ascetic life of the departed prelate, nor with the pious and intellectual object 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 we are 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 taints 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 we attribute its early death; nor do we admire 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 ornament, 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. We should, if we had the chance of living long

enough, expect to find the writers of another century puzzled by the nomenclature of some of these benevolent institutions. 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 pivot of his own individual idiosyncracy, and, following the instincts of his 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 councils of the assembled magnates of the realm, but it was the form in which each shape and quality of humanity, down even to misery 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, we should rather that

it were 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 KitCat; the Beaf-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."

There has been an addition, by no means contemptible, added to the influence exercised by these institutions on the course of events, in the Book clubs of the present day. They have within a few years added a department to literature. The collector, who has been a member of several, may count their fruit by the thousand, all ranging in symmetrical and portly volumes. Without interfering either with the author who seeks in his copyrights the reward of his genius and labour, or with the publisher who calculates on a return for his capital, skill, and industry, the book clubs have ministered to literary wants, which these legitimate sources of supply have been unfitted to meet.

We trust that, throughout the pretty extensive circle of acquaintance to whom Maga pays her monthly visit, there is not one single person so grossly ignorant, as not to recognise in the book clubs a set of associations for the purpose of printing and distributing among the members certain books, calculated to gratify the peculiar taste which has brought them together and united them into a club. We may presently, perhaps, indulge in some characteristic notices of the specific clubs, their members, and their acts and movements: in the mean time we shall say a word on the efficiency of the 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 Holingshed 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. Such publications 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

VOL. XC.-NO. DLII.

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 the remnant 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 theman 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

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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 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 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 check of 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 vol

umes.

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 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. The answer to the pleading we have alluded to is easy. Where the book demanding an introduction professes to be a work of genius, addressing itself to all mankind-if it really be what it professes, the market will get it. No production of the kind is ever lost to the world. There may be, on the other hand, special disquisitions on matters of science or learning intended for peculiar and limited audiences. 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. Yes, 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 one or other 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 announced 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, we confess to the weakness of letting the original remain, in some instances, unexamined, and drawing our information with confiding gratitude from the translation furnished by the learned editor. Without such aid we would have had, for instance, little advantage in that illustration of a great crisis in early Irish history called the Battle of MaghRath, and therefore we thankfully acknowledge our obligations to O'Donovan's translation, which, having the merit of being more literal than Macpherson's translations from the same language, begins in this wise :—