"I have seen an evil dream, A week and a month this night; home My whelp, of estimable character, By which he destroyed Erin in an hour. That meal thou hast taken to-night A hen-egg from the King, who loves thee not, And a goose-egg to Maelcobhba. I never had known The noble position of the King of Oirghiall Until I beheld Maelcobhba It is a thing so well known as to require mention only for the purpose of preserving regularity and sequence in these rather desultory remarks, that "The Roxburghe was the father of the book clubs. We have elsewhere mentioned its origin, as a sort of annual solemnity, literary and convivial, for the purpose of commemorating that great crisis in the history of book-hunting-the sale of the Duke of Roxburghe's library. That affair, as its historian informs us, lasted for forty-two days. The commemorative anniversary represented neither the first nor the last Being honoured at the banqueting of these, but, after solemn discus house." Let us 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 professed Greek scholar. He was accustomed to read the old authors on medicine and surgerya 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 us, 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. sion, was fixed for the day which witnessed the disposal of the Valdarfer Boccaccio. This was the 17th of June. The day may occur to the reader as one very close to the commemoration of another great conflict. The Roxburghers, however, are not to be blamed for the conjunction, for they established their club in 1813, and are not responsible for the battle of Waterloo having been fought on the 18th of June, two years later. It was a fundamental arrangement of the club that, at each commemoration, one of the members should distribute among his fellows a volume printed at his own expense for the occasion, either from some rare book, or from manuscript; further, the number of members was limited to thirty, and one black ball sufficed. Nothing has done so much to secure the potent influence of clubs as the profound secrecy in which their transactions have generally been buried, downwards from the Vehm Gericht, the earliest institution of the kind, unless we are to count the Mystagoges of the Eleusinian mysteries as a club. In civilised times this secrecy has been preserved through that social rule which prohibits gentlemen from making public the affairs of the private circle; and it has been clenched by the powerful protection of the one, two, three black balls. It is singular that so small and exclusive a club 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 Haslewood. 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 Haslewood sit at the board with scholars and aristocratic book-collectors through a free use of their technical phraseology. In either case, if the use of these terms descended into a motley grotesqueness, it was excused as excessive fervour carrying the enthusiast off his feet. When Haslewood'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 Baldardash," "Octagonal Olio," "Zany's Zodiac," "Noddy's Nuncheon," "Mumper's Medley," "Quaffing Quavers to Quip Queristers," "Trampers 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 we betray gross ignorance by the supposition -we think he must certainly have himself bestowed on it, as it excels the most outrageous pranks of the alliterative age. It is called, "GreenRoom Gossip; or, Gravity Gallinipt. A Gallimaufry got up to guile. Gymnastical and Gyneocratic Governments. Gathered and garnish ed by Gridiron Gabble, Gent., Godson to Mother Goose." The name of Joseph Haslewood 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 book-hunting 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 days of the club he had got into. The 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. In these revelations we find how long a probation the system of bookclubs had to pass through, before it shook off the convivial propensities which continued to cluster round the normal notion of a club, and reached the dry asceticism and attention to the duties of printing and editing, by which the greater number of book-clubs are distinguished. It was at first a very large allowance of sack to the proportion of literary food, and it was sarcastically remarked that the club had spent a full thousand pounds in guzzling before it had produced a single valuable volume. We have some of the bills of fare at the "Roxburghe Revels," as they were called. In one, for instance, we count, in the first course, turtle cooked five different ways, along with turbot, john dory, tendrons of lamb, soutee of haddock, ham, chartreuse, and boiled chickens. The bill was £5, 14s. a-head; or, as Haslewood expresses it," according to the long-established principles of Maysterre Cockerre,' each person had £5, 14s. to pay.' We might be tempted to offer the reader a fuller specimen of the historian's style; but unfortunately its a characteristics, grotesque as they are, cannot be exemplified in their full breadth without being also given at full length, so as entirely to exhaust the patience of even the gentlest reader. The accounts of the several dinners read like photographs of a mind wandering in the mazes of indigestion-begotten nightmare. When Dibdin protested against its publication, he described it a great deal too attractively when he called it "the concoction of one in his gayer and unsuspecting moments the repository of private confidential