.?^^ 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
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 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
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AMONG MY BOOKS 
 
Among My Books 
 
 Papers on Literary Subjects by 
 the following Writers 
 
 Augustine Birrell 
 
 
 Herbert Paul 
 
 Andrew Lang 
 
 
 Earl of Creive 
 
 '■Ian MacLaren ' 
 
 
 ' John Oli-ver Hobbes ' 
 
 J. P. Mahaffy 
 
 
 ' Vernon Lee ' 
 
 Austin Dobson 
 
 
 Stanley Lane- Poole 
 
 Leslie Stephen 
 
 
 Arthur Machen 
 
 'A' 
 
 
 Hon. Lionel A. Tollemache 
 
 Edmund Gosse 
 
 
 George W. Smalley 
 
 Go/dzuin Smith 
 
 
 D. H. Madden 
 
 Percy Fitzgerald 1 
 
 Reprinted 
 
 from 
 
 * Literature ' 1 
 
 With a Preface by 
 H. D. Traill, D.C.L.. 
 
 ^ 
 
 Mew l^orft 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO. 
 1898 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THE literary causeries which form the contents 
 of this volume made their first appearance 
 in the pages of Literature; and, as Editor of 
 that Journal, I have been honoured with an invita- 
 tion to introduce this collection of them with a few 
 words of my own. It gives pain to my patriotism 
 to find that before three of these words have been 
 set down, I am forced to become a borrower from 
 the French language, but in truth there is no escape 
 from the necessity of raising this forced loan. The 
 word causerie^ as it is known and understood in the 
 literary and artistic world of France, describes the 
 scope and spirit of these papers with substantial 
 accuracy ; and no English word does. They are 
 too short to be called essays in the modern sense, 
 though, to be sure, they are nearly all of them 
 longer than most of Bacon's, with whom their 
 authors will not object to be compared ; and only 
 in one or two cases do they at all approach to the 
 character of a specific and detailed review of any 
 particular work. They are, in short, what it was 
 our desire that they should be when we sought the 
 aid of the distinguished men and women of letters 
 who have contributed them — that is to say, con- 
 
 263741 
 
vi Preface 
 
 versational discourses on every and any variety 
 of literary topic that might suggest itself to the 
 student and book-lover sitting down to write under 
 the conditions and in the surroundings indicated 
 by the title of the series. 
 
 This title has of course been criticised, principally, 
 no doubt, by those who have never themselves 
 undertaken the perplexing duties of sponsor at one 
 of these arduous christenings ; and it has been said 
 that some of the writers show no signs of having 
 derived even so much as an accidental and 
 momentary inspiration from the contents of their 
 libraries. Among My Books, contend these cap- 
 tious critics, is no very appropriate title for a 
 paper which might have been inspired (say they) 
 ' by a review read in a railway train, or a novel 
 lying on a club table.' I confess I am not much 
 moved by this objection. To me it seems that the 
 reflections of a scholarly and thoughtful mind need 
 not, and do not, savour less of the library, because 
 their theme may have offered itself from the world 
 without. On the contrary, there is no keener whet 
 to the studious appetite than the student derives 
 from his ' walks abroad,' nor anything more likely 
 to move him to utterance, on his return to the 
 library, than his sharp sense of the contrast between 
 the sobriety of temper, the maturity of judgment, 
 the perfection of form — in a word, the genuine, 
 time-tried merits of the dead and gone writers on 
 the shelves around him, and the hasty verdicts, the 
 crude deliverances, the sham attractions, the noisy 
 
Preface vii 
 
 r^clamCy with which current literature too much 
 abounds. 
 
 This observation, however, applies but to a few 
 of the causeries included in the volume. In 
 the large majority of the contributions to the 
 Among My Books series, the association with the 
 library is not, I think, difficult to trace. A book- 
 lover among his books has many moods, and the 
 spirits of their departed authors speak to him 
 with many voices. Now he seems to hear the 
 plaintive whisper of some * inheritor of unfulfilled 
 renown' who was promised immortality, and for 
 all that one can see now, has as good a right to it 
 as many who have won it ; and then the student 
 feels moved to remind the world once more of this 
 forgotten one, and to protest against his doom of 
 unmerited neglect. Now it is he himself who is 
 the accused, and as he listens to the reproachful 
 sigh of some teacher of his youth who has long 
 since ceased to offer him a ' key of the universe,' 
 his conscience urges him to acknowledge his debt 
 and to explain his defection. Or again, ' the book ' 
 may suggest * the critic,' as it did to the admired 
 essayist who played coryphaeus to the series, and 
 diverted his readers with one of those agreeable 
 exercises in raillery which are a stumbling-block 
 to the humourless and a delight to everyone else. 
 Or perhaps it is not a single voice that we hear 
 from our laden book-shelves, but a chorus of voices, 
 a moan, a murmur as from an overcrowded popula- 
 tion, asking when this perpetual and suffocating 
 
viii Preface 
 
 addition to their numbers is to cease. When that 
 happens, a terror seizes upon the bookman, and, 
 despairing of any effective results from the 
 efforts of the reviewers, who, to do them 
 justice, try their hardest to * expose ' the weakly 
 infant at birth, an eminent critic propounds 
 an ingenious plan providing for the automatic 
 extinction of all neglected books at the age 
 of one hundred years. Few of us, I suppose, 
 are strangers to the emotions which found ex- 
 pression in this proposal, but it is not well to 
 encourage them. ' That way madness lies.' If 
 for a moment I revive them, it is only for the 
 purpose of illustrating the variety of the ways in 
 which their libraries have appealed to the various 
 contributors to this volume, and of the responses 
 which the appeal has called forth. A glance at 
 the table of contents, with its titles ranging from 
 an essay on style to a chapter of biography, and 
 from a colloquy on ethics to a Shakspearian ' squib,' 
 should suffice to satisfy the reader that the volume 
 contains food for the most diverse literary tastes. 
 That they will find it both palatable and nutritious, 
 the reputation of its purveyors should prove a 
 sufficient guarantee. H. D. T. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PREFACE .... 
 
 I. A COLLOQUY ON CRITICISM 
 
 Augustine Birr ell 
 
 II. HISTORY AS IT IS WRITTEN 
 Andrew Lang 
 
 III. UGLINESS IN FICTION 
 
 ^lan MacLaren ' 
 
 IV. THOUGHTS ON STYLE 
 
 / P. Mahaffy 
 
 V. * THE ADVENTURES OF CHERUBINA 
 
 Austin Dobson 
 
 VI. PERISHABLE BOOKS 
 
 Leslie Stephen 
 
 PAGE 
 V 
 
 7 
 
 15 
 21 
 29 
 37 
 
 VII. ON CERTAIN DEFECTS IN MODERN CRITICISM 45 
 
 'A • 
 
 VIII. ADDISON S TRAVELS 
 Edmund Gosse 
 
 IX. AMERICAN HISTORIES 
 Goldwin Smith 
 
 X. THE SCHOLARSHIP OF THE EIGHTEENTH 
 
 CENTURY . . . • 
 
 Herbert Paul 
 
 XL A LEAF FROM AN INN ALBUM 
 Earl of Crewe 
 
 51 
 
 57 
 
 63 
 
 71 
 
Contents 
 
 XII. BYSSHE : A DIALOGUE 
 John Oliver Hobbes 
 
 XIII. KEYS TO THE UNIVERSE . 
 
 Vernon Lee 
 
 XIV. AN ARAB CLASSIC 
 
 Stanley Lane-Poole 
 
 XV. UNCONSCIOUS MAGIC 
 Arthur Machen 
 
 XVI. REMINISCENCES OF 'LEWIS CARROLL 
 Lionel A. Tollemache 
 
 XVII. A SECOND COLLOQUY ON CRITICISM 
 A ugustine Birrell 
 
 XVIII. OLD LAMPS FOR NEW 
 George W. Smalley 
 
 XIX. BACON ENTHRONED 
 D. H. Madden 
 
 XX. AN OLD PUZZLE . 
 
 Leslie Stephen 
 
 XXI. ' PICKWICK ' . . . 
 
 Percy Fitzgerald 
 
 PAGE 
 
 79 
 
 85 
 
 91 
 
 99 
 
 109 
 
 119 
 
 125 
 
 133 
 
 141 
 
 149 
 
AMONG MY BOOKS 
 
 I 
 
 A COLLOQUY ON CRITICISM 
 
 BY AUGUSTINE BIRRELL 
 
 THERE is (about this we are pretty well certain) 
 nothing more uncomfortable and disquieting 
 to the ordinary good fellow — and unless you adopt 
 a standard of excellence so high as must damn the 
 whole British Empire, most of the sons of Adam 
 are good fellows — than to find himself at logger- 
 heads with his neighbour about anything. 
 
 The people who love to differ are the minority — 
 they may be found, no doubt, if not in every 
 hamlet, certainly in every township, but for all 
 that they are the minority, and only distantly re- 
 semble the kindly hosts who love best those songs 
 which have a chorus in which all can join. 
 
 As a proof of this I would instance the unhappi- 
 ness of finding yourself positively disliking and 
 despising some book written, it may be, by an 
 acquaintance, which is enjoying great popularity. 
 To take it up only to find its ' pathos ' repulsive, 
 its * humour ' disheartening, its * merriment ' offen- 
 
 A 
 
.• 'r' ,^.. : ! .,', .«.'. Among My Books 
 
 sive, and then laying it down with a groan, to read, 
 or, worse still, to be told by some honest fellow, of 
 its strange power, its dramatic grip, its enormous 
 sale. All this is sheer agony. The ordinary 
 sorrows of life, however crushing, are shared with 
 humanity. Tombs and monuments remind you of 
 other men's bereavements ; — the list of bankrupts 
 gives you a feeling of kinship with half the town ; 
 but this inability to enjoy what apparently all the 
 world is enjoying is intolerable. 
 
 It is no use saying de gustibus^ etc. In the first 
 place it is not true. Burke long ago pointed out, 
 in his Treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful, that 
 ^ mankind are more generally agreed about Virgil 
 than they are about Aristotle. These things cut 
 very deep into life. Were you to be condemned to 
 spend three months at sea in a small cabin with a 
 stranger, with what easy composure would you 
 hear him, the first night, declare himself a Hobbist, 
 but how would your heart sink within you were he 
 to aver that he never could see anything funny in 
 . * Pickwick ! ' It is a very serious thing to differ 
 radically on a question of taste. 
 
 And so it comes about that the life of a Critic in 
 these times is well-nigh intolerable, and, indeed, it 
 is not without emotion — genuine emotion — that to- 
 day I see launched a new critical adventure. It 
 makes a brave appearance as it pushes off, friends 
 wave their handkerchiefs, the captain is on the 
 upper deck, the crew (well-tanned veterans some of 
 them) wave their new quills — it is indeed a gallant 
 
A Colloquy on Criticism 
 
 sight ! Yes — but look ahead to the sea where the 
 ship must go, to the far-off ocean, whose vast tides 
 pant dumbly passionate with dreams of all the 
 books, as yet unwritten, which Literature must 
 review, and of the authors, passionate but not 
 dumb, whom we shall, if we do our duty, most 
 grievously offend. Duty! the word instantly 
 arrests one, just as did the word 'delicacy' the 
 great Journalist in Friendship's Garland. * Deli- 
 cacy,' he murmured, ' surely I have heard the word, 
 in the old days before I learnt to call Hepworth 
 Dixon's style lithe and sinewy, and before ever I 
 wrote for this cursed paper.' So at the word 
 ' Duty ' I stand at attention. What are the duties 
 of a Critic? 
 
 No sooner is the question asked than tempera- 
 ment steps in and makes everything difficult. 
 One man's temperament leads him to magnify his 
 office, another's to minimise it. Pomposity is the 
 besetting sin of the one, cynicism of the other. Of 
 the two Mr Cynic is the more agreeable, while Mr 
 Pomposity does the least harm. It is desirable to 
 avoid * glasses ' and to see things with the naked 
 eye. 
 
 Can it be said that to review new books as they 
 appear is a public duty ? The fact that it is dis- 
 charged privately proves nothing. Until 1870, in 
 England the duty, of educating the young was dis- 
 charged by the British and Foreign School Society 
 and the National Society, whilst for many a long 
 day the duties of nursing the poor and visiting 
 
Among My Books 
 
 prisons were left to individual charity. The main- 
 tenance of the Fine Arts is, after a beggarly 
 fashion, recognised by the State, and there are 
 those who seriously advocate a National Theatre. 
 Ought Criticism to be established and endowed? 
 Should the Gazette appear with a Literary supple- 
 ment? On the whole, we think not. 
 
 But if Criticism is a matter of private enterprise 
 it should be undertaken in a suitable spirit. The 
 famous motto of the Edinburgh Review assumes 
 too much. A Judge is not self-elected, neither 
 does he choose his calendar and condemn whom 
 he wills. The country prosecutes, the jury convicts, 
 the Judge sentences. Professor Wilson, the noisiest 
 of all professors, owed no duty to the public 
 to ridicule John Keats in Blackwood's Magazine. 
 Lady Eastlake had no better right to slander 
 Charlotte Bronte in the Quarterly Review than has 
 any evil-tongued woman to revile her neighbour in 
 the market-place. 
 
 The duties of a Critic are those of a handicrafts- 
 man who takes money in exchange for an article of 
 his manufacture. He must do his best to learn his 
 business, and, having learnt it, to go about it dili- 
 gently and honourably, and in a spirit of humanity. 
 He must avoid the error of imagining his opinion 
 to be a great matter, but he is not entitled, if his 
 criticism be printed and circulated, to treat it as if 
 it were of no moment whatever. 
 
 Critics are sometimes accused of forgetting the 
 publicity, the almost awful publicity, of the Print-- 
 
A Colloquy on Criticism 
 
 ing Press, and of scattering abroad in the lightness 
 of their hearts all kinds of winged words and 
 poisoned arrows. But do they ? You have only to 
 compare the trenchant and often most valuable 
 criticism you hear at a dinner table with the tame, 
 emasculated utterances of the Press to realise how 
 paralysing is publicity and how impossible it is to 
 say in print what you may utter with perfect 
 propriety in private. Nobody can truthfully assert 
 that harshness or brutality is a characteristic of 
 present-day criticism. Whether it be wise or 
 foolish, important or insignificant, it is at least 
 good-natured. Books are liberally besmattered 
 with praise, and the rarest gifts of the gods are 
 affected to be bestowed upon writers of the most 
 humble endowments. Enthusiasm seems easily 
 kindled. Nobody, as I have already said, wishes 
 to differ with his neighbour, least of all to make his 
 V differences public. * Whistle and let the world go 
 by ' is a maxim of prudence, and one very generally 
 observed by wise men. But how is the poor 
 Critic to observe it ? A popular novel, a popular 
 volume of theology, and a popular poet are sent 
 him for review. He reads, and as he reads his 
 gorge rises. They are — so, at least, the unhappy 
 writer conceives — everything fiction, religion, poetry 
 ought not to be ; what should be natural is forced, 
 what should be devout is vulgar, what should be 
 felicitous is ill-expressed ; grace, dignity, deli- 
 cacy, charm — of no one of these qualities is 
 there so much as a trace. Of course, the reviewer 
 
Among My Books 
 
 may be mistaken. But if he is, his whole outlook 
 upon this world is mistaken ; all that is about him 
 is mistaken ; his library is all wrong ; every estimate 
 he has formed, every lesson he has learnt is all 
 wrong — everything is upside down, if these books 
 be anything but the poor trash his judgment tells 
 him they are. But is he to say so ? The novelist 
 is a great friend of his wife's sister, the divine and 
 the poet are club acquaintances of his own. He 
 cannot say what he really thinks of their produc- 
 tions — their * work,* as they love to call their lucu- 
 brations. Unable to say what he thinks, he 
 proceeds to say as little as he can about the books 
 before him, and to fill up his space with general 
 reflections, which are deprived of all value because 
 the writer does not apply them fearlessly to the 
 matter in hand. The result is deplorable. 
 
II 
 
 HISTORY AS IT IS WRITTEN 
 
 BY ANDREW LANG 
 
 IS it cynical to be diverted by the innocent 
 absurdities of historians ? Nothing, to my 
 mind, can be more amusing, in the way of literature, 
 than to read, side by side, the works of two historical 
 writers who deal with the same period, and, to a 
 great extent, with the same authorities, but who 
 differ in sentiment. I have lately read, in pure in- 
 dolence, the chapters on Mary Stuart and Elizabeth 
 Tudor, by Mr Froude and Mr Patrick Eraser 
 Tytler. Mr Tytler was no Mariolater. He 
 thought that Mary had a guilty knowledge of her 
 husband's murder, but as to how much Mary knew 
 he was uncertain. The Regent Murray he re- 
 garded as a great, and, on the whole, as a good man, 
 with a dash of the Pecksniff. Mr Froude had no 
 doubt that Mary was deep in her lord's murder ; 
 Murray he admired as the Bayard of early Protes- 
 tantism. As to Elizabeth, Mr Froude had few 
 illusions. His opinion about her guilty knowledge 
 
8 Among My Books 
 
 of Amy Robsart's murder is rather like Mr Ty tier's 
 opinion about Mary's guilty knowledge ofDarnley's 
 murder, though not so frankly expressed. 
 
 There does not seem to be a very wide difference 
 between the ideas of these two historians, but, when 
 we compare their works, we are entertained and 
 edified by what they each leave out in their uncon- 
 scious siippressiones veri. I would not accuse either 
 gentleman of being consciously unsportsmanlike ; 
 nevertheless each omits exactly the points on which 
 the other lays stress. This, of course, is futile. 
 The facts are accessible, many of them are already 
 printed ; moreover one author is sure to tell what 
 the other may be trusted to leave untold. Yet 
 they cannot be trusted to be quite candid. Thus 
 to give a few examples, there was the return of the 
 forfeited Earl of Lennox to Scotland in 1 564. Mr 
 Froude admits that Elizabeth had ' supported his 
 petitions' for restoration to his lands. In fact 
 Elizabeth had warmly urged it. But, as soon 
 as Mary had granted Elizabeth's desire, that lady 
 changed her mind. Mr Tytler has several pages 
 on this subject ; he quotes the replies of Mary's 
 ministers as to Elizabeth's insistence on Lennox's 
 pardon, as to Elizabeth's care to have evidence of 
 her fickle behaviour destroyed. Mr Froude omits 
 all that ; he merely says that a variety of pretexts 
 were invented for delay or refusal. 
 
