If there were ten or twenty disappointed candidates, the hundred were possessed of the treasures which none could have obtained but for the restrictive arrangements. Scott used to say that the Bannatyne Club was the only successful joint-stock company he ever invested in—and the remark is the key-note of the motives which kept alive the system that has done so much good to literature.

To understand the nature and services of these valuable institutions, it is necessary to keep in view the limits within which alone they can be legitimately worked. They will not serve for the propagation of standard literature—of the books of established reputation, which are always selling. These are merchandise, and must follow the law of trade like other commodities, whether they exist in the form of copyright monopolies, or are open to all speculators. No kind of co-operation will bring the volumes into existence so cheaply as the outlay of trade capital, which is expected to replace itself with a moderate profit after a quick sale. The perfection of this process is seen in the production and sale of that book which is ever the surest of a market—the Bible; and when a printer requires the certain and instantaneous return of his outlay, that is the shape in which he is most secure of obtaining it.

On the other hand, the clubs will not avail for ushering into the world the books of fresh ambitious authors. That paradise of the geniuses, in which their progeny are to be launched full sail, where they are to encounter no risks, and draw all the profits without discount or percentage, as yet exists only in the imagination. It would not work very satisfactorily to have a committee decreeing the issues, and the remuneration to be paid to each aspirant—ten thousand copies of Poppleton's Epic, and a cheque for a thousand pounds handed over out of the common stock, to begin with—half the issue, and half the remuneration for the Lyrics of Astyagus, as a less robust and manful production, but still a pleasant, murmuring, meandering, earnest little dream-book, fresh with the solemn purpose of solitude and silence. No, it must be confessed our authors and men of letters would make sad work of it, if they had the bestowal of the honours and pecuniary rewards of literature in their hands, whether these were administered by an intellectual hierarchy or by a collective democracy. Hence the clubs have wisely confined their operations to books which are not the works of their members; and to keep clear of all risk of literary rivalries, they have been almost exclusively devoted to the promulgation of the works of authors long since dead, whether by printing from original manuscripts or from rare printed volumes.

It has been pleaded that this machinery might have been rendered influential for the encouragement of living authorship. It has been, for instance, observed, with some plausibility, that he who has the divine fervour of the author in him, will sacrifice all he has to sacrifice—time, toil, and health—so that he can but secure a hearing by the world; and institutions of the nature of the book clubs might afford him this at all events, leaving him to find his way to wealth and honours, if the sources of these are in him. No doubt the history of book-publishing shows how small are the immediate inducements and the well-founded hopes that will set authors in motion, and, indeed, a very large percentage of valueless literature proves that the barriers between the author and the world are not very formidable, or become somehow easily removable. This, in fact, furnishes the answer to the pleading here alluded to; and it may further be safely said, where the book demanding an introduction professes to be a work of genius, addressing itself to all mankind, that if it really be what it professes, the market will get it. No production of the kind is liable to be lost to the world.

Here it is plaintively argued by Philemon, that the rewards of genius are very unequally distributed. Who can deny it? Nothing is distributed with perfect balance like chemical equivalents in this world, at least so far as mortal faculties are capable of estimating the elements of happiness and unhappiness in the lot of our fellow-men; nor can one imagine that a world, all balanced and squared off to perfection, would be a very tolerable place to live in. Genius must take its chance, like all other qualities, and, on the whole, in a civilised country it gets on pretty well. Is it not something in itself to possess genius? and is it seemly, or a good example to the uninspired world, that its owner should deem it rather a misfortune than a blessing because he is not also surrounded by plush and shoulder-knots? If all geniuses had a prerogative right to rank and wealth, and all the pomps and vanities of this wicked world, could we be sure that none but genuine geniuses would claim them, and that there would be no margin for disputation with "solemn shams"? Milton's fifteen pounds are often referred to by him who finds how hard it is to climb, &c.; but we have no "return," as the blue-books call it, of all the good opportunities afforded to intellects ambitious of arising as meteors but only showing themselves as farthing rush-lights. On the other hand, no doubt, the wide fame and the rich rewards of the popular author are not in every instance an exact measure of his superiority to the disappointed aspirant. His thousand pounds do not furnish incontrovertible evidence that he is a hundred times superior to the drudge who goes over as much work for ten pounds, and there may possibly be some one making nothing who is superior to both.