communications mere memorandum-book of what had passed at convivial meetings, and in which winged words' and flying notes of merry gentlemen and friends, were obviously incorporated." No! wings and flying are not the ideas that naturally associate with the historian of the Roxburghe, although, in one instance, the dinner is sketched off in the following epigramatic sentence, which startles the reader like a plover starting up in a dreary moor:-"Twenty-one members met joyfully, dined comfortably, challenged eager ly, tippled prettily, divided regretfully, and paid the bill most cheerfully." On another occasion the historian's enthusiasm was too expansive to be confined to plain prose, and he inflated it in lyric verse:— "Brave was the banquet, the red red juice, Hilarity's gift sublime, Invoking the heart to kindred use, And bright'ning halo of time.' This, and a quantity of additional matter of like kind, was good fun to the scorners, and, whether any of the unskilful laughed at it, scarcely made even the judicious grieve, for they thought that those who had embarked in such pompous follies deserved the lash administered to them in his blunders by an unhappy member of their own order. In fact, however, this was the youthful giant sowing his wild oats. It was not until the year 1827 that a step was taken by the Roxburghe Club which might be called its first exhibition of sober manhood. Some of the members, ashamed of the paltry nature of the volumes circulated in the name of the club, bethought themselves of uniting to produce a book of national value. They took Sir Frederick Madden into their counsels, and authorised him to print eighty copies of the old metrical romance of Havelok the Dane. This gave great dissatisfaction to the historian, who muttered how "a MS. not discovered by a member of the club was selected, and an excerpt obtained, not furnished by the industry or under the inspection of any one member, nor edited by a member; but, in fact, after much pro and con, it was made a complete hireling concern, truly at the expense of the club, from the copying to the publishing." The value of this book, as a contribution to English literature, has been attested by the extensive critical examination it has received, and by its being reprinted for sale. And this, by the way, suggests a practical answer to those who complain of the arrangement, essential to the club system, of limiting the number of the impression of each volume. There is, in the general case, no copyright in the book, and it is free to any one who thinks the public at large will buy it, to reprint it, and supply the market. The printing of Havelok the Dane, followed, as it was, by another valuable old romance, William and the Wer Wolf, made the reputation of the Roxburghe, and proved an example and encouragement to the clubs which began to arise more or less on its model. It was a healthy protest against the Foggy Dibdinism which had ruled the destinies of the club, for Dibdin had been its master, and was the Gamaliel at whose feet Haslewood and others patiently sat. Of the term we have now used, the best explanation we can give is this, that in the selection of books-other questions, such as rarity or condition, being set aside, or equally balanced-a general preference is to be given to those which are the most witless, preposterous, and in every literary sense valueless -which are, in short, rubbish. What is here meant will be easily felt by any one who chooses to consult the book which Dibdin issued under the title of The Library Companion, or the Young Man's Guide and the Old Man's Comfort, in the choice of a library. This, it will be observed, is not intended as a manual of rare or curious, or in any way peculiar books, but as the instruction of a Nestor on the best books for study and use in all departments of literature. Yet one will look in vain there for such names as Montaigne, Shaftesbury, Benjamin Franklin, D'Alembert, Turgot, Adam Smith, Malebranche, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Fenelon, Burke, Kant, Richter, Spinoza, Flechier, and many others. Characteristically enough, if you turn up Rousseau, in the index you will find Jean Baptiste, but not Jean Jacques. You will search in vain for Dr Thomas Reid, the metaphysician, but will readily find Isaac Reed, the editor. If you look for Molinæus or Du Moulin, it is not there, but alphabetic vicinity gives you the good fortune to become acquainted with "Moule, Mr, his Bibliotheca Heraldica." The name Hooker will be found, not to guide the reader to the ecclesiastical polity, but to Dr Jackson Hooker's Tour in Iceland. Lastly, if any one shall search for Hartley on Man, he will find in the place it might occupy, or has reference to, the editorial services of "Haslewood, Mr Joseph." Like other great human institutions, such as the British Constitution and the Russian Empire, the organisation of the book clubs did not come forth full formed from the ingenious brain of any inventor. Its success may be traced through various minor channels, which lose themselves in indefiniteness when we attempt to trace them to their absolute sources. The Roxburghe idea, that the annual commemoration festival should be an occasion for the members in their turn presenting a volume to the corporation, was a casual fortuitous suggestion, a mere trifle, but it was a seed which fell in a good place, and produced an eminently valuable harvest. Though the Roxburghe, when taken in