 Melville was now sent by Mary to England, and 
 both our authors cite a Latin letter, from Elizabeth 
 to Cecil, in which the English Queen admits that 
 
History as it is Written 
 
 she is entirely unable to find a reply to her Scottish 
 sister. ' Invenias igitur aliquid boni quod in 
 mandatis scriptis Randall dare possim.' This 
 seems a simple affair, each historian has to trans- 
 late an easy piece of Latin. Let us see how they 
 do it. Here is Elizabeth's note to Cecil ; both 
 historians give, practically, the same Latin, except 
 that, if Mr Tytler quotes correctly, then Mr Froude 
 loyally amends her Majesty's spelling and grammar. 
 So I offer Mr Froude's text. 
 
 * In ejusmodi labyrintho posita sum de responso 
 meo reddendo ad Reginam Scotiae' [Tytler, for 
 ' labyrintho,' ' laberintho,' for * ad Reginam,' * R. 
 (Reginae) Scotiae '], * at nescio quomodo illi satis- 
 faciam, quum neque toto isto tempore illi ullum 
 responsum dederim, nee quid mihi dicendum 
 nunc sciam. Invenias igitur aliquid boni quod in 
 mandatis scriptis Randall dare possim [possem, in 
 Tytler], et in hac causa tuam opinionem mihi 
 indica.' 
 
 Even as to Cecil's endorsement of this scrap our 
 authors differ. Mr Froude has ' endorsed in Cecil's 
 hand " The Queen's Majesty's writing, being sick, 
 September 23."' 
 
 Mr Tytler has, * Thus backed by Cecil, 23rd 
 September, 1564. At St James's The Queen writ- 
 ing to me being sick.' Who was sick? The 
 Queen, in Mr Froude's opinion ; Cecil, in Mr 
 Tytler's view. * Elizabeth was harassed into ill- 
 ness ' (Froude) ; ' Cecil was then confined to his 
 chamber by sickness' (Tytler). Which author 
 
lo Among My Books 
 
 could not copy an endorsement without omissions, 
 or additions, and blunders ? 
 
 Now let us compare the translations of this short 
 and simple epistle : — 
 
 Tytler's Translation. Froude's Translation. 
 
 'I am involved in such a la by- 'I am in such a labyrinth 
 rinth, regarding the reply to the about the Queen of Scots (no re- 
 letter of the Queen of Scots, that ference to her letter), that what 
 I know not how I can satisfy her, to say to her or how to satisfy 
 having delayed all this time her I know not. I have left her 
 sending her an answer, and now letter to me all this time un- 
 really being at a loss what I answered, nor can I tell what to 
 must say. Find me out some answer now. Invent something 
 good excuse y which I may plead kind for me^ which I can enter 
 in the despatches, to be given to in Randolph's commission, and 
 Randolph, and let me know give me your opinion about the 
 your opinion in this matter.' matter itself.' 
 
 Now, does invenias aliquid boni mean * Invent 
 something kind,' or ' Find out some good excuse ? ' 
 It cannot well mean both, and the difference is im- 
 portant. 
 
 A little later both historians describe the situa- 
 tion when Elizabeth made Lord Robert Dudley an 
 Earl. Mr Froude (whose ignorance of human 
 nature one admiringly envies) holds that Elizabeth 
 was honest in wishing to give Leicester up to Mary. 
 Mr Tytler is strongly of the opposite opinion. 
 Well, the authority of both historians here is Sir 
 James Melville, Mary's envoy. Mr Tytler, natur- 
 ally, one may say inevitably, cites the famous 
 passage, ' The Queen could not refrain from putting 
 her hand in his ' (Leicester's) * neck to kittle him, 
 
History as it is Written 1 1 
 
 smilingly, the French Ambassador and I standing 
 by.' Mr Froude does not cite this passage. Yet 
 one woman does not usually cede to another an 
 admirer whom she cannot refrain from tickling 
 in public. Mr Froude doubts Melville's general 
 veracity, but quotes him just where he is not quoted 
 by Mr Tytler. 
 
 One might go on quoting these parallels, but 
 I confine myself to one case, which seems very 
 egregious. After the Rebellion in the North ( 1 569), 
 when Mass was celebrated once more in the 
 desecrated Cathedral of Durham, Northumberland 
 fled across the Border, and was sold to Murray by 
 Hector Armstrong, of Harlaw. This was the one 
 crime which Borderers could not pardon. Murray 
 then, according to Mr Tytler, proposed to exchange 
 the betrayed Northumberland for Mary, his sister, a 
 captive in England. What he meant to do with 
 Mary, ' 'Tis better only guessing.' At all events, he 
 promised that she 'should live her natural life.' 
 This proposal to sell Northumberland to his death, 
 in exchange for Mary, Mr Tytler cites from * Copy 
 of the Instrument,' endorsed with names of certain 
 Scotch nobles, allies of Murray's, in Cecil's hand. 
 Knox, at the same date, sent a letter bidding Cecil 
 ^strike at the root' — Mary. Mr Tytler also cites 
 Murray's instructions to his envoy, and his demand 
 for Mary's person, from a note ' wholly in Cecil's 
 hand,' and adds that Lesley, Bishop of Ross, 
 detected a proposition * equivalent to signing 
 Mary's death warrant.' Then Murray was shot 
 
12 Among My Books 
 
 by Bothwellhaugh, and the arrangement fell 
 through. 
 
 Well, Mr Froude quotes much from Murray's in- 
 structions, as Mr Tytler does, but about the 
 proposed surrender of Northumberland in exchange 
 for Mary Mr Froude does not say one single word 
 (chapter 53, 1570), nor a word about the Bishop of 
 Ross's remonstrance, any more than Mr Tytler 
 dwells on the said Bishop's alleged confessions that 
 Mary poisoned her first husband, and so forth. 
 When we come to these episcopal revelations, it is 
 Mr Tytler's turn to leave things out. To be sure, 
 the learned Bishop confessed rather too much, like 
 Topsy. Why should Mary, when Queen of France, 
 make herself a premature Dowager by poisoning 
 her husband, the King ? 
 
 It would be worth while to make a tabular 
 statement of all Mary's iniquities, from the days 
 when she was her uncle's mistress till she poisoned 
 her first husband, blew up her second, and tried to 
 poison her little boy with an apple. A greyhound 
 shared the apple with her pups, and they all ex- 
 pired incontinently. Greyhounds are notoriously 
 fond of apples, and apt to share an apple with their 
 whelps, while apples are easy things to poison. On 
 the other hand, a mere glance through Mr Tytler's 
 pages supplies a long list of Murray's treacheries : 
 * He betrays Mary's intentions,' ' Treachery of the 
 Lord James,' ' Conspiracy of Murray and Argyll,' 
 ' Art and part in Riccio's murder,' and so forth, 
 till he plunders his sister's diamonds, and tries 
 
History as it is Written 13 
 
 to get hold of her by betraying Northumber- 
 land. 
 
 Thus is history written, till one despairs, if not of 
 history, at least of historians. There is a pleasing 
 edition of Burnet, with the notes of Swift and other 
 contemporaries. An edition of Mr Froude, cum 
 notis variorum^ with the errors corrected and the 
 omissions supplied, would also be a valuable work, 
 and much more humorous than The Comic History 
 of England. 
 
Ill 
 
 UGLINESS IN FICTION 
 
 BY ' IAN MACLAREN ' 
 
 NOVEL readers escaped from the sex novel 
 with a sense of relief, and were beginning 
 to hope that fiction was returning to the decencies 
 of life, when the slum novel appears and fills us 
 with despair. For the majority of us hard-working 
 men (and women), toiling considerably more than 
 eight hours a day in various professions and 
 businesses, fiction is an appreciable relief and re- 
 inforcement. An hour with a well-written novel 
 when the work of the day is done — say at lo P.M., if 
 we be fortunate — consoles one for a long spell of 
 care and drudgery. As a class, we are not un- 
 reasonable nor exacting ; we do not complain that no 
 * Henry Esmond ' nor * Heart of Midlothian ' is to 
 be heard of anywhere, but are unaffectedly grateful 
 for a tale which is interesting and well written. If 
 the author be able to move us to tears or laughter 
 after an honest, manly fashion, or to set us a- thinking 
 on the problems of society, or to brace us to do our 
 
1 6 Among My Books 
 
 duty better, or to waken us up by a good adventure 
 story, then our hearts grow warm to the man, and 
 we rouse ourselves from arm-chairs to acknowledge 
 our debt, and afterwards burn the letter as becomes 
 self-respecting Englishmen who are more ashamed 
 of emotion than of anything else under the sun. 
 Nor are we really squeamish and prudish, some of 
 us having had occasion to know almost as much of 
 life as a woman novelist, but let us confess that we 
 would prefer to keep (fairly) good company in our 
 hours of rest. We are perfectly aware that people 
 swear and do other things which are worse, but with- 
 out being Pharisees we distinctly object to books 
 which swear on every page and do other things on 
 the page between, being our companions for the 
 hour when the lamp is lit and the streets are quiet. 
 It may be our narrowness, and we are prepared to 
 hear that we are Philistines and destitute of the 
 very beginnings of culture if we are rather sick of 
 a certain monotonous adjective and the other things. 
 We condoned oaths in Thackeray because it was 
 the custom of very agreeable people to swear then, 
 but it is only the custom of very disagreeable 
 people now, and while some of us in various walks 
 of life have to endure such people, at times we do 
 not hanker after their unnecessary and voluntary 
 company. 
 
 This deplorable disability to appreciate a highly- 
 flavoured book does not blind one to its frequent 
 force and partial veracity. It deals, let it be 
 granted, with elemental facts of savage life at 
 
Ugliness in Fiction 17 
 
 home and at first hand. The author has heard 
 with his own ears and not another's, and has seen 
 with his own eyes, and whatsoever he has heard 
 and seen he has written ; or if there be some things 
 kept back they are only such as could not be 
 legally put into print. One must also, as a rule, 
 acknowledge with admiration the dramatic sense 
 of the author who recognises a situation at a glance, 
 and his artistic skill who presents it with a firm 
 touch. It is the substance, not the workmanship, 
 which offends and repels. Very likely the subject 
 is a chapter in the life either of a coster girl or a 
 street arab, which is sometimes disgusting, some- 
 times immoral, and always unpleasant. Perhaps 
 there is a minute description of a bank holiday 
 excursion, where lovers drink incredible quantities 
 of beer, and eat like ravenous beasts. There will 
 almost certainly be a fight between two women, 
 with full details, and if there be a death-scene, the 
 mother will discuss with a neighbour whether the 
 coffin should be ' helm ' or ' hoak ' while her daughter 
 lies a-dying, and relate with gusto how the coffin 
 lid was at last fastened down on her husband's 
 body, whose dropsy had made him an inconvenient 
 size, by the simple expedient of the widow's 
 weight being added to that of two undertakers. 
 One breathes throughout an atmosphere of filth, 
 squalor, profanity, and indecency, and is seized with 
 moral nausea. There are such things as drains, 
 and sometimes they may have to be opened, but one 
 would not for choice have one opened in his library. 
 
 B 
 
1 8 Among My Books 
 
 When one asks why this kind of book should be 
 written, and, let us suppose, by an author of power 
 — did not Rudyard Kipling turn aside to write 
 ' Badalia Herodsfoot ' and thereby incur a consider- 
 able paternal responsibility? — it will doubtless be 
 replied, because it is true and it is desirable that 
 people should know the truth. If costers or other 
 people are living after a bestial fashion, then this 
 ought to be known to all whom it may concern. 
 Which means that such books are really semi- 
 philanthropic and are novels with a purpose, fall- 
 ing into the class of* Nicholas Nickleby ' and * Never 
 too Late to Mend.' This leaves the question of their 
 art untouched, but it vindicates their intention, and 
 so at the worst the slum novel is only a mistake. 
 It is, however, a very distinct mistake. For one 
 thing the people who are addressed would be 
 far more likely to be impressed were the life of 
 this under-world stated in terms of fact and not 
 tricked out as fiction. Besides, it is impossible that 
 this can be the whole life of the East-end— this 
 inferno of vice and violence. Is there no purity, 
 no loyalty, no kindliness, no self-respect among 
 these people? It is incredible that they should all 
 be ruffians and loose women ; and, therefore, it is 
 certain that one side of life is ignored ; and, if this 
 be so, the description is disproportionate and un- 
 reliable. The writer has seen only such things as 
 he proposed to see ; they could not, of course, be 
 the things he wished to see ; and, instead of being 
 realistic, his book is an inverted idealism in which — 
 
Ugliness in Fiction 19 
 
 manipulating facts according to his mind — the 
 author presents what is morally ugly as another 
 idealist would present what is morally beautiful. 
 Possibly the author may repudiate any purpose 
 and may content himself with pleading the com- 
 pulsion of his art. This life exists as a matter of 
 fact, and it has appealed to his literary sense ; it is 
 a subject, and he has represented what he has seen. 
 As a painter takes a black sullen pool, so a novelist 
 has chosen this sink of human life — this is his 
 metier ^ and nothing remains to be said. It is his 
 form of art, and has to be judged by the rules of 
 art. If so, a question at once occurs to the simple 
 reader, and he would be greatly obliged by an 
 answer. Is the representation of moral ugliness 
 really artistic? As one understands it, the chief 
 end of, say, sculpture is to create in marble that 
 idea of physical beauty which lies in the back- 
 ground of the mind ; and while suffering may be 
 included in the beautiful, as for instance in the 
 Dying Gladiator, or much of Michelangelo's work, 
 no sculptor of the first order has set himself to 
 embody in marble hideous deformity. Painters 
 have not shrunk from crucifixions, but they have 
 not chosen leprosy, although the silver sheen had 
 lent itself well to treatment; nor a surgical operation, 
 although the blood — well one need not press that 
 point. Why is a humpback or a leper inadmissible ? 
 Because they are the violation of the law of things ; 
 they are imperfection and disease. Why should 
 the artist in life forsake the quest of the perfect and 
 
20 Among My Books 
 
 the beautiful, wrought out often through poverty 
 and agony, and spend his skill on what is loathsome 
 and disgusting? Is he not also bound to the 
 service of the ideal, and is it not his function to 
 fling out before us that model of high character and 
 living which we all have imagined, after which we 
 all strive, but which we cannot express ; or is it 
 that the canon of beauty which guides the sculptor 
 and the painter has no authority over the novelist, 
 and he alone of artists has the liberty of deformity ? 
 
IV 
 
 THOUGHTS ON STYLE 
 
 BY J. P. MAHAFFY 
 
 LITERARY men of old were supposed, I 
 believe, to wander at will among their 
 books and cull from their shelves what took 
 their fancy. If such was indeed the case, they 
 enjoyed a leisure very different from that of 
 our generation. The man of books no longer 
 brings out of his treasure-house things new and 
 old, like the householder in the Gospel, but 
 these things are borne in upon him by circum- 
 stances, and his mind is determined by what he 
 has to read. Who can avoid, at this moment, 
 reading critic after critic upon the * Life of 
 Tennyson,' a book which has hit the fortunate 
 moment, ' when nothing else was going on,' and 
 so has got an ample hearing. A college Don in 
 Dublin is led by his examinations at this same 
 moment to re-read the great classics which have 
 long been part of his mental furniture, and so I 
 chance to have before me again Virgil, the literary 
 
22 Among My Books 
 
 artist whom common consent has declared to be 
 the most Tennysonian of the ancients. Not that 
 our poet's direct obligations to Virgil are so marked 
 as those to Theocritus, with whom he seems to 
 have been saturated, but the general resemblance 
 is surely most remarkable. Virgil is far the 
 greatest of the Roman poets, not by reason of his 
 great ideas — in that Lucretius is his rival — but by 
 reason of the combined purity and dignity of his 
 style, which bears the evidence of being deli- 
 berately and consciously polished to the utmost 
 degree of propriety and refinement. Illustrations 
 abound on every page of his work. Take but one, 
 not above the average, in his brief lines on the 
 palace of Circe, which .^neas passes at the open- 
 ing of the seventh book of the epic, from which 
 I select but two : 
 
 Hinc exaudiri gemitus, iraeque leonum 
 Vincla recusantum et sera sub nocte rudentum. 
 
 You feel that Virgil must have heard the strange 
 grating and metallic sound of a lion's roar at some 
 Roman amphitheatre. And so he uses the word 
 rudentum. Such is the kind of perfection to be 
 found all through Tennyson, and when one of our 
 weekly oracles of wisdom, in its recent comparison 
 of Shakespeare with him, said many true things, it 
 seems to me to have missed an important contrast 
 in this respect. To talk of the style of Shakespeare 
 seems to me odd and irrelevant. The style of 
 Tennyson is of the essence of his greatness. 
 
Thoughts on Style 23 
 
 This reminds me of an interesting remark in 
 Gustave Flaubert's correspondence. 'What dis- 
 tinguishes great genius is generalisation and 
 creation ; it resumes scattered personalities in a 
 type, and brings new characters to the conscious- 
 ness of humanity. Shakespeare is something 
 tremendous in this respect ; he was not a man, 
 but a continent : there are crowds and countries 
 in him. Such men have no need of attending to 
 style. They are strong in spite of all their faults, 
 and even because of them ; but we, the little ones, 
 are worth nothing except by finish of execution. 
 V. Hugo, in this century, will eat up everybody, 
 although he is full of faults. I venture on this 
 proposition — that great men often write very badly, 
 and so much the better for them. It is not to 
 them that we must go for the art of form, but to 
 men like Horace and La Bruy^re.' I should leave 
 out V. Hugo, who certainly aimed at a splendid 
 style, and should put in Walter Scott, who now 
 offends the young Scotland of Stevensonians by 
 the negligences of his diction. But he, too, was 
 far too great for style ; he was unfolding such a 
 wealth of human nature, galleries of great portraits, 
 of nationalities, volumes of history and of legend, 
 that he had neither time nor care for the graces of 
 a polished style. Look how his people live, just 
 like the people of Shakespeare, in the hearts of all 
 English-speaking people, nay, even in the hearts 
 of foreigners, for Scott, owing to his want of style, 
 is capable of translation ! On the other hand, there 
 
24 Among My Books 
 
 is something so personal in an elaborated style that 
 the characters are thrown into the shade by the 
 personality of the poet, and so Tennyson has not 
 left us a single character whose name is a house- 
 hold word, such as Scott and even far lesser men 
 have created. His imagination has not furnished 
 us with a great hero. The portrait of Arthur 
 Hallam is drawn from real life with loving care, 
 but fades out in the great * In Memoriam ' before 
 the deep world-problems which fill the poet's 
 mind, and so that exquisite monument of personal 
 grief is like the Attic tomb reliefs, in which we 
 wonder at the poetical pictures of human sorrow, 
 without knowing or caring what individual bereave- 
 ment they were designed to commemorate. 
 