Such aberrations are incident to all human affairs; but in those of literature, as in many others, they are exceptional. Here, as in other spheres of exertion, merit will in the general case get its own in some shape. Indeed, there is a very remarkable economic phenomenon, never, as it occurs to me, fully examined, which renders the superfluous success of the popular author a sort of insurance fund for enabling the obscure adventurer to enter the arena of authorship, and show what he is worth. Political economy has taught us that those old bugbears of the statute law called forestallers and regraters are eminent benefactors, in as far as their mercenary instincts enable them to see scarcity from afar, and induce them to "hold on" precisely so long as it lasts but no longer, since, if they have stock remaining on hand when abundance returns, they will be losers. Thus, through the regular course of trade, the surplus of the period of abundance is distributed over the period of scarcity with a precision which the genius of a Joseph or a Turgot could not achieve.

The phenomenon in the publishing world to which I have alluded has some resemblance to this, and comes to pass in manner following. The confirmed popular author whose books are sure to sell is an object of competition among publishers. If he is absolutely mercenary, he may stand forth in the public market and commit his works to that one who will take them on the best terms for the author and the worst for himself, like the contractor who gives in the lowest estimate in answer to an advertisement from a public department. Neither undertaking holds out such chances of gain as independent speculation may open, and thus there is an inducement to the enterprising publisher to risk his capital on the doubtful progeny of some author unknown to fame, in the hope that it may turn out "a hit." Of the number of books deserving a better fate, as also of the still greater number deserving none better than the fate they have got, which have thus been published at a dead loss to the publisher, the annals of bookselling could afford a moving history.

When an author has sold his copyright for a comparative trifle, and the book turns out a great success, it is of course matter of regret that he cannot have the cake he has eaten. This is one side of the balance-sheet, and on the other stands the debit account in the author who, through a work which proved a dead loss to its publisher, has made a reputation which has rendered his subsequent books successful, and made himself fashionable and rich. There have been instances where publishers who have bought for little the copyright of a successful book have allowed the author to participate in their gains; and I am inclined to believe that these instances are fully as numerous as those in which an author, owing his reputation and success to a book which did not pay its expenses, has made up the losses of his first publisher.

If we go out of the hard market and look at the tendency of sympathies, they are all in the author's favour. Publishers, in fact, have, though it is not generally believed, a leaning towards good literature, and a tendency rather to over than to under estimate the reception it may meet with from the world. In considering whether they will take the risk of a new publication, they have no criterion to value it by except its literary merit, for they cannot obtain the votes of the public until they are committed; and, indeed, there have been a good many instances where a publisher, having a faith in some individual author and his star, has pushed and fought a way for him with dogged and determined perseverance, sometimes with a success of which, were all known, he has more of the real merit than the author, who seems to have naturally, without any external aid, taken his position among the eminent and fortunate.

There are, at the same time, special disquisitions on matters of science or learning intended for peculiar and limited audiences, which find their way to publicity without the aid of the publisher. For these there is an opening in certain institutions far older than the book clubs, and possessed of a far higher social and intellectual position, since they have the means of conferring titles of dignity on those they adopt into their circle—titles which are worn not by trinkets dangling at the button-hole, but by certain cabalistic letters strung to the name in the directory of the town where the owner lives, or in the numberless biographical dictionaries which are to immortalise the present generation. So the author of an essay, especially in scholarship or science, will, if it be worth anything, find a place for it in the Transactions of one or other of the learned societies. It will probably keep company with, if indeed it be not itself one of, a series of papers which appear in the quarto volumes of the learned corporation's Transactions, merely because they cannot get into the octavo pages of the higher class of periodicals; but there they are, printed in the face of the world, whose inhabitants at large may worship them if they so please, and their authors cannot complain that they are suppressed. Whether the authors of these papers may have been ambitious of their appearance in a wider sphere, or are content with their appearance in "The Transactions," it suffices for the present purpose to explain how these volumes are a more suitable receptacle than those printed by the book clubs for essays or disquisitions by men following up their own specialties in literature or science; and if it be the case that some of the essays which appear in the Transactions of learned bodies would have gladly entered society under the auspices of some eminent periodical, yet it is proper at the same time to admit that many of the most valuable of these papers, concerning discoveries or inventions which adepts alone can appreciate, could only be satisfactorily published as they have been. And so we find our way back to the proposition, that the book clubs have been judiciously restricted to the promulgation of the works of dead authors.

This has not necessarily excluded the literary contributions of living men, in the shape of editing and commenting; and it is really difficult to estimate the quantity of valuable matter which is thus deposited in obscure but still accessible places. A deal of useful work, too, has been done in the way of translation; and where the book to be dealt with is an Icelandic saga, a chronicle in Saxon, in Irish Celtic, or even in old Norman, one may confess to the weakness of letting the original remain, in some instances, unexamined, and drawing one's information with confiding gratitude from the translation furnished by the learned editor.