hand by Mr Beriah Botfield and other ripe and good scholars, outgrew the pedantries in which it had been reared, and performed much valuable literary work, yet its chief merit is in the hints its practice afforded to others. The idea of keeping up the value of a book by limiting the impression, so as to restrain it within the number who might desire to possess it, was, no doubt, known before the birth of this the oldest book-club. The practice was sedulously followed by Hearne the antiquary, and others, who provided old chronicles and books of the class chiefly esteemed by the book-hunter. The very fame of the restricted number, operating on the selfish jealousy of man's nature, brought out competitors for the possession of the book, who never would have thought of it but for the pleasant idea of keeping it out of the hands of some one else. There are several instances on record of an unknown book lying in the printer's warerooms, dead from birth and forgotten, having life and importance given to it by the report that all the copies, save a few, have been destroyed by a fire in the premises. By judiciously adjusting the number of copies printed, the remarkable phenomenon has been exhibited of the rarity of a book being increased by an increase in the number of copies. To understand how this may come to pass, it is necessary to look on rarity as not an absolute and objective quality, but as relative to the number who desire to possess the article. Ten copies which two hundred people want constitute a rarer book than two copies which twenty people want. A book may be the sole remaining copy-in technical language, may be unique-but nobody has heard of it, and nobody wants it, so it stands quietly on its own shelf uncoveted. But let its owner print -say twenty copies for distribution -the book-hunting community have got the "hark-away," and are off after it. In this way, before the days of the clubs, many knowing people multiplied rarities; and at the present day there are reprints by the clubs themselves of much greater pecuniary value than the rare books from which they have been multiplied. The book clubs probably owe more to Sir Walter Scott than to any other man. In 1823 the Roxburghe Club made proffers of membership to him, partly, it would seem, under the influence of a waggish desire to disturb his great secret, which had not yet been revealed. Dibdin, weighting himself with more than his usual burden of ponderous jocularity, set himself in motion to intimate to Scott the desire of the club that the Author of Waverley, with whom it was supposed that he had the means of communicating, would accept of the chair at the club vacated by the death of Sir M. Sykes. Scott got through the affair ingeniously with little coy fencing that deceived no one, and was finally accepted as the Author of Waverley's representative. The Roxburghe had, however, at that time, done nothing in serious book-club business, having let loose only a small flight of the flimsiest sheets of letterpress. It was Scott's own favourite club, the Bannatyne, that first projected the plan of printing substantial and valuable volumes. a At the commencement of the same year, 1823, when he took his seat at the Roxburghe (he did not take his bottle there, which was the more important object for some time after), he wrote to the late Robert Pitcairn, the editor of the Criminal Trials, in these terms:-"I have long thought that a something of a bibliomanical society might be formed here, for the prosecution of the important task of publishing diletante editions of our national literary curiosities. Several persons of rank, I believe, would willingly become members, and there are enough of good operatives. What would you think of such an association? David Laing was ever keen for it; but the death of Sir Alexander Boswell and of Alexander Oswald has damped his zeal. I think, if a good plan were formed, and a certain number of members chosen, the thing would still do well."* Scott gave the Bannatyners a song for their festivities to the tune of "One Bottle More;" and it is a wonderful illustration of his versatile powers in the admirable bibulous sort of jovialty which he distils, as it were, from the very dust of musty volumes. Two of the strangest characters that literature ever produced, or who ever joined the book-hunt, are hit off in the following stanzas-the snarling Pinkerton, and Ritson, who had lived an unbeliever in eternal quarrels with the rest of his kind, but who on his deathbed found just one sin to repent of-an act of apostasy to his vegetarian faith, in having, when tired and wet after a long pedestrian journey, eaten a potato fried in fat: "John Pinkerton next, and I'm truly concerned, I can't call that worthy so candid as learned; He railed at the plaid, and blasphemed the claymore, And set Scots by the ears in his one vo lume more. One volume more, my friends, one volume more, Celt and Scot shall be pleased with one volume more. As bitter as gall, and as sharp as a razor, And feeding on herbs as a Nebuchadnezzar, His diet too acid, his temper too sour, Little Ritson came out with his two volumes more. But one volume, my friends, one volume more, We'll dine on roast beef, and print one volume more.' Scott printed, as a contribution to his favourite club, the record of the trial of two Highlanders for murder, which brought forth some highly characteristic incidents. The *Notices of the Bannatyne Club, privately printed. |