 But here I am, discoursing of style, concerning 
 which my fastidious academic friends tell me I 
 know nothing. Nevertheless, every man who 
 writes must have some notions about good and 
 bad writing, though they may be faulty. In a 
 paper just published I had reason to compare 
 two authors whom I called Miss Austen and Marie 
 Corelli. An excellent academic Mentor said that 
 was wrong ; 1 should have said for conformity's 
 sake, 'Jane Austen.' But, if I could only clear 
 myself of the grave charge of having courted 
 alliteration, I should defend my phrase by the 
 fact that when we were young we always heard 
 from our prim and staid relations of Miss Austen, 
 a lady of whom they spoke with respectful but 
 distant admiration. They would have thought 
 
Thoughts on Style 25 
 
 Jane rather forward. And this marks the con- 
 trast to which I was pointing between certain 
 older and newer novelists. 
 
 I have just said that thoughts on style may be 
 expected from any literary source, and, by v/ay ot 
 curious confirmation, where do I find the latest 
 essay on this subject? Actually in the Hellenic 
 Journal^ where there is a paper not only very 
 instructive but very interesting on the well-known 
 tract * On the Sublime,' which dates from the purist 
 Renaissance in the days of Augustus. The author, 
 who is apparently a literary amateur, tells us his 
 ideas concerning fine style, as opposed to poverty 
 and vulgarity on the one side, artificiality and 
 bombast on the other. Mr Rhys Roberts has 
 given an excellent analysis of this very sensible 
 and ' modern ' piece of criticism, and only shows 
 in one spot that he has not taken the lessons of 
 Longinus adequately to heart. I do not think 
 the off-hand judgment disparaging Bacchylides in 
 comparison with Pindar is wholly justified by what 
 we read in the new papyrus. There seems to 
 be, with great simplicity of structure and of metre, 
 a rich vocabulary, and a great deal of fine and 
 moving pathos in these odes. But it is hard to 
 judge aesthetically, when impeded by the trouble 
 of deciphering even an easy hand. There is no 
 need, however, to anticipate the verdict of scholars 
 which will be let loose upon the world almost 
 immediately. But I return to the interesting 
 passage thus translated in the Hellenic Journal : — 
 
26 Among My Books 
 
 * The legislator of the Jews, no ordinary man, 
 having formed and expressed a worthy conception 
 of the might of the Godhead, writes at the very 
 beginning of his Book of Laws: — "And God said" 
 — what ? Let light be, and it was ; let earth be, 
 and it was.' What a strange bathos in expres- 
 sion ! And has Mr Roberts never appreciated our 
 Authorised Version ? Longinus is quoting loosely 
 from some version (not the LXX) read out to him 
 by some Jewish friend. But surely the A. V. is 
 just as accurate — ' Let there be light, and there 
 was light. Let the dry land appear, and it was 
 so.' At all events, this was English. 
 
 I suppose it is only in so very simple an instance 
 that we can reproduce sublimity in a translation. 
 And how many of us can really understand the 
 beauties of any language but our own ? When I 
 see criticisms on French and German masterpieces 
 written by men who are unable either to speak or 
 write these languages, it reminds me of the foreign 
 criticisms on Burns by people who can read English, 
 but who only know the dialect of Burns, as I do, 
 through a glossary. And what knowledge of a 
 dialect can we gain through a glossary, or even 
 through a dictionary? How can we learn the 
 clusters of associations, the delicate shades of feel- 
 ing which cling about words familiar to the poet 
 from childhood, and which determine both the 
 beauty and propriety of their use ? So then, to 
 the great body of English-speaking people. Burns 
 as a great poet is inaccessible. How much more 
 
Thoughts on Style 27 
 
 to foreigners ? And for the same reason Goethe's 
 Faust, or the lyrics of V. Hugo, are by us only very 
 imperfectly understood. Of course the same may 
 be said of our appreciation of Sophocles and Virgil, 
 who would laugh their sides sore at our Babu 
 verses in their language. But then in dead lan- 
 guages no better knowledge is now to be had. In 
 the living we should perhaps be content with 
 native judgments. I have even heard it said by a 
 great linguist that no man really knows more than 
 one language — and most men not even that. But 
 what a blow to all our critical literature and our 
 fancied appreciation of the great masterpieces of 
 many languages ! These considerations are so 
 humiliating that I feel disposed to apologise for 
 bringing them forward. 
 
V 
 
 'THE ADVENTURES OF CHERUBINA ' 
 
 BY AUSTIN DOBSON 
 
 WHEN the first editor of the Quarterly 
 reported to John Murray, by request, 
 upon Miss Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice,' he 
 commended it chiefly for the absence of certain 
 then-popular features. There were, he said, ' no 
 dark passages, no secret chambers, no wind-howl- 
 ings in long galleries, no drops of blood upon 
 a rusty dagger' — things which, in Mr Gififord's 
 opinion, 'should be left to ladies' maids and 
 sentimental washerwomen.' That he failed to 
 discover in Miss Austen the characteristics of 
 Mrs Radcliffe is not extraordinary ; nor to any 
 fervent ' Janite ' (to use Professor Saintsbury's 
 word) will it seem strange that he should declare 
 ' Pride and Prejudice ' to be ' really a very pretty 
 thing.' But it is assuredly worth noting that Miss 
 Austen, so far from following the author of the 
 ' Italian ' and the ' Mysteries of Udolpho,' had 
 actually already composed a book to ridicule that 
 
30 Among My Books 
 
 gifted writer — the MS. of which book, * Northanger 
 Abbey,' to wit, when Gifford wrote to Murray, was 
 temporarily interred in a publisher's drawer at 
 Bath. It is, besides, curious that, notwithstanding 
 the vexatious suppression of her own finely-touched 
 little satire. Miss Austen should, in her correspond- 
 ence, be generous enough to praise warmly another 
 work which was also devoted to making fun of Mrs 
 Radcliffe. ' I finished the " Heroine " last night '— 
 she writes to her sister Cassandra while on her way 
 to London to publish * Mansfield Park ' — ' and was 
 very much amused by it. ... It diverted me ex- 
 ceedingly.' Later in the same letter she adds — ' I 
 have torn through the third vol. of the " Heroine." 
 I do not think it falls off. It is a delightful bur- 
 lesque, particularly on the Radcliffe style.' This is 
 ' praise from Sir Hubert Stanley,' and fully justifies 
 us in taking down the volumes to be dusted. 
 
 Although occasionally to be discovered among 
 those bouquins de rebut achctes au rabais of which 
 De Musset writes, copies of the 'Heroine' are 
 certainly not common, and may even be termed 
 rare. The author's name, which, it will be ob- 
 served, Miss Austen does not mention, was Eaton 
 Stannard Barrett, further described on his title- 
 page as 'Esquire.' Born at Cork in 1786, Barrett 
 was educated at Wandsworth, and afterwards 
 entered the Middle Temple. But he seems never 
 to have practised at the Bar, and he died prema- 
 turely of consumption in Wales. He made several 
 incursions into literature. He wrote a comedy ; he 
 
' The Adventures of Cherubina ' 3 1 
 
 wrote political satires against the Whigs of his day, 
 of which one, ' All the Talents,' obtained some con- 
 temporary reputation ; and he wrote a Popesque 
 eulogy on ' Woman,' four lines of which periodi- 
 cally, and not undeservedly, figure among the 
 
 * Quotations Wanted ' of literary journals. ' Not 
 she,' he says of his subject, 
 
 ' Not she with trait'rous kiss her Saviour stung, 
 Not she denied Him with unholy tongue ; 
 She, while Apostles shrank, could dangers brave, 
 Last at His cross and earliest at His grave.' 
 
 Finally, in addition to a novel called ' Six Weeks 
 at Long's,' he wrote the ' mock Romance ' of which 
 the full title is *The Heroine, or Adventures of 
 Cherubina.' It was published in 18 13 by Henry 
 Colburn, was dedicated to the Right Hon. George 
 Canning, and bore for motto ' L'Histoire d'une 
 femme est toujours un Roman.' 
 
 The idea of burlesquing or satirising current 
 forms of fiction was obviously not a new one. 
 Without going back even as far as Mrs Lenox and 
 the * Female Quixote,' only a short time before the 
 
 * Heroine ' appeared, Miss Charlton had essayed 
 something of the kind in her ' Rosella,' and Mrs 
 Green had put forth her * Romance Readers and 
 Romance Writers.' But Barrett, as fits a male, 
 comes to closer quarters with his theme. Miss 
 Cherry Wilkinson, whose adventures he relates, is 
 the only daughter of a farmer who, by ' honest and 
 disgusting industry,' has acquired — what he could 
 
32 Among My Books 
 
 scarcely acquire now — a considerable fortune. 
 Cherry's governess, who has been discharged for 
 misconduct, and who has stuffed her pupil with 
 romances, easily persuades her that she is a ' child 
 of mystery.' Thereupon Miss Wilkinson discovers 
 — with the aid of an old indenture — that her real 
 name is, or should be, Cherubina De Willoughby, 
 and that she is called to the career of a Heroine. 
 For this she has already certain indispensable physi- 
 cal qualifications. Although but fifteen she is tall 
 and ' aerial,' her hair is flaxen, her face Grecian, 
 and her eyes blue and sleepy. She has also, 
 according to one of her admirers, ' a voice soft as 
 a Creolian lyre.' Further, she is an adept in most 
 of the other requisites. She can * blush to the tips 
 of her fingers ' ; faint at pleasure ; has tears, sighs, 
 and half-sighs at command ; is mistress of the 
 entire gamut of smiles, from fragmentary to fatal, 
 and is fully skilled in the arts of gliding, tripping, 
 flitting, and tottering, which last, being the 'ap- 
 proach movement of heroic distress,' is the heroine's 
 ne phis ultra. She is also fully posted in the 
 obligations of a heroine to 'live a month on a 
 mouthful,' to accomplish long journeys without 
 fatigue, and to obtain the necessaries of life without 
 the tedious formalities of payment. Finding she is 
 threatened with an old playfellow, one Stuart, as a 
 suitor, she resolves to fly from her father's house. 
 This she does, on a stormy night, taking with her, 
 in 'a small band-box,' her jewels, her 'spangled 
 muslin' (the regulation costume of heroines), her 
 
'The Adventures of Cherubina' 33 
 
 satin petticoat, her silk stockings, and her satin 
 shoes. 
 
 From this point to the end of Volume Three 
 Cherubina * crowds and hurries and precipitates ' 
 her remarkable adventures. At the outset she 
 saves her would-be suitor Stuart from robbers, an 
 act which constitutes him her convenient protector 
 through the book whenever her vagaries make a 
 deus ex machina imperative. Then she takes coach 
 to London, meeting on the road one Betterton, 
 whose intentions are not honourable. Escaping 
 from him she falls in with a St Giles' woollen- 
 draper named Jerry Sullivan, whose womankind 
 naturally distrust the spangled ' child of mystery.' 
 So she takes refuge in a Baronial Castle, which 
 turns out to be Covent Garden Theatre, where she 
 meets an actor named Abraham Grundy, whose 
 dramatic appellation of Lord Altamont Mortimer 
 Montmorenci, and habit of acting (like John 
 Kemble) both on and off the stage, exactly suit her 
 cadre. He carries her to his lodgings, where also 
 resides a half-crazy poet, whose poems are still 
 unpublished, but who has written a biography of 
 himself to precede them, which is a creditable 
 parody on Johnson. Her father, following her, is 
 promptly hustled by Montmorenci into a private 
 madhouse ; and Betterton (whose nefarious pur- 
 poses are always foiled by her good angel Stuart) 
 persuades her that she is entitled to the property 
 of a certain Lady Gwyn. To Lady Gwyn's, there- 
 fore, Cherubina repairs, by this time attired in a 
 
 C 
 
34 Among My Books 
 
 Tuscan masquerade dress, modelled upon Mrs 
 Radcliffe. Lady Gwyn, at first regarding her as 
 mad, afterwards retains her to divert her friends. 
 Failing to oust Lady Gwyn, she endeavours to 
 establish herself on a feudal footing in a neigh- 
 bouring ruin called Monkton Castle, with Sullivan 
 as warden, Higginson (the crazy poet) as minstrel, 
 and a body of haymakers, at so much per diem^ as 
 vassals. After doing a good deal of mischief, and 
 going through a tangle of fantastic experiences, 
 some of which, in a Gothic chamber, remind one of 
 those of Catharine Morland, she comes to her 
 senses. Her father is set free ; and Stuart, indul- 
 gently admitting that * her principles have been a 
 little perverted by the influence of the native 
 novel,' delivers himself of a discourse on fiction, 
 which, although no burlesque, is not the less 
 edifying. Upon romances he is extremely hard ; 
 they are dangerous stimulants to the imagination, 
 which first elevate and then enervate. Sentimental 
 novels are not much better, but he excepts among 
 these latter, ' Rasselas ' and * The Misanthropist ' (?). 
 He advises Cherubina, as a remedial measure, * to 
 mix much in the world, and learn the customs of 
 actual, not ideal society.' ' I now,' says that re- 
 formed young person, winding up her correspond- 
 ence (the book, it should be stated, is in the ' episto- 
 lary style ' which Fielding condemned), ^ pass my 
 time both usefully and agreeably. Morality, history, 
 languages, and music occupy my mornings, and 
 my evenings are enlivened by balls, operas, and 
 
'The Adventures of Cherubina ' 35 
 
 familiar parties.' But, she adds, after referring to 
 the good counsels of her companion Stuart, whom 
 she of course eventually marries, * I still retain some 
 taints of my former follies and affectations. My 
 postures are sometimes too picturesque ; my phrases 
 too flowery ; and my sentiments too exotic' 
 
 The above is but a rapid and imperfect sum- 
 mary of an undoubtedly clever book, although the 
 modern reader, especially if he be averse from 
 burlesque, will probably conclude that Miss Austen 
 was rather easily ' diverted.' He will, however, do 
 well to bear in mind that, while its light-hearted 
 parody of * Caroline de Lichtfield,' the * Beggar 
 Girl,' the ' Mysteries of Udolpho,' the * Children of 
 the Abbey,' and the rest, is now hopelessly ob- 
 scure to us, it was abundantly perceptible to that 
 accomplished student of 'follies and nonsense, 
 whims and inconsistencies,' the author of * North- 
 anger Abbey.' 
 
VI 
 
 PERISHABLE BOOKS 
 BY LESLIE STEPHEN 
 
 A SPEAKER at the recent conference of 
 librarians complained that most modern 
 books were doomed to speedy destruction, not in 
 the spiritual but in the material sense. The paper 
 on which they are printed will rapidly become 
 mere pulp or impalpable powder. One might 
 have supposed that such a result would be grati- 
 fying, especially to librarians. Considering what 
 a vast proportion of printed matter not only is, 
 but is intended to be, purely ephemeral, there 
 could, at first sight, be no reason for desiring its 
 preservation. The regret, perhaps, is an instance 
 of a tendency noted by all psychologists. A 
 pursuit becomes delightful for its own sake, even 
 when its ostensible end ceases to be valuable. 
 A zealous librarian takes such a pleasure in 
 preserving literature that he forgets to consider 
 whether the stores accumulated can be of any 
 use, and then to enquire whether useless stores are 
 not positively pernicious. Persons who are not 
 subject to that illusion may take a different view. 
 
38 Among My Books 
 
 Why should not all books be made of perishable 
 materials ? Hawthorne somewhere argues that 
 when we have become civilised we shall again give 
 up houses for tents. Why encumber ourselves 
 with huge masses of bricks and mortar, which, if 
 they suit the convenience of one generation, are all 
 the more likely to be ill suited to its successors ? 
 Why, on the same principle, should we try to 
 carry with us vast accumulations of printed matter 
 which have served their only possible purpose? 
 Would it not be a good thing if a law were made 
 that no paper should be used which was not war- 
 ranted to vanish (say) in a century? Domestic 
 life now involves a continuous struggle against the 
 masses of waste paper, circulars and advertisements, 
 which pour In by every post ; and but for a sys- 
 tematic destruction would cause a household to be 
 snowed up as under a paper avalanche. The race 
 at large is suffering in the same way ; and some 
 mode of self-defence is becoming absolutely neces- 
 sary. The legislation we have suggested would 
 provide an automatic machinery which would 
 become operative at the end of the twentieth 
 century. From that time forth no book would be 
 in existence which would have been printed more 
 than a hundred years, and room would be con- 
 stantly made for a new influx by the spontaneous 
 vanishing of rubbish. 
 
 It would not follow that all literature above a 
 century old should perish. It would simply be 
 that books not reprinted for a century would vanish. 
 
Perishable Books 39 
 
 All the great books, the models and masterpieces 
 of literature, would be preserved ; and there would, 
 we may suppose, be a constant watchfulness over 
 books which were approaching the fatal term. 
 The effect would be like that of cremation. We 
 should destroy what is really dead instead of pre- 
 serving mere mummies. The literature actually 
 preserved would be mainly such as had some primd 
 facie claim to the title of classical. We are often 
 exhorted to limit our reading to really good books. 
 That is obviously impossible, if we are to know 
 anything of our contemporaries ; but it seems to 
 be a sound rule for the study of older literature. 
 Shakespeare is worth reading ; but the only real 
 use of plunging into the enormous rubbish heaps of 
 the small Elizabethan literature is to glorify the 
 Dry-as-dusts who won't recognise the inevitable 
 law of death. The advantages are obvious in the 
 case of history. A book which shall be a great 
 work of art as well as an accurate record is now 
 scarcely possible. The improvement of modern 
 history is a familiar topic ; and in certain respects 
 is undeniable. But it is permissible to doubt 
 whether modern historians would not be better if 
 great masses of records had been summarily de- 
 stroyed. The examination of all manner of 
 archives and State paper offices has, it is true, 
 enabled recent inquirers to give elaborate accounts 
 of the various purposes and impressions of States- 
 men from day to day. If history is understood as 
 implying an exact knowledge of Queen Elizabeth's 
 
40 Among My Books 
 
 intentions as to Mary Queen of Scots at any- 
 given date the records have been invaluable. But 
 even in the hands of a great literary artist like 
 Froude, history written on this scheme often 
 becomes wearisome, because we feel that the 
 minute personal questions are both insoluble and 
 irrelevant. The broad and really important facts 
 are obscured by the supposed necessity of going 
 into minute biography. Imagine a history of the 
 present day written on the scale adopted for 
 periods when documents were comparatively rare, 
 and the unfortunate historian bound to be familiar 
 with all the views of Mr Gladstone and Lord 
 Salisbury and all their subordinates, to read all the 
 private letters, and all the despatches, and all the 
 Blue-books, and all the statistical tables, to make 
 up his mind about all the ins and outs of the 
 labour question, and the education question, and 
 the rights of our policy in Egypt and India — any 
 one of which is enough to occupy the whole time 
 of a contemporary. If it takes Mr Gardiner a year 
 to write the history of a year at Cromwell's time, it 
 will hereafter take a lifetime to write of a year 
 under Queen Victoria. History on such a scale is 
 plainly impossible ; and it is every day becoming 
 more essential to tabulate, classify, prepare indexes, 
 and in one way or other to organise the vast 
 masses of information which are accumulating 
 more and more rapidly. The unhappy historian in 
 the future will be physically unable to go into a 
 hundredth part of the available sources of informa- 
 
Perishable Books 41 
 
 tion. He must constantly be content with sum- 
 maries without trying to go behind them ; and it is 
 desirable that the burthen should be lightened by 
 destroying what is plainly useless. We seem to 
 be making such a mistake as a collector of a 
 museum of natural history, who should not be 
 content with getting examples of every species, but 
 should try to keep every example he could of each 
 species. The historian is constantly tempted to 
 waste time by ascertaining facts, not because every- 
 body supposes that they can throw any more light 
 upon any serious question, but simply because they 
 are ascertainable. He can only refuse on peril of 
 being denounced as superficial by somebody who 
 spends his whole energy upon the minute details 
 which are really without any significance. The 
 historian will clearly have to abandon the pretence 
 of omniscience ; but he should be freed from the 
 temptation of pretending to it by destroying the 
 worthless records, which, so long as they exist, 
 make constant calls upon his attention. After all, 
 a vast mass of knowledge is valueless ; it could be 
 destroyed without really altering our judgment of 
 any important point, and if we here and there 
 destroyed something .which might be of some use, 
 we should get a greater advantage by making the 
 waste of time upon such investigations once for all 
 impossible. 
 