Let me offer one instance of the important service that may be done by affording a vehicle for translations. The late Dr Francis Adams, a village surgeon by profession, was at the same time, from taste and pursuit, a profound Greek scholar. He was accustomed to read the old authors on medicine and surgery—a custom too little respected by his profession, of whom it is the characteristic defect to respect too absolutely the standard of the day. As a physician, who is an ornament to his profession and a great scholar, once observed to me, the writings of the old physicians, even if we reject them from science, may be perused with profit to the practitioner as a record of the diagnosis of cases stated by men of acuteness, experience, and accuracy of observation. Adams had translated from the Greek the works of Paul of Ægina, the father of obstetric surgery, and printed the first volume. It was totally unnoticed, for in fact there were no means by which the village surgeon could get it brought under the notice of the scattered members of his profession who desired to possess such a book. The remainder of his labours would have been lost to the world had it not been taken off his hands by the Sydenham Club, established for the purpose of reprinting the works of the ancient physicians.

The Roxburghe Club.

Great institutions and small institutions have each individually had a beginning, though it cannot always be discovered, distance often obscuring it before it has been thought worth looking after. There is an ingenious theory abroad, to the effect that every physical impulse, be it but a wave of a human hand, and that every intellectual impulse, whether it pass through the mind of a Newton or a brickmaker, goes, with whatever strength it may possess, into a common store of dynamic influences, and tells with some operative power, however imperceptible and infinitesimal, upon all subsequent events, great or small, so that everything tells on everything, and there is no one specific cause, primary or secondary, that can be assigned to any particular event. It may be so objectively, as the transcendentalists say, but to common apprehensions there are specific facts which are to them emphatic as beginnings, such as the day when any man destined for leadership in great political events was born, or that whereon the Cape of Good Hope was doubled, or America was discovered.

The beginning of the book clubs is marked by a like distinctness, both in date and circumstance. The institution did not spring in full maturity and equipment, like Pallas from the brain of Jove; it was started by a casual impulse, and remained long insignificant; but its origin and early progress are as distinctly and specifically its own, as the birth and infancy of any hero or statesman are his. It is to the garrulity of Dibdin writing before there was any prospect that this class of institutions would reach their subsequent importance and usefulness, that we owe many minute items of detail about the cradle of the new system. We first slip in upon a small dinner-party, on the 4th of June in the year 1813, at the table of "Hortensius." The day was one naturally devoted to hospitality, being the birthday of the reigning monarch, George III.; but this the historian passes unnoticed, the object of all-absorbing interest being the great conflict of the Roxburghe book-sale, then raging through its forty-and-one days. Of Hortensius it is needless to know more than that he was a distinguished lawyer, and had a fine library, which having described, Dibdin passes on thus to matters of more immediate importance: "Nor is the hospitality of the owner of these treasures of a less quality and calibre than his taste; for Hortensius regaleth liberally—and as the 'night and day champagnes' (so he is pleased humorously to call them) sparkle upon his Gottingen-manufactured table-cloth, 'the master of the revels,' or (to borrow the phraseology of Pynson) of the 'feste royalle,' discourseth lustily and loudly upon the charms—not of a full-curled or full-bottomed 'King's Bench' periwig—but of a full-margined Bartholomæus or Barclay like his own."[67]

After some forty pages of this sort of matter, we get another little peep at this momentous dinner-party. "On the clearance of the Gottingen-manufactured table-cloth, the Roxburghe battle formed the subject of discussion, when I proposed that we should not only be all present, if possible, on the day of the sale of the Boccaccio, but that we should meet at some 'fair tavern' to commemorate the sale thereof." They met accordingly on the 17th of June, some eighteen in number, "at the St Albans Tavern, St Albans Street, now Waterloo Place." Surely the place was symbolical, since on the 18th of June, two years afterwards, the battle of Waterloo was fought; and as the importance attributed to the contest at Roxburghe House on the 17th procured for it afterwards the name of the Waterloo of book-battles, it came to pass that there were two Waterloo commemorations treading closely one on the other's heels.

The pecuniary stake at issue, and the consequent excitement when the Valdarfer Boccaccio was knocked off, so far exceeded all anticipation, that at the festive board a motion was made and carried by acclamation, for meeting on the same day and in the same manner annually. And so the Roxburghe Club, the parent of all the book clubs, came into existence.

It must be admitted that its origin bears a curious generic resemblance to some scenes which produce less elevating results. On the day of some momentous race or cock-fight, a parcel of sporting devotees, "regular bricks," perhaps, agree to celebrate the occasion in a tavern, and when the hilarity of the evening is at its climax, some festive orator, whose enthusiasm has raised him to the table, suggests, amidst loud hurrahs and tremendous table-rapping, that the casual meeting should be converted into an annual festival, to celebrate the event which has brought them together. At such an assemblage, the list of toasts will probably include Eclipse, Cotherstone, Mameluke, Plenipo, the Flying Dutchman, and other illustrious quadrupeds, along with certain bipeds, distinguished in the second degree as breeders, trainers, and riders, and may perhaps culminate in "the turf and the stud all over the world." With a like appropriate reference to the common bond of sympathy, the Roxburghe toasts included the uncouth names of certain primitive printers, as Valdarfer himself, Pannartz, Fust, and Schoeffher, terminating in "The cause of Bibliomania all over the world."[68]

The club thus abruptly formed, consisted of affluent collectors, some of them noble, with a sprinkling of zealous practical men, who assisted them in their great purchases, while doing minor strokes of business for themselves. These, who in some measure fed on the crumbs that fell from the master's table, were in a position rather too closely resembling the professionals in a hunt or cricket club. The circle was a very exclusive one, however; the number limited to thirty-one members, "one black ball excluding;" and it used to be remarked, that it was easier to get into the Peerage or the Privy Council than into "the Roxburghe."

Nothing has done so much to secure the potent influence of clubs as the profound secrecy in which their internal or domestic transactions have generally been buried. The great safeguard of this secrecy will be found in that rigid rule of our social code which prohibits every gentleman from making public the affairs of the private circle; and if from lack of discretion, as it is sometimes gently termed, this law is supposed to have a lax hold on any one, he is picked off by the "one," "two," "three black balls." It is singular that a club so small and exclusive as the Roxburghe should have proved an exception to the rule of secrecy, and that the world has been favoured with revelations of its doings which have made it the object of more amusement than reverence. In fact, through failure of proper use of the black ball, it got possession of a black sheep, in the person of a certain Joseph Hazlewood. He had achieved a sort of reputation in the book-hunting community by discovering the hidden author of Drunken Barnaby's Journal. In reality, however, he was a sort of literary Jack Brag. As that amusing creation of Theodore Hook's practical imagination mustered himself with sporting gentlemen through his command over the technicalities or slang of the kennel and the turf, so did Hazlewood sit at the board with scholars and aristocratic book-collectors through a free use of their technical phraseology. In either case, if the indulgence in these terms descended into a motley grotesqueness, it was excused as excessive fervour carrying the enthusiast off his feet. When Hazlewood's treasures—for he was a collector in his way—were brought to the hammer, the scraps and odds and ends it contained were found classified in groups under such headings as these—Garlands of Gravity, Poverty's Pot Pourri, Wallat of Wit, Beggar's Balderdash, Octagonal Olio, Zany's Zodiac, Noddy's Nuncheon, Mumper's Medley, Quaffing Quavers to Quip Queristers, Tramper's Twattle, or Treasure and Tinsel from the Tewksbury Tank, and the like. He edited reprints of some rare books—that is to say, he saw them accurately reprinted letter by letter. Of these one has a name which—risking due castigation if I betray gross ignorance by the supposition—I think he must certainly have himself bestowed on it, as it excels the most outrageous pranks of the alliterative age. It is called, "Green-Room Gossip; or, Gravity Gallinipt; A Gallimaufry got up to guile Gymnastical and Gyneocratic Governments; Gathered and Garnished by Gridiron Gabble, Gent., Godson to Mother Goose."

The name of Joseph Hazlewood sounds well; it is gentleman-like, and its owner might have passed it into such friendly commemoration as that of Bliss, Cracherode, Heber, Sykes, Utterson, Townley, Markland, Hawtrey, and others generally understood to be gentlemen, and, in virtue of their bookish propensities, scholars. He might even, for the sake of his reprints, have been thought an "able editor," had it not been for his unfortunate efforts to chronicle the doings of the club he had got into.[69] His History, in manuscript, was sold with his other treasures after his death, and was purchased by the proprietor of the Athenæum, where fragments of it were printed some fifteen years ago, along with editorial comments, greatly to the amusement, if not to the edification, of the public.