 The argument applies even more clearly to pure 
 literature. How much of all the writing intended 
 for ephemeral amusement is really worth the space 
 
42 Among My Books 
 
 it occupies on the shelves of the British Museum? 
 Look at any collection of British poets. Say 
 honestly what proportion of it does any good to 
 any human being. The old rule as to medioc- 
 rity in poetry gives the principle. A tenth-rate 
 historian may add something to our knowledge of 
 fact; but a tenth-rate poet does nothing whatever. 
 He is simply an inferior echo of something better, 
 and the original is enough for all our purposes. 
 Would anybody suffer if Blackmore's ' Creation ' or 
 Boyse's * Deity ' had calmly and quietly vanished 
 away ? Will our grandchildren have any cause for 
 sorrow if ninety-nine hundredths of all the publica- 
 tions of to-day should disappear like a bad dream ? 
 To keep such things, it may be said, is a harmless 
 superstition. They may be stowed away in boxes 
 and do no injury to anyone. There is, however, 
 some harm to libraries, as every one knows who 
 has anything to do with the accumulating matters 
 which are always overpowering the energies of 
 their guardians. But the bare existence of such 
 repositories discourages and overwhelms conscien- 
 tious readers. They are haunted by the vague im- 
 pression that they ought to read everything, and 
 forget that the more rubbish they study the less 
 energy they have for what is good. And surely 
 the honest writer of such stuff may feel the same. 
 He writes an article to amuse his neighbours for a 
 few minutes. He has nothing whatever to say to 
 posterity. When he writes a letter to a friend he 
 means it for the waste-paper basket. When he 
 
Perishable Books 43 
 
 addresses the public, he means the public of his 
 own period, and should feel it to be an impertin- 
 ence if he is forced to present himself to the future 
 race without any intention of his own. We are, 
 as has sometimes been remarked, ephemeral beings, 
 and ought to behave as such. Why should we be 
 forced to be immortal? We should be content, 
 and even eager, to pass into oblivion as soon as 
 the temporary purpose of amusing an idle hour 
 has been fulfilled. A writer who feels that 
 strongly — of course we do not speak to the Heaven- 
 born genius — should insist, if he could, upon 
 having his work printed upon perishable materials. 
 Immortality in print is not only a superfluity ; the 
 bare suggestion of its possibility is a positive injury 
 to one's feelings. 
 
VII 
 
 ON CERTAIN DEFECTS IN MODERN 
 CRITICISM 
 
 BY 'A' 
 
 IT is as much in the interest of the readers of 
 the present day as in that of the writers that 
 I would plead with certain of our literary reviewers 
 for some modification in the scale and language of 
 criticism adopted by them in dealing with new pub- 
 lications. For I assume that the primary purpose 
 of a review is to guide the reader as to the new 
 publications which are likely to interest and attract 
 him. 
 
 Speaking for myself, and, I should suppose, for 
 most others, when I take up a periodical journal or 
 review devoted to criticism, my first object is to see 
 what books of value and merit have been lately 
 given to the world. The review may not be able 
 to afford space for long extracts from any such 
 work dealt with, and we are therefore left entirely 
 dependent on the taste and judgment of the critic. 
 And in this matter it is evident that a great change 
 has of late come over the disposition of the average 
 
46 Among My Books 
 
 critic. Forty years ago, and longer, it was the 
 common and just complaint that reviewers sacri- 
 ficed too much to the pleasure (a very seductive 
 one) of tossing and goring the author under review. 
 The old Quarterlies and the Saturday Review^ 
 under its original management, for instance, had 
 the reputation of being too severe. It was com- 
 monly supposed that political enmities, artistic 
 differences of opinion, opposing historical schools, 
 and the like, were allowed to enter into the region 
 of literary criticism, and to deflect it sorely from 
 the path of pure and impartial judgment. There 
 may be something of this still left among us, 
 but by far the most startling feature of modern 
 reviewing is not its harshness, its scorn, its implac- 
 ability, but rather its universal indulgence, and its 
 indiscriminate and excessive language of eulogy. 
 
 It is only necessary to glance down the advertis- 
 ing columns of a literary journal, in which pub- 
 lishers attach * Notices of the Press ' to the books 
 they announce, to be struck by this fact. Words 
 and terms, once upon a time reserved only for the 
 great masters of literature, for the great classics of 
 the language, seem to be now sprinkled freely, with 
 no sense of their incongruity, over any and every 
 new work of fiction that may appear. The term 
 * genius,' for example, which was once held as it 
 were a sacred appellation to be conferred on the 
 Dt Majores of our literature, is now so common as 
 to have lost any significance whatever. I noted it 
 three times last week in the advertisements of a 
 
Defects in Modern Criticism 47 
 
 single publisher, applied to some recent works of 
 fiction. As for lesser terms of praise, * unique,' 
 * unsurpassed,' ' first-rate,' ' intensely human,' 
 ' quivering and palpitating with passion,' — these, 
 I need not say, appear week after week as plentiful 
 as blackberries. 
 
 It is therefore of a certain lack of moderation 
 and discrimination that I complain as unfair to the 
 reader who comes to the critic for guidance. He 
 wants to know, in the first instance, which new 
 books are of high excellence, which of a moderate 
 merit, and which are to be avoided as worthless. 
 Too often he reads reviews which seem to speak of 
 all alike in language which used once, as I have 
 said, to be restricted to the masterpieces of our 
 literature. We all know the story of the little 
 child, who, reading epitaph after epitaph in the 
 churchyard, inquired with some surprise of its 
 parent * where all the wicked people were buried.' 
 An unsophisticated stranger after reading review 
 after review of modern works of fiction might well 
 ask where all the worthless novels were interred. 
 It is our sense of proportion that is offended when 
 praise is universal. We long at last for some 
 rough-and-ready measure of distinction. A grad- 
 uated scale, numbered for reference, as thus : — (i) 
 First-rate, (2) Good, (3) Good, but not good enough, 
 (4) Very fair, (5) Fair, (6) Mediocre, (7) Poor stuff, 
 (8) Pretentious trash, (9) Sensational rubbish, (10) 
 Drivel — would at least indicate an attempt at 
 classification, though it did not provide elaborate 
 
48 Among My Books 
 
 reasons for the judgment given. But if the critic's 
 judgment by classification were sound, it would be 
 a great saving of trouble. The method might be 
 crude and inartistic, and would not even make 
 copy. But the reader, supposing the classification 
 to be reasonably just, would at least be nearer than 
 he is at present to knowing what to expect from 
 the book noticed. The original prospectus of this 
 present journal included the perfectly just remark, 
 that indiscriminate praise encourages the produc- 
 tion of much inferior literary work. There is 
 nothing new, of course, in the observation, but it is 
 not for that reason superfluous to repeat it. The 
 old motto of the Edinburgh Review^ taken from 
 Publius Syrus — an author, said Sydney Smith, 
 whom none of us had read — 'Judex damnatur 
 quum nocens absolvitur,' contains the whole moral 
 in a nut-shell. 
 
 This is an age when the manufacture of books 
 has reached a pitch unknown to any other period 
 of our literature. The marked increase in the 
 number of publishers in the last quarter of a 
 century goes to show it. But it may well be 
 doubted whether the multiplication of books ac- 
 counts for the multiplication of publishers, or vice 
 versa. The unprecedented range of topics chosen 
 — as if the British Museum had been (to borrow 
 the expressive simile of Lord Tennyson's Lin- 
 colnshire friend) ' raked out with a small-tooth 
 comb ' to find something new that will form 
 an attractive title — forces one to suspect that 
 
Defects in Modern Criticism 49 
 
 the genesis of many new works must be of this 
 sort. And the strange thing, as it strikes the 
 ignorant outsider, is this — that the vaster the 
 annual crop of books, the more lenient, the less 
 exacting, the critic appears to become. He seems 
 to smile, with all-embracing benevolence, upon all ! 
 And this, I repeat, may be fun for the critic — and 
 for the author — but how about the poor reader of 
 the review, who is on the look out for suggestion 
 and guidance ? 
 
 And if there is this ground for the plaint that I 
 am pouring forth, is there not another, of even more 
 importance ? Even the critics who have long erred 
 on the side of excessive laudation are startled at 
 last by the signs of a public standard of taste 
 against which they are warring in vain. Certain 
 novels of to-day, which need not be named, but 
 which will occur to every one, selling by the 
 hundred thousand — full of false humour, false 
 philosophy, false pathos, and the most mon- 
 strous pictures of life, such books have at last 
 awakened certain critics to the forgotten responsi- 
 bilities of criticism. A few, no doubt, still take 
 sides with the myriad purchasers — and boldly heap 
 upon these works of fiction every epithet of praise 
 that they can summon. But the majority, to do 
 them justice, have, like the fabled worm, * turned at 
 last' But it is too late. The admirers of these 
 productions no longer care for the critic ! The 
 more their favourite romances are abused, the 
 more fondly they cling to them. Yet I must 
 
 D 
 
50 Among My Books 
 
 put in a word for such as these. Are they so much 
 to be scorned, as we in our haste may think ? Are 
 they not showing, in part, simply the fruits of a de- 
 fective education ? Have they not been too often 
 allowed, by their educators, to mistake the sham 
 for the reality ? The critic cannot, it is true, 
 neutralise the natural bias of any reader towards 
 what is fifth-rate. But I submit that he might 
 have done more than he has in this direction. 
 
VIII 
 ADDISON'S TRAVELS 
 
 BY EDMUND GOSSE 
 
 IN spite of the increase of intercommunication 
 between England and the Continent, books 
 of European travel of any practical merit were curi- 
 ously rare at the close of the seventeenth century. 
 It is difficult to see what guides there were for a 
 smart young gentleman just setting out on the 
 Grand Tour in 1699. If he had a turn for science, 
 he might take with him the ponderous ' Observa- 
 tions ' which John Ray, the naturalist, had published 
 in 1673 ; a little more up to date were those dis- 
 quisitions concerning political geography which 
 Gilbert Burnet called his Travels in Italy and 
 Switzerland. But this was practically all ; and we 
 must take this dearth into consideration when we 
 judge a volume like Addison's ' Remarks on Several 
 Parts of Italy, etc,,' which has unkindly, and, indeed, 
 unfairly, been called a book of travels which might 
 have been written at home. It is just because in 
 1699 there were no materials at home from which 
 
52 Among My Books 
 
 it could be written that its interest, if not very 
 exciting, is permanent. 
 
 The elegant and youthful traveller was far from 
 being celebrated when this tour in Italy and 
 Switzerland was taken. Joseph Addison had 
 recently been confirmed in a Fellowship at 
 Magdalen College, Oxford ; he had written some- 
 what unimportant copies of verses in Latin and 
 English ; he was projecting a translation of 
 Herodotus, and nibbling here and there at Ovid. 
 But Charles Montague had fixed his eye upon 
 him, had extracted him from his shell in Oxford, 
 and had persuaded Lord Somers to grant him a 
 crown pension of ;£"300 a year on which to prepare 
 for politics by foreign travel. Accordingly, Addison 
 loitered only long enough to get his Latin poems 
 addressed to Montague printed in the ' Musse 
 Anglicanae,' as letters of introduction to Con- 
 tinental scholarship ; and early in 1699 he started. 
 Of his adventures in France the book before us 
 says nothing ; we know that a gift of the ' Musae ' to 
 Boileau gave that potentate of letters * a very new 
 idea of the English politeness.' But on the 12th 
 of December, 1699, Addison started on board a 
 * tartane ' from Marseilles bound for Genoa, and he 
 did not return to England until 1703. Edward 
 Wortley Montagu was with him, but Addison 
 does not refer to him or to any companion. 
 
 It will be remembered that the elder Mr Shandy, 
 long inconsolable for the loss of Bobby, was cheered 
 by recollecting how many things referring to such 
 
Addison's Travels 53 
 
 a bereavement could be collected from the Classics. 
 Before starting for Italy, Addison filled a common- 
 place-book with passages from the Latin poets 
 descriptive of scenes which he was likely to en- 
 counter, and he translated them as neatly as he 
 could into English verse of the quality of Waller. 
 These quotations, printed at the proper points in 
 large type, occupy a great deal of room, and help 
 to explain the fact that the book, although it has 
 not very much substance in it, runs to the com- 
 paratively handsome figure of 534 pages. It was 
 not published until 1705, that is to say, not until 
 the sudden success of ' The Campaign ' had made 
 the author famous. The title-page was anonymous, 
 but the interesting dedication to Lord Somers was 
 signed, and no secret was made of the authorship. 
 The course the young traveller pursued ran from 
 Genoa, through Pavia and Milan to Venice, then 
 down to Ferrara and Rimini, and so, zigzagging 
 across the Apennines, to Rome and Naples. He 
 was perhaps the first Englishman to recognise the 
 singular coziness of San Remo, and to smile at the 
 pomposity of the principalit}/ of Monaco, where an 
 ofificer remarked to him, 'with a great deal of 
 Gravity, that his Master and the King of France, 
 amidst all the Confusions of Europe, had ever been 
 good Friends and Allies.' But the minute political 
 sub-divisions of Italy itself were so far from scandal- 
 ising Addison, that he notes an opinion that the 
 geographical forms of that Peninsula predispose it 
 to the formation of a large number of independent 
 
54 Among My Books 
 
 States. Venice greatly entertained him, yet his 
 descriptions of it are frigid ; the colourless purity 
 of Addison's style at this period scarcely lends 
 itself to the picturesque. He is much more his 
 future self in little touches of ironical observation 
 or humorous reflection which remind us of the 
 Spectator of twelve years hence ; as, for instance, 
 when, at a Venetian opera, Cato being discovered 
 in his library, Addison is gratified to see that 
 the author whom the Roman stoic studies is 
 Tasso. 
 
 Addison was probably the earliest English 
 traveller who visited San Marino, and, conscious 
 of this fact, he gives a special chapter to an account 
 of this sympathetic Republic. He tells us that the 
 inhabitants are forbidden to wander about the slopes 
 of their own mountain, lest unconsciously they 
 should tread down a second path of entrance for 
 a possible enemy. Later on, with much intrepidity, 
 Addison ascends Vesuvius from Naples, and, on 
 his way back to Rome by sea, stops his felucca at 
 Capri and at Ischia. Forced to lie one night 
 tossing under the promontory of Monte Circeio, 
 the noise of the wind and sea on the rocks reminds 
 him of ' the Howling of Wolves and the Roaring 
 of Lions ' ; here his classic reminiscences come upon 
 him thick and fast, but he regrets, in more homely 
 language, that the woods ' are most of 'em grubb'd 
 up.' One of the most interesting passages in this 
 neglected volume is that in which the fact of making 
 the perilous and awkward entrance of the Tiber 
 
Addison's Travels 55 
 
 suggests to Addison the benefits to our knowledge 
 of ancient life which would accrue from judicious 
 excavation. 
 
 From one end of Italy to the other, this ingenious 
 young gentleman of Oxford, with difficulty snatched 
 from Anglican orders, is sternly Protestant. The 
 legends of Rome are all ' imposture ' and * bungling 
 tricks ' ; at Siena the stories about St Catherine 
 seem to him nothing but ' gross and absurd.' Nor 
 is he more or less opposed to the Gothic forms of 
 architecture than were his contemporaries. He 
 is passionately in favour of the Palladian style, 
 and all others seem to him savage. With Milan 
 Cathedral he is extremely disappointed, and he dis- 
 misses Siena as a ' barbarous Building.' Palladio's 
 church of Santa Justina in Padua, on the other hand, 
 lifts him to an ecstasy ; it is * the most handsom, 
 luminous, disencumber'd Building' Addison ever 
 saw. In this the young traveller was of his time. 
 His master Boileau, in crushing Ronsard, had 
 found nothing more contemptuous than to rhyme 
 ' Gothique ' with ' rustique,' while Moli^re, in * La 
 Gloire du Val-de-Grace,' had dismissed the exquisite 
 cathedrals of his own country as ' ces monstres 
 odieux des siecles ignorants.' But all this is no 
 worse than what we have heard Mr Ruskin say 
 of the architecture of the Renaissance, and every 
 church, like every dog, may have its day. 
 
 Nor could Addison be expected to be more in 
 sympathy with Alpine scenery than with Gothic 
 architecture. Yet in Switzerland he has glimmer- 
 
56 Among My Books 
 
 ings of appreciation. The panorama of the Ober- 
 land, taking him wholly by surprise from the 
 MUnster-Terrasse at Berne, faintly struck the chords 
 of emotion ; and the drive from Yvoire to Thonon 
 filled his spirit ' with an agreeable kind of Horror.' 
 Soleure, now so dull a little town, appeared to 
 Addison as having ' a greater Air of Politeness ' 
 than any other in Switzerland ; and he is strangely 
 enthusiastic about St Gallen, which was, however, 
 so completely rebuilt half a century later than 
 Addison's time, that we can with difficulty place 
 our eyes in the position of his. On the whole, 
 Addison's lively description of Swiss places and 
 conditions is better calculated than are his stiffer 
 and more pedantic Italian chapters to make us 
 realise what he visited, and the changes 'twixt now 
 and then. For one thing, his inevitable Common- 
 place-book from the Classics gave out as soon as 
 he crossed the Alps, and he had no Lucan or Silius 
 Italicus to tell him beforehand what his sensations 
 ought to be by the Lake of Geneva or in the crocus 
 meadows of the valley of the Aar. 
 
IX 
 
 AMERICAN HISTORIES 
 
 BY GOLDWIN SMITH 
 
 SIR HENRY MAINE somewhere speaks of 
 the nauseous grandiloquence of the Ameri- 
 can panegyrical historians. It was true, no doubt, 
 when he wrote that in American histories rhetoric 
 was apt to prevail over research, and that there 
 was a lack of the judicial quality, especially in 
 dealing with questions between the United States 
 and Great Britain. But Sir Henry Maine wrote 
 some time ago, and American historiography has 
 since then greatly advanced alike in research, in 
 impartiality, and in purity of style. 
 
 Nobody will complain of want of research in the 
 works of Mr Henry Lea, Mr Justin Winsor, Mr 
 John Fiske, Mr Henry Adam, Mr M'Master, Mr 
 Schouler, or Professor Moses Coit Tylor, to men- 
 tion only those whose works meet the writer's 
 eye on his shelves. In truth there has now set in 
 almost a mania for research, partly caught in 
 Europe, which, one can hardly help thinking, leads 
 
58 Among My Books 
 
 in some cases to a waste of labour ; as, when an 
 elaborate essay is written about municipal institu- 
 tions now extinct, which were unimportant when 
 they existed, and about the actual working of 
 which we can know little, since they may after 
 all have been mere constitutional masks for some 
 one-man power. There is even a growing disposi- 
 tion, clearly imported from Europe, to make history 
 what is called ' scientific* — that is to discard its 
 moral and personal element and to reduce it to a 
 dry statement of phenomena and their connection, 
 analogous to the method of physical science, and 
 in accordance with the hypothesis of evolution. It 
 may be that if we could penetrate to the origin of 
 all things, this treatment might turn out to be cor- 
 rect. We might find that the whole human drama, 
 with all that appears to us to be personal, had been 
 predetermined in the atoms of the nebula ; for to 
 that or to something still more remote the strictly 
 evolutionary theory of history must go back. But 
 as history presents itself to us or comes within 
 reach of our intelligence, personality surely is ulti- 
 mate, though it is of course moulded by antecedent 
 and environment. Had a bullet entered the brain 
 of Cromwell or of William III in his first battle, or 
 had Gustavus not fallen at Liitzen, the course of 
 history apparently would have been changed. The 
 course even of science would have been changed if 
 there had not been a Newton or a Darwin. The 
 personality of Napoleon was a tremendous factor, 
 and indeed is so still, since all this militarism is to 
 
American Histories 59 
 
 a great extent his work ; and who could have pre- 
 dicted its introduction through the annexation of 
 Corsica by France? Let history be as philo- 
 sophic as you will, the attempt to exclude from it 
 personality would surely be to falsify it by the 
 suppression of a great factor, as well as to deprive 
 it of life. 
 
 At the time at which Maine wrote, grandilo- 
 quence, nauseous or not, certainly prevailed even 
 in so highly respectable a writer as Bancroft. But 
 this, not only in regard to literature, but in regard 
 to oratory, is now very much a thing of the past. 
 Some traces may occasionally be found. One 
 history, essentially very valuable, lies before us 
 curiously dotted with strained metaphors, through 
 which the reader longs to strike his pen. But it 
 is to be hoped that, while spread-eagle rhetoric is 
 discarded, spirit is not to be banished from the 
 narrative or literary grace from the style. Most 
 readers, after all, require a history which they can 
 read with pleasure, and which easily impresses 
 itself on their minds. Hume and Robertson have 
 long been consigned to disgrace for their want 
 of accurate erudition, especially in relation to 
 the Middle Ages, which to them and their con- 
 temporaries were merely the Dark Ages, while to 
 the medievalist of our day they appear to be the 
 special ages of light. But we must not be alto- 
 gether ungrateful for the literary skill which, by 
 giving us a lively, luminous, and interesting nar- 
 rative, not only affords us pleasure, but fixes the 
 
6o Among My Books 
 
 leading facts of history in our minds. It would 
 not be difficult to name works, admirable in point 
 of erudition, and regarded by all scholars with pro- 
 found gratitude, which no ordinary mortal could 
 read, or, if he did read, could possibly remember. 
 If history is to be read, common people must have 
 something less dry. 
 
 The impartiality of an American historian is, of 
 course, specially tried in dealing with the American 
 Revolution, and all the subsequent disputes between 
 the United States and Great Britain. Having 
 occasion the other day to inspect the American 
 school histories, about the partial character of 
 which, and their evil influence in keeping up 
 Anglophobia, a good deal has been said, I found 
 nothing so bad as I had been led to expect. It 
 seemed to me that whatever there was of acrimony 
 in the tone had been sensibly diminishing of late 
 years. England, unhappily, is the only foreign 
 nation with which the United States ever waged 
 serious war, and the military records, which in 
 theirs, as in other histories, fill a disproportionate 
 space, are all records of battles by land and sea 
 with us. Nor was it to be expected that American 
 writers would take a less American view of these 
 questions than that which was taken by English 
 Whigs, such as Chatham, Fox, and Burke, at the 
 time of the Revolutionary war. But in the recent 
 American historians, at least those of high reputa- 
 tion, a sincere desire to be impartial or even to be 
 kind to Great Britain will generally be found. 
 
American Histories 6i 
 
 Here and there you come upon what, to an 
 Englishman at least, appears to be Anglophobic 
 injustice. In the interesting series of ' Lives of 
 American Statesmen/ a few such passages will be 
 found ; but the best of them, such as Mr Carl 
 Schurz's ' Life of Henry Clay,' are free from 
 anything of the kind. Some of the American 
 historians or biographers — Professor Hosmer for 
 example — write on international questions just as a 
 candid Englishman would write. 
 
 A trial now awaits the American historian in his 
 judicial character which it will not be very easy for 
 a native writer to meet. The South is demanding 
 a version of the history of the Civil War rectified 
 in its interest, and fitted to be taught in its schools. 
 As might have been expected, that which was a 
 memory of sorrow to the vanquished is becoming a 
 memory, perhaps a legend, of heroic achievement 
 to their sons. A Northerner must find it difficult 
 to place himself at that which is the Southern, and, 
 perhaps, in a certain sense the right, point of view. 
 To Northerners secession seemed rebellion ; and if 
 you asked them for what they were fighting, the 
 general answer would be that they were fighting 
 to make the South submit to the law. Recon- 
 struction proceeded on the same theory, with the 
 untoward result of putting the South under ' carpet- 
 bagging ' government, instead of turning it over, as 
 soon as it had fairly submitted, to the guidance of 
 its natural chiefs. Legally this view might be 
 right. The Union, if not national at first, had 
 
62 Among My Books 
 
 become national in course of time, so that formally 
 secession would be rebellion, and the war to which 
 it led would be a civil war. But in reality the war 
 was international, and was in fact so treated from 
 the outset by the North, which never hanged a 
 Southerner for rebellion, or withheld from the 
 Southern soldiery the full measure of belligerent 
 right. Nature, more powerful and authoritative 
 than any constitutional compact, had forced apart, 
 after long, uneasy, and at length insufferable wed- 
 lock, two communities radically antagonistic to 
 each other in social structure, and therefore incap- 
 able of political union. If one of the two nations 
 formed by the rupture was warranted in attacking 
 and conquering the other, the justification was to 
 be found, not so much in a legal claim to allegiance 
 as in the character of slavery, the danger of its 
 propagation, and the duty owed to the negro. 
 The trophies and statues raised by the North 
 are clearly memorials of international war ; civil 
 war has no triumphs. It will be curious to see a 
 Southern history, especially a school history, of the 
 War of Secession. 
 
X 
 
 THE SCHOLARSHIP OF THE 
 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 BY HERBERT PAUL 
 
 IF I wanted a book to amuse me on a railway 
 journey, I would as soon take Porson's 
 * Letters to Travis ' as any other. The unfortunate 
 Archdeacon to whom they were addressed has 
 been long and justly forgotten. The spuriousness 
 of I John V. 7, the famous record of the Three 
 Heavenly Witnesses, has been admitted by all 
 competent critics for a hundred years, though the 
 text continues to be read in Christian Churches 
 as a genuine part of the Epistle. Even if it had 
 been found in all the Greek manuscripts, instead 
 of in none, Travis would have been totally unfit 
 to defend it, or anything else, against a real 
 scholar. 
 
 Wherein, then, lies the interest of the book? 
 I answer that it is not controversial but personal, 
 and that the author is a typical example of 
 a profound student, who was also a great man 
 
64 Among My Books 
 
 of letters, freely rolling out his mind. Porson 
 wrote it in the prime of life and the freshness 
 of his powers, before his natural indolence had 
 gained upon him, before he had found con- 
 solation for his troubles in the last place where 
 it should be sought. In humour, in learning, 
 in mental power, in sarcasm and irony, in easy 
 command of vivid, racy, vernacular English, he 
 had few equals and no superior. He did not 
 know how to be dull, and if his treatment of 
 ignorance is such as mercy might have induced 
 justice to spare, we must remember that in the 
 ignorance which he attacked there was a large dose 
 of dishonesty. And if Porson gave no more than 
 justice to others, he received far less than justice 
 himself These very letters are the result of theo- 
 logical studies which he, and he almost alone, 
 thought necessary before he took orders in the 
 Church of England. He convinced himself that he 
 could not take them, and that at a time when Arian 
 clergymen might be counted by the hundred, while 
 schoolmasters and college tutors became deacons 
 and priests as formally and as mechanically as they 
 became bachelors and masters of arts. ' He who 
 puts Christianity before truth,' said the illustrious 
 author of the ecclesiastical revival in the nine- 
 teenth century, 'will go on to put the Church 
 before Christianity, and will end by putting him- 
 self before the Church.' Porson put truth before 
 everything, and what was his reward? He lost 
 his clerical Fellowship at Trinity because the 
 
Eighteenth Century Scholarship 65 
 
 Master would not give him a lay one. That 
 exemplary divine advised him to become a parson, 
 and gave the lay Fellowship to his own nephew. 
 Porson was miserably poor. He was sent to Eton 
 and to Cambridge by charity. He was the most 
 acute and erudite scholar in Europe. The noble 
 foundation of Henry the Sixth, the later and 
 larger foundation of Henry the Eighth, cherish 
 his memory with pride. But the official head of 
 his own college, a minister of the Church of Christ, 
 told him, with a cynical leer, to be a hypocrite 
 or starve. His stipend as Professor of Greek was 
 forty pounds a year. If he had been a clergyman, 
 he would have become a Canon of Ely and a 
 comparatively rich man. 
 
 It was hardly to be expected that Porson would 
 treat with much indulgence a professional apologist 
 of orthodoxy who could not be made to under- 
 stand an argument, and who thought collating 
 manuscripts the same thing as collecting them. 
 If he sometimes made fun of Mr Travis, and 
 referred him to the authority of the celebrated 
 manual Dormi Secure (Sleep Soundly), the 
 temptation must have been irresistible, especially 
 as Mr Travis would never see the joke for him- 
 self But, as Macaulay said, when one praises an 
 author one should give specimens of his wares. 
 I will not quote from the criticism of Gibbon in 
 the preface, because every undergraduate, if not 
 every schoolboy, knows it. The following passage 
 may, perhaps, not be equally familiar : — * Having 
 
 E 
 
66 Among My Books 
 
 at last discussed the subjects of Stephens' and 
 Beza's orthodox manuscripts, I am compelled to 
 decide (with sorrow I pronounce it!) that they 
 have disappeared ; perhaps they were too good 
 for this world, and, therefore, are no longer 
 visible on earth. However, I advise the true 
 believers not to be dejected ; for, since all things 
 lost from earth are treasured up in the lunar 
 sphere, they may rest assured that these valuable 
 relics are safely deposited in a snug corner of 
 the moon, fit company for Constantine's donation, 
 Orlando's wits, and Mr Travis' learning.' Constan- 
 tine's donation was the alleged present of the 
 Western Empire to the Bishop of Rome, which 
 would indeed have been splendid if it had been 
 made. * Mr Travis' arguments are like the Sibyl's 
 books : they contain information of equal truth, 
 and they increase in value by the diminution of 
 quantity.' Of Cyprian he says: — 'The merits of 
 the martyr threw a shade over the defects of the 
 author, and the veneration that ought to have been 
 confined to his piety was extended to his writings.' 
 It is impossible not to be reminded of Gibbon. 
 But I venture to say that the comparison will not 
 be unfavourable to Porson. Gibbon's sentences 
 would have been longer, less direct, and more 
 offensive. Nor was Porson's style corrupted by 
 Gallicisms. He always wrote idiomatic English, 
 and in writing he always aimed straight at the 
 mark. ' I pay no compliment to De Missy when I 
 say that he had a clearer and more critical head 
 
Eighteenth Century Scholarship 67 
 
 than Cyprian/ It would be difficult to kill two 
 birds more neatly with one stone. 
 
 Porson was not merely the greatest classical 
 scholar since the death of Bentley. He was ac- 
 quainted with English literature as few classical 
 scholars at that time were. He knew Shakespeare 
 as we should all like to know him, and the New 
 Testament as we all ought to know it — that is to 
 say, by heart. Even Byron never made a better 
 Shakespearian quotation than Porson flung con- 
 temptuously at that typically bad scholar, Gilbert 
 Wakefield, who presumed to criticise his edition of 
 the Hecuba of Euripides — 'What's Hecuba to him, 
 or he to Hecuba?' He was saturated with Milton, 
 Dryden, and Pope. He was an omnivorous and re- 
 tentive reader, whose vast knowledge was at his fin- 
 gers' ends. There are modern professors who despise 
 him because he said that life was too short to learn 
 German. I will not ask whether it is possible to be 
 the worse for German. There are, as Porson knew 
 to his cost, more pernicious forms of excess. When 
 he applied to Hermann the well-known epigram of 
 Phocylides, he perhaps betrayed a patriotic bias- 
 On the other hand, if his eye had been accustomed 
 to the atrocities of the German printing-press, he 
 would not have carried out his wholesome reform in 
 the construction of Greek type. 
 
 The * Letters to Travis ' illustrate the leisurely 
 scholarship of the eighteenth century in the careless 
 profusion with which they are written. Porson 
 does not husband his strength, or keep half his 
 
68 Among My Books 
 
 good things for another time. He might have 
 confuted Travis in a letter, almost in a page. He 
 gives him twelve letters and exhausts the subject. 
 But he does much more. He exhibits the prin- 
 ciples of sound criticism, the nature of historic and 
 literary evidence. He shows by the example which 
 we were all taught in youth to regard as better than 
 precept how the authority of manuscripts should be 
 weighed, when silence is a proof of ignorance, how 
 a marginal gloss gets into the text, under what 
 conditions a theologian may be assumed to have 
 used the best evidence at his disposal. In a treatise 
 of this comprehensive sort the particular dispute 
 assumes its due proportions, and is dwarfed by the 
 splendid lesson in criticism which gives its perma- 
 nent value to Porson's work. This is doubly for- 
 tunate ; for it is by the letters alone that the general 
 reader can judge of Porson at all. Fragments of 
 his brilliant conversation (' Wonderful poet, Mr 
 Southey ; his poetry will be read when Homer and 
 Virgil are forgotten') have been preserved. He 
 delivered no lectures at Cambridge ; he would have 
 been thought eccentric if he had. He wrote politi- 
 cal squibs for the Morning Chronicle^ but daily 
 journalism is the most perishable of all commercial 
 products. He edited four Greek plays, but his 
 notes are critical of the text, and not explanatory 
 of the meaning. He said himself that he was quite 
 content to be known as one Porson who at the 
 close of the eighteenth century did something for 
 the text of Euripides. He also did a great deal to 
 
Eighteenth Century Scholarship 69 
 
 make Athenaeus intelligible. He has been unlucky 
 in his biographer, a clergyman who murdered 
 Lucretius and translated his wife. By far the best 
 account of him is Professor Jebb's admirable article 
 in the * Dictionary of National Biography,' which is 
 really perfect, but, of course, tantalisingly brief 
 His brave, sad, and too brief career may almost be 
 summed up in a sentence. He was the martyr of 
 honesty and the slave of drink. 
 
XI 
 A LEAF FROM AN INN ALBUM 
 
 BY THE EARL OF CREWE 
 
 AMONG ' books which are no books ' — though 
 he mentioned such various harvest of the 
 human mind as Court Calendars, Draught Boards 
 bound and lettered at the back, Statutes at large, 
 the works of Hume and Gibbon, and ' block-headed 
 Encyclopaedias ' generally — Charles Lamb did not 
 happen to include Inn Albums and Visitors' Books. 
 It is possible that the kindly critic may have judged 
 with tolerance the efforts of mild sentiment and 
 milder humour which crowd their pages, and that 
 he therefore purposely left them out of his list : be 
 this as it may, to the ordinary observer their chief 
 interest lies in the singular revelation they present 
 of a dreadful fact not commonly recognised. They 
 make it evident that about one person in five be- 
 lieves that he or she is capable of some form of 
 literary composition worthy of being set down and 
 preserved. Allowing for a little modesty in the 
 remaining four, one is tempted to wonder if there 
 
72 Among My Books 
 
 is any man or woman alive who is not an author in 
 secret, and to thank Heaven that in literature free 
 coinage is unknown, and that only these humble 
 mints, the Visitors' Books, remain always open. 
 And though the better educated of these comtnis- 
 voyageurs Troubadours would not admit it, they are 
 but the genteeler cousins-german of those other 
 travellers who carve their names on the temple of 
 Luxor, or treat Vatican statues in a manner which 
 argues a contempt for graven images worthy of 
 Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. 
 A leaf, then, from an Inn Album — 
 
 page on page of gratitude 
 for breakfast, dinner, supper and the view, 
 
 is not a promising subject ; but the particular leaf 
 in question has a certain interest of its own. In a 
 copy of Shelley's ' Revolt of Islam' (London, 1818) 
 — once the property of that industrious collector, 
 the Rev. John Mitford, and annotated in his 
 delicate handwriting — is inserted what he describes 
 as ' A page from the Journal Book of Chamouny in 
 Switzerland,' containing a somewhat notorious 
 entry. 
 
 During the summer of 18 16, Shelley, with Mary 
 Godwin and her half-sister Jane or Claire Clairmont, 
 left his Windsor retreat for Switzerland. It was in 
 a large measure Jane Clairmont's expedition, for 
 Byron was at Geneva ; and though her fellow- 
 travellers suspected nothing, she had already in- 
 troduced herself to Byron, under pretence of seeking 
 
A Leaf from an Inn Album 73 
 
 a Drury Lane engagement, and had flung herself 
 into his not unwilling arms. 
 
 The intercourse between Byron and Shelley at 
 Diodati and on Lake Leman furnishes one of the 
 most interesting passages in the lives of English 
 men of letters ; Byron, however, was not of the 
 party which started for Chamouni towards the 
 end of July. According to Professor Dowden's 
 account (Life of Shelley, Vol. II., p. 29), the 
 travellers, after an ineffectual attempt to view the 
 Mer de Glace on July the 24th, succeeded in reach- 
 ing Montanvert on the following day, and * before 
 they left Montanvert the travellers' Album had re- 
 ceived in unusual form, but one not to be mistaken, 
 the sign-manual of P. B. Shelley.' The entry, how- 
 ever, bears the date July the 23rd, and therefore 
 Mitford may have been right in supposing it to 
 have been made at Chamouni, though the writer in 
 the Quarterly Review, to be quoted presently, seems 
 to have been of Professor Dowden's opinion. 
 
 The leaf in question is of rough blue-grey paper, 
 foolscap size, and shows evidence of having been 
 cut from a book, as a word or two is missing from 
 each line on the inner margin. It is ruled by hand 
 into vertical divisions headed respectively * jours, 
 mois, noms des voyageurs, lieu de naissance et 
 profession, d'ous ils viennent, ou ils sont dirig^, 
 observations.' Both sides of the paper are full of 
 names, and many of the travellers have contributed 
 in various languages to the column of observations. 
 There is nothing very striking in the list ; the 
 
74 Among My Books 
 
 Shelley names are immediately followed by those 
 of The Mackintosh and his wife, and one wonders 
 what the Highland magnates thought of the poet 
 and his companions. Then follows Lord Darling- 
 ton, with some members of his family, and * Newby 
 Lowson, Esq.' — a Wagg or Wenham perhaps — 
 against whose name somebody has pencilled, ' A 
 Curious fellow this,* Lord Darlington, afterwards 
 first Duke of Cleveland, famous in the hunting and 
 racing world of his time — 
 
 Darlington's peer 
 With his chin sticking out and his cap on one ear — 
 
 was also a curious fellow in his way, and if he 
 objected to the Shelley manage it could not have 
 been upon moral grounds. Later comes a vast 
 family of Hales, against whom the inevitable 
 buffoon has written ' All Hale ! ! vide Mackbeth,' 
 and then a gentleman, unknown to fame, but who 
 sounds like a specimen of those who in their way, 
 too, have helped to make England great, ' John 
 Pycroft — English — Lausanne to Geneva — and no 
 poet.* 
 
 At the top of Shelley's page is the latter part of 
 what was evidently a long, fervid, and ill-expressed 
 outpouring of religious thankfulness inspired by 
 the grandeur of the surroundings. The writer's 
 name does not appear. Professor Dowden is surely 
 right in his surmise that it was this well-intended 
 but tasteless exhibition of conventional piety which 
 excited Shelley to his expression of revolt ; but it 
 
A Leaf from an Inn Album 75 
 
 may be added that he was by no means the only 
 protester, and certainly not the rudest One 
 commentator has scrawled * Methodist — what non- 
 sense/ in the margin ; and another inquires, ' Why 
 are people anxious to make themselves ridiculous 
 in the eyes of everybody ? ' While a third has 
 written on a mutilated part of the sheet, but 
 seems to declare that * any one listening to this 
 nonsense must be a complete gudgion ! ' 
 
 The Shelley entry runs thus : — 
 
 Percy B. Shelley — (lieu de naissance) Sussex — 
 (ou ils sont dirige) L'enfer — (observations) eijULi 
 ^iXavOpcoTTog, SrjjuLOKpaTiKOS t aOeog re. 
 
 Next comes M. W. G. (Mary WoUstoncraft 
 Godwin), born in London, coming from England, 
 and bound for the same unpleasant destination as 
 Shelley. 
 
 The third entry, Madlle. C. C. (Claire Clairmont) 
 — (lieu de naissance) Clifton. 
 
 In his notice of the incident. Professor Dowden 
 (Vol. II., p. 30) states : — 
 
 A third comer, it is said, added the word fiojpds, and Byron, on 
 visiting Montanvert, defaced Shelley's atheist and his successor's 
 fool. 
 
 This account, founded, as the writer tells us, on 
 Mr Swinburne's recollection of the original docu- 
 ment, is not quite accurate. Under Shelley's de- 
 claration a later traveller has written, from Psalm 
 liii. v. I : — 
 
 6 &(t)p(3}v eXirev iv rrj Kapdlcf, dvrov, ovk ((Ttl deds. 
 
 Unlike Shelley, he has carefully added his ac- 
 
76 Among My Books 
 
 cents, and, to point his moral, has heavily under- 
 lined the Greek word rendered in our version fool, 
 and the name Percy B. Shelley — who said in his 
 heart there is no God. Professor Dowden continues 
 (p. 30, note) :— 
 
 We hear nothing of the /Awpis from Lord Broughton, who was 
 present on the occasion of Byron's discovering Shelley's entry in 
 the visitors' book. 'At an inn on the road,' he writes, * the 
 travellers' book was put before us, and Lord Byron, having written 
 his name, pointed out to me the name of Mr Shelley, with the words 
 'atheist' and 'philanthropist' written in Greek opposite to it, and 
 observing, " Do you not think I shall do Shelley a service by scratch- 
 ing this out ? " he defaced the words with great care.' (' Italy, Re- 
 marks made in Several Visits, etc.,' Vol. L, pp. 1-2.) 
 
 Either Lord Broughton's memory failed on the 
 precise detail of what happened, or Byron purposely 
 misled him, for no attempt has been made to deface 
 either Shelley's writing or his critic's. But a toler- 
 ably successful effort has been made to efface the 
 entry of Claire Clairmont's initials, and to a less 
 extent the word ' Clifton,' so that it is only just pos- 
 sible to make out the ' Madlle. C. C In this light 
 it is not difficult to amend Lord Broughton's story. 
 Byron would scarcely trouble himself greatly over 
 Shelley's extravagance, but at this time he had 
 long been estranged from Claire, and was just the 
 man to erase anything that reminded him of a 
 disagreeable and discreditable episode, in which he 
 had played, not merely a loose, but a heartless part. 
 
 That Allegra's mother should have been de- 
 scribed as ' Madlle.' a few months before her child 
 was born may or may not have contributed to the 
 
A Leaf from an Inn Album 77 
 
 deletion. It does not seem to be clear, from any 
 information to be obtained elsewhere, why Clifton 
 should have been written opposite Claire Clair- 
 mont's name. 
 
 Such was Shelley's foolish, bitter jest — bad Greek, 
 and bad taste. It might well have passed un- 
 noticed by the world, but an article in the Quarterly 
 Review (No. xxxvi., Jan. 1818, 'Foliage,' by Leigh 
 Hunt) seems to show that a comment upon it was 
 expected to be intelligible to ordinary readers. 
 After allusion to the audacities of Laon and 
 Cythna, to Shelley's expulsion from Oxford, and 
 to his domestic troubles, the Reviewer proceeds : — 
 
 If we were told of a man, who, placed on a wild rock among the 
 clouds, yet even in that height surrounded by a loftier amphitheatre 
 of spire-like mountains hanging over a valley of eternal ice and snow, 
 where the roar of mighty waterfalls was at times unheeded from 
 the hollow and more appalling thunder of the unseen avalanche — if 
 we were told of a man who then witnessing the sublimest assem- 
 blage of natural objects, should retire to the cabin near and write 
 d^eos after his name in the album, we hope our own feeling would 
 be pity rather than disgust ; but we should think it imbecility to 
 court that man's friendship, or to celebrate his intellect or his heart 
 as the wisest or warmest of the age. 
 
 Shelley's fame has long outlived any possibility 
 of abatement owing to the most high-flown or most 
 excusable reproofs from Quarterly Reviewers and 
 their kind ; and perhaps the wisest course is to read 
 * Mont Blanc,' and to forget all about the Inn 
 Album. Which seems to show that this paper had 
 better not have been written. 
 
XII 
 BYSSHE: A DIALOGUE 
 
 BY JOHN OLIVER HOBBES 
 
 * T LIKE Hamlet,' confessed Bysshe. 'Goethe 
 A and Victor Hugo have tried everything, but 
 Shakespeare has said everything. Humanity, in 
 his plays, is set before us as perfectly and more 
 delightfully than Nature. He eliminates the lie 
 from the fact, whereas Nature is always obliged to 
 give the lie as well. There's a good deal in that 
 old doctrine of Original Sin. Again, in the six- 
 teenth century, that spleeny Luther had not yet 
 jaundiced all the poetry of the world. My comfort 
 is that Shakespeare felt the malady approaching, 
 and broke the magic staff, and drowned the book 
 of inspiration, in time. Prospero's abjuration in 
 The Tempest — (there's a tragedy for you !) — is but a 
 sad farewell to his enthusiasm — to- that wisdom 
 which Socrates possessed till the end, and called 
 a dream, which we would fain possess, and call 
 Romance ! In our days enthusiasm is regarded as 
 the virtue of dupes, and distinguished modern 
 
8o Among My Books 
 
 writers at home and abroad have every literary 
 gift except that essential one — you may call it by 
 another name, if you like — piety.' 
 
 At this point Adolphus Simnel, who had met 
 Flaubert and was not insensible to that distinction, 
 asked : 
 
 ' What has piety to do with literary art ? ' 
 ' This,' replied Bysshe. ' It is impossible for an 
 impious — and therefore selfish — mind to possess 
 that genial humour which is inseparable from a 
 sound judgment, or to understand Irony, which, 
 as you will admit, makes the strength of tragedy, 
 the gaiety of comedy, the pathos of life, and the 
 whole business of metaphysic' 
 
 * Good Lord ! ' ejaculated Adolphus Simnel. 
 
 * You could not call on a better Critic ! ' returned 
 the elderly amateur Bysshe. 'But to resume. 
 Had your infinitely accomplished friend, the late 
 M. Flaubert, enjoyed the grace of piety, he would 
 have been as great a humorist as Cervantes ! 
 Madame Bovary, poor creature, is Don Quixote all 
 over again — with a difference.' 
 
 * This,' said Simnel, * is enormous ! Yet it has 
 something in it to interest the imagination. Pray 
 go on.' 
 
 * I am not an author,' continued Bysshe. ' I am 
 nothing more nor less than an absurd person, yet 
 whenever I read a book I ask myself the question, 
 " How ought one to write of human beings ? In 
 an idealistic way or in a natural way ? " All men 
 are engaged either on this side or that. I think, and 
 
Bysshe: A Dialogue 8i 
 
 I believe I have the world with me here, that the 
 idealist is right. I will explain why. Before one 
 can idealise life one must have triumphed over it. 
 The idealist is the master of his material, whereas 
 the naturalist must ever be its slave. Don Quixote 
 is the man who conquers, because he looks above 
 the baseness of appearances. Madame Bovary is 
 neither man nor woman, but a tortured egoism, 
 perishing horridly of disappointments because the 
 world cannot give that intoxication which — to do 
 it justice — it has never promised. In one case we 
 see the strength of ideals, in the other, the weak- 
 ness of lies. Compare the work of these two men 
 of genius. You will see how much they have in 
 common, yet how differently they bear the trials of 
 existence. The Man has taught us sympathy and 
 courage ; the Temperament has tried to teach us 
 hatred and despair. All sane young people read 
 Cervantes with pleasure, while they recoil from 
 Flaubert in dismay.' 
 
 ' Dear soul,' said Simnel, * Flaubert felt, with an 
 exquisite anguish, the fatuity, the ignorance, the 
 odiousness, the imbecility, the stale immorality, 
 the degradation of the self-satisfied intolerable 
 middle-classes. He was a great artist. He wrote 
 for ten or twelve persons only.' 
 
 'When I think,' said Bysshe, 'that Almighty 
 God was willing to come down from Heaven, and 
 sit anywhere, in order to tell a lot of vulgar people 
 the most perfect little stories in all creation — I 
 refer to the Parables — I own that I cannot tolerate 
 
 F 
 
82 Among My Books 
 
 the gifted beings who can only bring themselves 
 to address a little circle who are not, by-the-bye, 
 especially anxious to be addressed.' 
 
 * Flaubert/ said Adolphus Simnel, ' had a great 
 admiration for the Evangelists, for Cervantes, and, 
 indeed, for most of those old Masters. But, as he 
 remarked so well, they write very badly. I am 
 getting to like them, but it is impossible to take 
 their work, as the bourgeois do, prodigiously au 
 serieux. What do you think, Mrs Carillon ? ' 
 
 'Well, dear Madame Sand was quite, quite 
 different,' replied Mrs Carillon. * She wrote be- 
 cause it was her profession to write. There are 
 ten thousand ways of being impressive. She had 
 but one ; and meditation, to such a sensibility, was 
 useless. She was a great child, without logic and 
 without training, with an incomparable gift of 
 language and a boundless human charity. She 
 could love marionettes and poets, she could stir up 
 revolutions and study botany. She could teach 
 her grandchildren the alphabet, and inform Flau- 
 bert, with her own simplicity, that, after all his 
 pains, she was still his superior in literary style.' 
 
 ' She was, no doubt,' said Bysshe, ' a woman 
 more to be remembered than most, and, beyond 
 question, the finest babbler that the republic of 
 letters has so far produced. But, dear lady, she 
 babbled consummate nonsense, dangerous non- 
 sense, and sometimes the sort of nonsense called 
 inconv enable! 
 
 ' True,' said Mrs Carillon, * yet she was so extra- 
 
Bysshe: A Dialogue 83 
 
 ordinarily kind. She had many passions, but not 
 a single vice. Now I have read every line of 
 Flaubert, not once, but often. The more I read 
 him the less I agree with him, yet I can never 
 leave him without crying. He does not seem a 
 soul in bliss, but a soul in the other state ... or 
 almost. . . . ' The tears I have shed over " Bouvard 
 and P6cuchet " — the tears ! ' 
 
 She moved, as she spoke, to the piano, and, 
 sitting before it, played the first bars of ' Tristan 
 und Isolde.' 
 
 Said Bysshe, * Nevertheless, I like Hamlet ! ' 
 
XIII 
 KEYS TO THE UNIVERSE 
 
 BY VERNON LEE 
 
 OVER one of the outer portals of the Alhambra 
 is engraved, as the traveller will rememberj 
 a large, enigmatic key. I had reason to believe, 
 at one time, that it was the key unlocking the 
 Treasure-house of King Yahya and the subter- 
 ranean palace of his enchanted daughter ; and I 
 even communicated this view, at considerable 
 length, to the readers of the Journal des Debats. 
 But I have waxed mystical, like the rest of us, of 
 late, and so I now think that the key on the horse- 
 shoe portal has nothing to do with treasures or 
 infantas, and is simply a symbolic ' Key to the 
 Universe.' 
 
 In our salad days books are very often * Keys to 
 the Universe ' ; and it is on this pretext that I am 
 allowed to mention the subject of them in these 
 pages. We can all of us remember having thought 
 that the reading of some particular book, or set of 
 books, would act as an Open Sesame admitting us 
 to the terraces and pinnacles of thought whence all 
 things human and divine would be discernible, 
 map-like and clear, at our feet. For some the 
 books have been books on philosophy ; for others, 
 
86 Among My Books 
 
 books on political economy ; for Petrarch, as we 
 know, the book was Homer in Greek, which he 
 kept by him and could not read. For the writer 
 of these lines, I am ashamed to say that the key 
 to the universe resided at one time in a treatise on 
 thorough bass, perhaps owing to an insuperable 
 di^culty in grasping whether progression by fourths 
 was extremely desirable or absolutely forbidden. 
 But whatever the books, I think it is certain that 
 no reader of them ever found that they opened 
 any such door as he expected. Indeed, it seems 
 probable that if books ever do act as keys to the 
 universe, or to the smallest pigeon-hole of the 
 universe, it is probably the books which have not 
 been expected to do anything of the kind, and even 
 those of which we have suspected it only long 
 after. For we have a way of looking, so to speak, 
 for the universe on the wrong side, as we look 
 sometimes, in a shuttered room, for a window on 
 the side where there is only dead wall ; and we do 
 not alwkys recognise the universe when we get a 
 glimpse of it. And yet that was the universe, 
 perhaps the only universe (all the rest vanity and 
 delusion) we shall ever really enter in the spirit, 
 that land of Cockayne into which we were admitted 
 by some line of poetry, some despised boys' book 
 of adventure. 
 
 From which statement it may be gathered that 
 I tend to believe that the only universe we can 
 ever really know is the universe which we know 
 not through processes of induction or deduction, 
 
Keys to the Universe 87 
 
 but through thoroughgoing enjoyment or weary 
 longing or bitter grief. For the universe whose 
 key we each of us seek for is a subjective universe, 
 composed of those elements of our own experience 
 which are nearest akin to ourselves. This is 
 obscure, so I proceed to explain. 
 
 It struck me the other day, at the mention of a 
 well-known firm of solicitors, that, in the eyes of 
 a certain friend of mine, these gentlemen un- 
 doubtedly hold the key to the universe. Un- 
 formulated to himself, my friend feels that what 
 Messrs Blank & Co. know, explains, or might 
 explain, the problems of life which, to his temper 
 of mind, are the most far-reaching, the secret of 
 the world's how and why. To his temper of 
 mind ; but not to the temper of mind of some 
 other person, who may have the same sort of 
 feeling for, say, the nerve-doctor, or the mystic 
 theologian, or the dealer in statistics. Indeed, it 
 is in this exclusively individual quality that lies 
 the interest and utility of these various views ; 
 each individual's key to the universe being in fact 
 a key to his personality. 
 
 But before developing this theme, allow me to 
 open a parenthesis to state that the key to the 
 universe is not by any means the key, necessarily, 
 to any particular thing which we, individually, 
 require to know for practical purposes. In that 
 sense every teacher is perpetually turning a key 
 which is beyond the grasp of his pupil ; and every 
 successful man of business, ojfficial, soldier, sailor, 
 
88 Among My Books 
 
 or candlestick-maker is doing the same, surrounded 
 by hopeless mystery, before the eyes of his un- 
 successful competitors ; let alone (and here the key 
 seems almost a literal reality) the fortunate man or 
 woman of the world, before whom all doors open 
 by unfathomable agency! But such persons are 
 not those who worry about the key to the universe, 
 or about the universe at all. Nay, it is not the 
 key to the universe which is being puzzled about 
 by the fond mother and the humble, unrequited 
 lover, much as they may wonder about the nature 
 of certain keys (and such wonder is surely among 
 the most pathetic things in the world) : * How does 
 that quite uninteresting school friend, that booby 
 with his silly jokes, get to the soul of my boy — 
 the soul which is closed to me ? ' or ' how (alas !) 
 can the frivolous fingers of such a woman turn the 
 locks in my hero's breast?' Those are the keys, 
 not of the universe, but of what concerns us much 
 more closely, the keys of other people's hearts. 
 But 'tis a subject almost too melancholy to touch 
 upon. Besides, it involves one of the chief aspects 
 of the problem of evil, to wit : Why love and 
 confidence are so oddly distributed in the world, 
 and why the people who could are so rarely 
 allowed to help each other along. This comes 
 under the heading of the universe (by which 
 means I close my parenthesis), and the key of the 
 section is held in turns, by Mother Church, by the 
 
 late Schopenhauer, and by . 
 
 The key to the universe has, per se, nothing 
 
Keys to the Universe 89 
 
 necessarily tragic about it. It is interesting, as I 
 remarked, not because it produces dramatic com- 
 motions, but because it is one of the best indications 
 afforded of the most deep down and essential 
 peculiarities of individual character — peculiarities 
 which the uniformities of education usually over- 
 lay, and the accidents of life chaotically jumble. 
 Now the stuff of which an individual character 
 consists, its real inherent spontaneous organic 
 tissue, is, so to speak, a sample of one of the 
 forces of Nature. For, as many as there are such 
 varieties of human stuff, each with its own inevi- 
 table modes of absorbing, rejecting, of decom- 
 posing, and sometimes of exploding — so many 
 (but multiplied by each other) are the contingencies 
 and complications of human existence. Now, in 
 my sense of the word, the key to the universe, con- 
 ceived by A as in the hand of B, is the indication 
 of the real disinterested, irrational (and therefore 
 irresistible) interests, curiosities, and biases of A. 
 Take for instance the persons to whom severally 
 (and with much depreciation of all the others) the 
 key to the universe is in the keeping of Carlyle, 
 or Browning, or Renan, or Ruskin, or Tolstoi, or 
 Ibsen. . . . And thus invoking impartially each 
 and all of these great names, let the present 
 writer withdraw, hazarding the opinion that in 
 literature, as in all else, appreciation, rather than 
 criticism, is one of the chief keys to the universe. 
 
XIV 
 AN ARAB CLASSIC 
 
 BY STANLEY LANE-POOLE 
 
 THE Arabs had a curious and effective 
 manner of reviewing. In the Time of 
 Ignorance, before the advent of the blessed 
 Prophet, the poets of the desert submitted their 
 verses to the judgment of their countrymen assem- 
 bled at the great annual Fair which served as the 
 Olympia of their race. The protagonists of the 
 rival tribes were carefully masked, lest winged 
 words should be followed by less metaphorical 
 arrows, and their poems were impartially recited by 
 a Public Orator. The acclamation of the multi- 
 tude decided the event, and the clan whose poet 
 won the Arabian substitute for the bays immedi- 
 ately indulged in feasting and self-glorification. 
 The discovery of a tribal poet was a source of 
 pride scarcely excelled by the birth of a son to 
 their chief or the foaling of their favourite mare. 
 In Mohammedan times the criticism of authors 
 was conducted in an equally public manner. 
 
92 Among My Books 
 
 When a man had produced something he thought 
 particularly good, he hastened to the Mosque to 
 share it with his critics. He was sure to find them 
 there, doctors learned in the law, poets, commen- 
 tators, seated cross-legged on their carpets in the 
 arched porticos round the court, expounding the 
 refinements of style to a circle of squatting 
 students. To this audience he would recite his 
 latest achievement, proud but tremulous. It must 
 have been a searching ordeal, for the listeners 
 were some of them rivals, and all of them keen 
 critics, on the alert for the least flaw, the slightest 
 halt in the rhythm, the smallest lapse from the 
 purity of the classical idiom. They had, too, a 
 way of expressing their opinions which was more 
 forcible than kind. There was a hot debate, much 
 citing of precedents and quoting of the Masters, 
 exploring of memory, and examination of texts. 
 The new comer defended his diction and produced 
 his authorities ; the rest cut him up in remorseless 
 verbal vivisection. It was Athanasius contra mun- 
 duin^ and the extraordinary thing is, not that 
 Athanasius survived and went on writing, but that 
 he sometimes profited by the heckling of his 
 critics, was actually convinced of his sins, and 
 amended his ways ; which, as an experienced re- 
 viewer will perceive, is absurd. 
 
 It is true, nevertheless ; and an authentic ex- 
 ample lies before me, in the book called ' The 
 Assemblies of Hariri.' Humiliating as it is, I 
 am aware that I shall be instantly confronted 
 
An Arab Classic 93 
 
 with the question, Who or what was Hariri? 
 Was it a town, or a man, or a tribe, or a cult? 
 I can only reply that an Oriental gentleman with 
 any pretence to polite scholarship would as soon 
 confess his ignorance of Hariri as an English 
 gentleman fifty years ago would have admitted 
 that he could not quote Horace. Both these 
 ideals are passing away, yet to the educated Arab 
 the ' Assemblies ' are still the sum and perfection 
 of literary form, and even Europeans have fallen 
 under their spell. Ruckert imitated them with 
 poetic ingenuity in German ; and the late Professor 
 Dieterici would sometimes wander into a friend's 
 room in a vague ecstasy and explain that he had 
 been * meandering in the delicious mazes of the 
 flowery gardens of Hariri.' For nearly eight cen- 
 turies his * Makdmdt ' have been regarded (to cite a 
 scarcely less fervent disciple, the late Mr Chenery) 
 as, ' next to the Koran, the chief treasure of the 
 Arabic tongue. Contemporaries and posterity have 
 vied in their praises of him. His " Assemblies " 
 have been commented with infinite learning and 
 labour in Andalusia and on the banks of the 
 Oxus. His poetry has been sung at the feasts of 
 the great, and by the camel drivers in the desert. 
 To appreciate his marvellous eloquence, to fathom 
 his profound learning, to understand his varied and 
 endless allusions have always been the highest 
 object of the literary, wherever the Arabic lan- 
 guage has been scientifically studied.' The extra- 
 ordinary difficulties and refinements of his style 
 
94 Among My Books 
 
 have made its skilful translation, as it were, the 
 philosopher's stone of Orientalists, and Mr Chenery's 
 version, with its exhaustive commentary, is among 
 the many services which that admirable scholar 
 unobtrusively rendered to learning. 
 
 El-Hariri belonged to the critical, artificial, 
 imitative period of Arabic literature. The time 
 of Creation was past, when the early desert poets 
 composed those ' Golden ' Odes and * Linked ' 
 Kasidas, which tradition long believed were sus- 
 pended, to their eternal glory, on the walls of 
 the holy Kaaba at Mecca. The age of Recollec- 
 tion had followed, when to recite the classic verse 
 was esteemed better than to compose anything 
 new, and when Hammad exerted his prodigious 
 memory by declaiming at a sitting two thousand 
 nine hundred poems, a hundred rhyming with 
 each of the twenty-nine letters of the alphabet, 
 till the Caliph Welid was prostrated with listening 
 to them. It became the ambition of the man of 
 letters to model his style closely upon classical 
 examples ; to treasure up rare phrases, peculiar 
 grammatical constructions, recondite allusions, 
 curious metaphors ; to play upon the sounds and 
 meanings of words, and to test the wits of his 
 hearers by the obscurity of the double entente. 
 Artificial as such compositions must be, they have 
 had their fascination in most literatures, especially 
 for the nicest scholars, whose critical taste and 
 learned apparatus found free play in such conceits. 
 Hariri was of this sort — a man of immense literary 
 
An Arab Classic 95 
 
 resources, remarkable critical powers, yet of narrow 
 intellectual vision. ' He spied out defects with the 
 microscopic eye of an insect, but the merits which 
 he prized were nice and contracted also.' 
 
 His birthplace encouraged his intellectual tem- 
 perament. He was born of Arab stock at Basra in 
 1055, and died there in 1122. He celebrates his 
 native city as the place where 'the ship and the 
 camel meet, the seafish and the lizard.' But 
 besides being the chief Mesopotamian mart for 
 the commerce between east and west, Basra was 
 the home of literary subtlety ; where, more than 
 anywhere else under the Caliphate, there was 
 everlasting 'grinding at grammar,' making of 
 anagrams, devising of conceits, and all manner 
 of poetastrical pedantry. When one of its most 
 famous scholars lay dying, his friends gathered 
 round to catch his last wishes ; but the learned 
 Sibawaih could only gasp out, 'There is some- 
 thing on my mind concerning the particle hatta ! ' 
 — One thinks of him who 
 
 Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic 3e, 
 Dead from the waist down. 
 
 Bred up in this straitest sect of the grammarians, 
 Hariri's undoubted genius for style was polished to 
 its finest edge, and his learning was widened to the 
 bounds of the scholarly horizon. His greatest 
 work, the ' Assemblies,' is indeed (as Dr Steingass 
 has well observed) an encyclopaedia of the scholar- 
 ship of his time and race, set forth in language 
 
g6 Among My Books 
 
 saturated with the idioms of the classical poets, the 
 Koran, and the proverbs of the desert. It is this 
 which makes it so valuable a text-book for the 
 student of Arabic. Here he will find poetry, his- 
 tory, antiquities, theology, law ; he will be intro- 
 duced to every branch of Mohammedan learning ; 
 whilst for niceties of grammar, rhetoric, and lexi- 
 cology he could have no surer guide. Dr Steingass 
 has conferred a great benefit on students by the 
 publication of a convenient text of the * Assemblies 
 of Hariri ' elucidated by very necessary notes, based 
 upon the labours of Sacy and Chenery, whose trans- 
 lation he has also completed. 
 
 It is difficult, no doubt, for most Westerns to 
 appreciate the beauties of this celebrated classic. 
 There is no cohesion, no connecting idea, between 
 the fifty separate * Assemblies,' beyond the regular 
 re-appearance of an egregious Tartufe, called Abu- 
 Zeyd, a Bohemian of brilliant parts and absolutely 
 no conscience, who consistently extracts alms from 
 assemblies of people in various cities, by preaching 
 eloquent discourses of the highest piety and moral- 
 ity, and then goes off with his spoils to indulge 
 secretly in triumphant and unhallowed revels. 
 Preston has summed up the intellectual character 
 of this fascinating hero of the ' Assemblies ' : — 
 ' Eloquent and erratic, like the hero of the Odyssey, 
 roaming from place to place with no means of sup- 
 port except his marvellous powers of language, nor 
 any object except the display of them, restless if 
 without an opportunity of exerting them, but care- 
 
An Arab Classic 97 
 
 less from the very confidence of success about em- 
 ploying them in a settled direction, devoting them 
 sometimes to the noblest and sometimes to the 
 meanest purposes, yet never losing sight of the 
 dignity of their possession, but applying them to 
 foil the learned, to cajole the simple, to baffle the 
 powerful, and to defraud the humane.' 
 
 Even in this framework there is no attempt at 
 originality ; it is borrowed from Hamadhani, the 
 * Wonder of the Age.' The excellence lies in the 
 perfect finish : the matter is nothing ; the charm 
 consists in the form alone. Yet this form is, to 
 English readers, exotic and artificial. Among its 
 special merits, in the eyes of Easterns, is the per- 
 petual employment of rhymed prose. To us this 
 is apt to seem at once monotonous and strained, 
 with its antithetic balance in sense, and jingle of 
 sound ; but to the Arabs, as to many primitive 
 peoples, either rhyming or assonant prose was 
 from early times a natural mode of impassioned 
 and impressive speech. It is the mode adopted 
 constantly and without strain in the Koran, and 
 it is the mode into which an historian, such as 
 Ibn-el-Athir, falls naturally when he waxes elo- 
 quent over a great victory or a famous deed. The 
 Arabic language, with its mathematical regularity 
 of structure and resulting assonances, lends itself 
 easily to this art of expression, and what to us 
 seems laboured and affected was undoubtedly pro- 
 duced without effort by the writer ; indeed, it is 
 the commonest thing to hear the weekly sermon 
 
 G 
 
98 Among My Books 
 
 in the mosque delivered ex tempore in rhyming 
 prose. 
 
 But if we do not care for rhymed prose, there 
 is plenty besides in Hariri to minister to varied 
 tastes. In these wonderful ' Assemblies ' we shall 
 find every kind of literary form, except the sham- 
 bling and the vulgar. Pagan rhetoric, Muslim 
 exhortation, simple verse, elaborate ode, everything 
 that the immeasurable flexibility of the Arabic 
 tongue and the curious art of a fastidious scholar 
 could achieve — all is here, and we may take our 
 choice. But the strangest thing about Hariri was 
 his profession. The greatest master of Arabic 
 style in the Middle Ages was a Sdhib al-Khabar. 
 Now S^hib al-Khabar, being freely interpreted, 
 means — our own correspondent ! 
 
XV . 
 
 UNCONSCIOUS MAGIC 
 
 BY ARTHUR MACHEN 
 
 THE facsimile page of Lord Tennyson's 
 handwriting in the second volume of the 
 * Memoir ' gives us some curious information as to 
 the symbolism of the * Idylls/ By the ' Round 
 Table,' it seems, we are to understand ' Liberal 
 Institutions,' and it must be confessed that to some 
 of us the interpretation is not a little terrifying. 
 No doubt the poet would not have had us take his 
 words in their strictly literal sense ; we are not for 
 the future to read into his lines references to Equal 
 Electoral Districts, Payment of Members and the 
 County Council, but from the high and mystic 
 order of the Round Table to * Liberal Institutions ' 
 in their mildest form there is surely a frightful and 
 abominable descent. I may admit at once that 
 Tennyson never meant us to associate a * Program ' 
 of any kind with Lancelot ; that we are free to 
 enjoy the session of the holy knights without a 
 thought of Local Veto ; and yet, when every allow- 
 
loo Among My Books 
 
 ance has been made, those of us who had dreamed 
 of something ineffable beneath the sacrament of 
 the words are left chilled and desolate by the poet's 
 explanation. We will give the most favourable 
 gloss to the phrase, and confess how good and 
 joyful a thing it is that brethren should dwell to- 
 gether in unity, under equal laws, ruled by noble 
 kings, while freedom broadens slowly down from 
 precedent to precedent ; but still, I, for one, must 
 say at the last that I have lost my earlier heaven. 
 Wordsworth could be prosaic, even to absolute 
 bathos, but he never paraphrased 'heaven lies 
 about us in our infancy ' by * wholesome maternal 
 influences surround us in our childhood.' Let us 
 make the distinction once for all ; the important 
 things of life are to the poets foolishness ; freedom, 
 justice, equal laws, all that lights the cheerful glow 
 of our household fires, are but dead ashes when we 
 look through the magic casements and behold the 
 knights arrayed, and the glory streaming from the 
 Vessel of the Grail. We do not wish to be told 
 then that the Magic Bark symbolises increased 
 facilities of locomotion. Clearly, if Tennyson knew 
 what he meant we are betrayed and undone ; while 
 we thought the poet had been chanting to us of 
 certain awful and hidden things, he has really 
 been expounding the principles of an amiable 
 Whiggery ; the enchanted towers of Carbonek 
 shrivel up into a Mechanics' Institute. 
 
 But did Tennyson know what he meant ? The 
 question sounds an impertinence, but it must be 
 
Unconscious Magic ; loi 
 
 asked quite seriously not only of Tennyson, but of 
 many other great writers. Perhaps if we could 
 have examined Cervantes and asked him the true 
 significance of the ' Don Quixote/ he would have 
 told us in all sobriety that it was nothing more than 
 a satire on the foolish books of Knight-errantry 
 then in fashion. It seems highly probable that 
 he would have made some such answer ; through- 
 out his book he insists that his object was merely 
 to reform a current perversity of literary taste. 
 And Rabelais too — he would not have hesitated, 
 we may be sure, if one could have taken him apart 
 and inquired into the meaning of his magic- 
 lantern visions, as Coleridge calls them. He would 
 have remembered the evil days in the convent of 
 Fontenay-le-Comte, the ignorance, the bigotry, the 
 brutality of the Greyfriars, and no doubt he would 
 have replied that in * Gargantua ' and * Pantagruel ' 
 he had wished to express his hatred of * clericalism ' 
 and monks and monastic rules. Sterne set out on 
 
 * Tristram Shandy ' with the idea of laughing at 
 some local enemies ; Dickens tells how he began 
 
 * Pickwick ' in order that Seymour might have a 
 text for his pictures of Cockney sportsmen, how he 
 continued it so that bribery and corruption at 
 elections, unscrupulous attorneys, and Fleet Prison 
 should be no more. Hawthorne was in a way a 
 conscious mystic, but it is doubtful whether he 
 realised how small a part is borne by the moral 
 tragedy in the grand achievement of the * Scarlet 
 Letter.' 
 
;io-2 Among My Books 
 
 Did they know what they meant ? I will return 
 to my first example of the late poet laureate with 
 his ' Liberal Institutions,' and so far as he and his 
 symbolism are concerned, I answer ' No ' at once, 
 and without hesitation. It is true that we cannot 
 say in words what we seek as we go down to 
 Camelot, we know not how it may be when the 
 trumpet sounds and the Knights of the Round 
 Table are gathered together, we bow in silence at 
 the Elevation of the Grail. It does not yet appear 
 what these things signify. But we do know that 
 while we read the ' Idylls' our attitude of mind 
 is wholly mystical, that our hearts lie stilled under 
 enchantment, that we are never troubled by the 
 thought of any * institutions,' however valuable such 
 things may be in themselves. To us, indeed, it 
 must seem astounding that Tennyson should 
 resolve our doubts in such a manner, but our 
 amazement would perhaps be less if we could have 
 breathed the atmosphere of the 'thirties with the 
 poet. Then, as in the early time of Wordsworth 
 and Coleridge, as through all the days of Shelley, 
 * poetical' and 'political' seemed almost synony- 
 mous adjectives, and Mr Snodgrass, the * great 
 poet,' spoke quite in character when he alluded to 
 the Revolution of July as 'that glorious scene.' 
 They thought highly of ' Freedom ' in those days, 
 not quite knowing what they meant, not at all 
 understanding that the word usually stands for 
 jobbery and corruption of the most offensive sort, 
 and perhaps the mistiness of the conception made 
 
Unconscious Magic 103 
 
 it glamorous and poetical. I am thankful that 
 Keats did not explain his poetry. Perhaps if he 
 had done so he would have told us that by ' faery 
 lands forlorn' he meant to signify the countries 
 oppressed by the Holy Alliance and the Roman 
 Pontiff. 
 
 And perhaps the case becomes stronger if I 
 leave Tennyson and pass to others. For though 
 we have the unimpeachable evidence of the poet's 
 handwriting as to the fact of his interpretation, 
 yet I, at all events, cannot quite believe that the 
 Parliamentary ideal was in his mind as he wrote 
 the great lines of the * Idylls.' It was probably an 
 afterthought, or perhaps a forethought, but not the 
 palmary thought of the creative moment. With 
 Cervantes, however, it is different. Again and 
 again he interrupts the splendid passage of his 
 knight to assure the reader that he means no more 
 than a little satire — that his only object is to write 
 down those tedious romances of chivalry. In 
 literature all things are conjectural, but, if any- 
 thing is certain, one may be sure that Cervantes 
 meant ' Don Quixote ' to be a burlesque on Amadis 
 and Belianis, and the rest of them ; he intended the 
 best book in profane letters to be a ' skit,' as we 
 should call it. It will be hardly necessary to show 
 at length how much more the author accomplished, 
 how utterly nonsensical is the line about laughing 
 Spain's chivalry away. To me it seems that 
 Cervantes distilled as into a quintessence all the 
 marvel and wonder and awe of chivalry ; that even 
 
104 Among My Books 
 
 the ' Morte d' Arthur ' is contained in ' Don Quixote' 
 as the less in the greater ; that this masterpiece is 
 one of those books written within and without. To 
 the gross eye, to the formal understanding, it is a 
 witty history of comic misadventure, but the elect 
 listen through its golden pages to the winding of 
 King Arthur's magic horn, to the chant of the 
 choir that guards the Grail. 
 
 My original question was, perhaps, too harshly 
 framed ; I will not ask * Did they know what they 
 meant ? ' but rather inquire as to how far the fine 
 and rare effects of literature were consciously de- 
 vised and produced. As has been stated, there 
 cannot be much doubt as to the intention of 
 Rabelais in inventing his extraordinary book. He 
 willed to run a tilt at things in general — to please 
 the vulgar with vulgar words and obscene tales — 
 but, above all, to render the Church and the monks 
 hateful and contemptible. And how little this 
 counts with the enlightened Rabelaisian of to-day. 
 It is true that the baser bookseller catalogues the 
 volume with * Maria Monk ' and ' Fast Life in 
 Paris'; it is true that the more inept critics are not 
 resolved whether Brother John be a ' type of the 
 Christian Soldier ' or * a good man spoiled by the 
 monastic discipline ' ; whether Panurge be the 
 * careful portrait of a man without a soul,' or 
 merely a personification of the Renaissance. 
 But the initiated heed nothing of all this. They 
 see the Tourainian sun shine on the hot rock 
 above Chinon, on the maze of narrow mount- 
 
Unconscious Magic 105 
 
 ing streets, on the high-pitched roofs, on the 
 grey-blue tourelles pricking upwards from the 
 fantastic labyrinth of walls. There is the sound of 
 sonorous plainsong from the monastic choir, of 
 gross exuberant gaiety from the vineyards by the 
 river; one listens to the eternal mystic mirth of 
 them that rest in the purple shadow by the white, 
 climbing road. The gracious and ornate chateaux 
 on the Loire and the Vienne rise fair and shining 
 to confront the incredible secrets of dim, far lifted 
 Gothic naves, that seem ready to take the great 
 deep and float away from the mist and dust of 
 earthly towns to anchor in the haven of the clear 
 city that hath foundations ; the rank tale of the 
 garderobe, of the farm kitchen, mingles with the 
 reasoned, endless legend of the Schools, with 
 luminous Platonic argument, with the spring of a 
 fresh life. There is a smell of wine and of incense, 
 of flowers and of ancient books ; and through it all 
 there is the exultation of chiming bells ringing for 
 a new feast in a new land. For my part, I care 
 very little whether Rabelais has overdrawn the 
 depravity of the monastic orders, or whether 
 Brother John was indeed spoiled by cloistral 
 discipline. 
 
 We may go far afield and search the most distant 
 ages and authors grotesquely unlike to one another, 
 and yet we shall come to the same conclusion, 
 that the casket alone was designed, that the jewel 
 slipped in unawares. From the England of the 
 Middle Ages to the New England of the Uni- 
 
io6 Among My Books 
 
 tarians there is a far way. But Chaucer desired to 
 tell amusing and gallant tales, not thinking at all 
 of the great and gorgeous tapestry that his rich 
 words were weaving, of the full descant to which 
 one sets every line he wrote. And Hawthorne, 
 though a more conscious artist, scarcely understood 
 that his puritan village tragedy but glimmers in 
 the light of Sabbath fires, in the red air of super- 
 natural suggestion which he wrought around it ; 
 the figure is hardly discernible in the midst of its 
 radiant and terrible aureole. I have pointed out 
 how Dickens began a common task, and at the end 
 of it congratulated himself and his readers on 
 the gradual reformation of the abuses which he had 
 attacked ; but I cannot discover in any part that 
 Dickens realised how in * Pickwick ' he had written 
 perhaps the last romance of the picaro that the 
 world will ever see, that he had closed a great 
 canon of literature. In ' Pickwick,' though the 
 author understood nothing of it, we follow our hero 
 into the unknown, with the wonder and charm and 
 the laughter, though not with the awe, with which 
 we followed * Don Quixote ' as he rode towards the 
 enchanted land of his desire, we relish probably for 
 the last time the joy of the winding of the lane, the 
 thought of what lies beyond the wood and the hill, 
 the surmise of the company that will gather in the 
 ancient galleried inn. And Dickens, reviewing his 
 book, parleys with us of the license of Counsel, of 
 Poor Laws — prophesies the School Board even ! 
 Literature is full of secrets, but perhaps it offers 
 
Unconscious Magic 107 
 
 no stranger matter for our consideration than 
 melodies unheard by those that made them, than 
 Siren songs that never came to the Sirens' ears. 
 The magicians have murmured strong spells and 
 most powerful evocations, but like the Coptic 
 priests, they have hardly or not at all understood 
 the words of might. 
 
XVI 
 REMINISCENCES OF ^ LEWIS CARROLL' 
 
 BY LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHE 
 
 THE obituary notices of the man of genius 
 who is best known as the literary father 
 of the Alices have agreed in calling attention to 
 one great peculiarity which marked him. His 
 mind had a twofold activity. He might be 
 described — of course mutatis mutandis et minutis 
 minuendis — as made up of ^sop and Euclid fused 
 together, somewhat as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 
 were fused together. To speak more precisely : 
 as a mathematician, he did his work well ; as a 
 romancist, admirably. The intellectual athlete who 
 kept his balance on the rugged and bewildering 
 heights of Conic Sections and Determinants could 
 freely disport himself in what I would call a waking- 
 dreamland^ a land whose phantasmagoria 
 
 Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax 
 And cabbages and kings 
 
 was interspersed with such veritable lusus simper- 
 
no Among My Books 
 
 naturalitatis as pedestrian Oysters and plaintive 
 Mockturtles. So that haply he might (in a novel 
 sense) have taken for his motto : Valet ima suinmis 
 Mutare. But the point to note is that his intellect, 
 vigorous and versatile on these oddly remote and 
 dissimilar levels, was unwieldy on intermediate 
 levels. He could soar and dive far better than he 
 could walk. This may partly account for his un- 
 readiness in conversation. Not, indeed, that he 
 was unable at times to talk brilliantly. With his 
 ready command of homely and witty illustrations, 
 he could hardly fail to achieve this. Indeed, I 
 have obtained distinct testimony on the point from 
 one of his intimate friends, who writes : 
 
 * Of his brilliancy there can be no manner of doubt ; 
 but it was at the same time very difficult to define or 
 focus. You ask me for some of his brilliant flashes. I 
 am quite unable to give you any. All he said, all his 
 oddities and clever things, arose out of the conversa- 
 tion — conversation quite of an ordinary everyday sort ; 
 to explain it at all you would want shorthand notes of 
 everything that was said, and even then you would 
 not follow it, unless you knew the people who were 
 talking, the peculiarities of this man, and the deafness 
 of that, and so on. It was just Alice, all kinds of 
 queer terms given to things. You never knew where 
 he would take you next; and all the while there 
 seemed to be an odd logical sequence, almost impell- 
 ing your assent to most unexpected conclusions. He 
 had a great fund of stories ; these again were never 
 told independently, they were fished up from his 
 stores by some line dropped down in ordinary talk. 
 
Reminiscences of ' Lewis Carroll ' 1 1 1 
 
 He always said he never invented them (and my own 
 impression is that he did not), but that they had been 
 read somewhere or told him by someone. He never 
 told stories against people, was never bitter or cruel, 
 never attempted to *' score " off others ! ' * 
 
 But, though sometimes a brilliant, Dodgson was 
 not a steady, or what may be termed a safe talker. 
 He could not be relied on to bear his part in the 
 give-and-take of serious conversation ; and (so to 
 say) to keep the shuttlecock flying at neither more 
 nor less than the convenient height. Indeed, the 
 greatest praise which his most partial friends could 
 claim for him as a talker would be that which 
 Wellington bestowed on Talleyrand, namely, that 
 he was generally dull, but now and then said 
 things which his hearers would never forget. Thus, 
 then, we may conclude that he had no eye for the 
 
 * It may be instructive to contrast the view of Dodgson's con- 
 versational powers which finds expression in this interesting letter 
 with the view taken by another of his friends, a man of science. 
 The latter tells me that, to his thinking, Dodgson was not a brilliant 
 talker ; he was too peculiar and paradoxical ; and the topics on 
 which he loved to dwell were such as would bore many persons ; 
 while, on the other hand, when he himself was not interested, he 
 occasionally stopped the flow of a serious discussion by the intrusion 
 of a disconcerting epigram. At first 1 was taken aback by this 
 glaring discrepancy of opinion. But on second thoughts I am 
 tempted, though with the utmost diffidence, to suggest a partial ex- 
 planation. Let me state, then, that the correspondent from whom I 
 have quoted is orthodox, whereas my scientific friend inclines 
 towards modern views. Now, I suspect that Dodgson's pleasantry, 
 however seemingly extravagant, had a method in it, and that, even 
 if none of his paradoxes had (like those of Mansel) a more or less 
 clearly-defined theological purpose, at anyrate his wit would play 
 with the greatest ease and effect among orthodox and sympathetic 
 listeners. Nor is it likely that among such listeners his sallies 
 would be rated at less than their full value. As a general rule, 
 orthodoxy combined with brilliancy is like glycerine combined with 
 vaccine — it enables a little of it to go a very long way ! 
 
1 1 2 Among My Books 
 
 middle-distance of the intellectual landscape. The 
 lower generalisations of philosophy and the higher 
 generalisations of daily experience, which together 
 form the common ground where men of parts and 
 men without parts can freely meet and converse — 
 these axiomata media of discourse were almost a 
 sealed, were (let us say) an uncut^ book to our 
 mathematical romancist. 
 
 He was, indeed, addicted to mathematical and 
 sometimes to ethical paradoxes. The following 
 specimen was propounded by him in my presence. 
 Suppose that I toss up a coin on the condition 
 that, if I throw heads once, I am to receive aid; 
 if twice in succession, an additional dole of 2d ; 
 if thrice, a further addition of 4d ; and so on, 
 doubling for each successful toss : what is the value 
 of my prospects? The amazing reply is that it 
 amounts to infinity ; for, as the profit attached to 
 each successful toss increases in exact proportion 
 as the chance of success diminishes, the value (so 
 to say) of each toss will be identical, being in fact 
 a Jd ; so that the value of an infinite number of 
 tosses is an infinite number of half-pence. Yet, in 
 fact, would any one give me sixpence for my 
 prospect? This, concluded Dodgson, shows how 
 far our conduct is from being determined by logic. 
 The only comment that I will offer on his astound- 
 ing paradox is that, in order to bring out his result, 
 we must suppose a somewhat monotonous eternity 
 to be consumed in the tossing process. 
 
 He told me of a simple, too simple, rule by 
 
Reminiscences of ' Lewis Carroll * 113 
 
 which, he thought, one could be almost sure of 
 making something at a horse-race. He had on 
 various occasions noted down the fractions which 
 represented the supposed chances of the competing 
 horses, and had observed that the sum of those 
 chances amounted to more than unity. Hence he 
 inferred that, even in the case of such hard-headed 
 men as the backers, the wish is often father to the 
 thought ; so that they are apt to overrate the 
 chances of their favourites. His plan, therefore, 
 was — Bet against all the horses, keeping your own 
 stake the same in each case. He did not pretend 
 to know much about horse-racing, and I probably 
 know even less ; but I understand that it would be 
 impossible to adjust the * hedging' with sufficient 
 exactitude — in fact, to get bets of the right amount 
 taken by the backers. 
 
 Two other 'dodges' of his may be mentioned 
 here. He said that, if a dull writer sent you a copy 
 of his books, you should at once write and thank 
 him, and should add, with delphic ambiguity, 
 that you will lose no time in perusing them ! Being 
 a strict moralist, he must assuredly have meant so 
 palpable an equivocation to be regarded as a mere 
 jeu d'esprit. He was doubtless more serious in 
 asserting that, whenever a mother held up an 
 uncomely infant for his inspection, he met her wist- 
 ful gaze with the exclamation, * He is a baby ! ' 
 Might not Falconbridge have condoned such an 
 evasion in extremis as being, at worst, * a virtuous 
 sin ' ? To be frank would be a mortal offence ; and 
 
 H 
 
114 Among My Books 
 
 to avert such a mishap, one might be tempted to 
 invoke a principle which assuredly could not be 
 extended to all cases — ' Salus amiciticBy s uprema 
 lex.' Better this than to set up the more widely 
 applicable and therefore more abusable plea — * De 
 minimis non curat moralitas' 
 
 Dodgson had an ingenious memoria technica to 
 impress and illustrate Harmonic Progression. Ac- 
 cording to him, it is (or was) the rule at Christ 
 Church that, if an undergraduate is absent for a 
 night during term-time without leave, he is for the 
 first offence sent down for a term ; if he commits 
 the offence a second time, he is sent down for two 
 terms ; if a third time, Christ Church knows him 
 no more. This last calamity Dodgson designated 
 as ' infinite.' Here, then, the three degrees of 
 punishment may be reckoned as i, 2, infinity. 
 These three figures represent three terms in an 
 ascending series of Harmonic Progression, being 
 the counterparts of i, |, o, which are three terms in 
 a descending Arithmetical Progression. 
 
 After the foregoing manifestations of the riddling 
 spirit which possessed this (ttoikiXmSo^) Oxonian 
 Sphinx, we are not surprised to learn that, though 
 he generally delighted children, he has been known 
 to bore them with arithmetical puzzles. Also, his 
 favourites sometimes complained that his interest 
 in them passed away with their childhood. He 
 related to me a quaint incident, which is said to be 
 highly characteristic of him. He mentioned that 
 he took no great interest in little boys, and that 
 
Reminiscences of * Lewis Carroll ' 115 
 
 once, on receiving a letter from a child with a 
 hermaphrodite name, either Sydney or Evelyn, he 
 supposed the writer to be a boy, and answered 
 somewhat curtly. Learning afterwards that his 
 small correspondent was a girl, he made his peace 
 by writing to her with great cordiality and with a 
 mock-serious playfulness. His letter contained an 
 injunction to the following effect : — ' If you see 
 Nobody coming into the room, please give him a 
 kiss from me.' Was he prompted thus to personify 
 Nobody by the recollection of a famous scene in 
 the ' Odyssey ' ? At all events, being sorely per- 
 plexed as to the manner of bestowing a ghostly 
 embrace on visible and incarnate nothingness, the 
 poor child naively acknowledged her embarrass- 
 ment in a letter which she wrote to her enigmatical 
 monitor, and which he kindly read aloud to me. 
 
 He spoke of the difficulties which he had to 
 encounter before his ' Alice ' could make her ap- 
 pearance on the stage. Especially he dwelt on the 
 corrections which were needed in ' The Walrus and 
 the Carpenter.' His intention had been that this 
 farcical interlude should be represented in its 
 original form. But he discovered that the tranquil 
 massacre of the oysters was a catastrophe too tame 
 for dramatic effect. Thereupon he conceived the 
 happy thought of making the ghosts of the victims 
 jump on the sleeping forms of their assassins, and 
 give them bad dreams. With pardonable — or 
 rather with amiable — vanity he informed me that 
 the spirit shown by the defunct oysters in inflicting 
 
1 1 6 Among My Books 
 
 this (somewhat mild) retaliation drew loud applause 
 from the spedtators. 
 
 Owing to the immense popularity of this fable 
 without a moral, or with a queer moral (for, in very- 
 truth, the loquacious and companionable oysters 
 are more like children bewitched into the shape of 
 oysters), I am tempted to make, or rather repeat, a 
 minute criticism upon it. Referring to the form in 
 which it was originally written, I asked its author 
 about its concluding stanza, and especially about 
 the line — ' Shall we be trotting home again ? ' The 
 humorous fatuity of this line, addressed as it is to 
 the eaten oysters, would assuredly tally far better 
 with the unctuous and gratuitous wheedling of the 
 Walrus than with the commonplace bluntness of 
 the Carpenter ; why, then, is it put into the Car- 
 penter's mouth ? Dodgson frankly owned that the 
 objection had never occurred to him. He said 
 something about the number of syllables in the 
 first line of the stanza, but he presently remarked 
 that this line might be written, ' O Oysters dear, 
 the Walrus said.' On the whole, he left on my 
 mind the impression that, if he had woven anew 
 the quaintly and brilliantly variegated threads of 
 the threefold wondertale of Alice (Tergeminam 
 Aliciam^ tria virginis or a creavit), this trifling 
 blemish in its best-remembered and oftenest-quoted 
 episode would possibly have been removed. Si 
 nulla est, tauten excute 7iullam. 
 
 My sketch of ' Lewis Carroll ' would be incom- 
 plete if I made no mention of his solicitude to avoid 
 
Reminiscences of ' Lewis Carroll ^ 117 
 
 every form of pleasantry which could possibly give 
 offence. Everybody remembers the triumphant 
 conclusion of ' Alice in the Looking-Glass.' After 
 not a few singular adventures, the heroine crosses a 
 fateful stream ; whereupon a crown is set on her 
 head ; and, entering a stately mansion, she is wel- 
 comed with the rejoicings of her friends, rejoicings 
 which are in no wise lessened by the infliction of a 
 sudden and severe, if not capricious, punishment on 
 a member of the opposite party. All this, ever since 
 my first perusal of the book, has reminded me of 
 the closing scene of that favourite of my boyhood, 
 * The Pilgrim's Progress.' I mentioned this associa- 
 tion of ideas to Dodgson ; and I let him divine my 
 curiosity to know whether the coincidence was un- 
 designed. He took the matter more seriously than 
 I had expected. With evident annoyance, he 
 assured me that the thought of imitating Bunyan 
 had never occurred to him ; such trespassing on 
 sacred ground would have seemed to him highly 
 irreverent ; and, sooner than be guilty of that 
 irreverence, he would have re-written this portion 
 of the book. At the same time, he acknowledged 
 that he had nearly been betrayed into an oversight 
 which he would have regretted exceedingly. Mill 
 was once provoked into saying that a certain wise 
 man was remarkable, not only for seeing what 
 ordinary men could not see, but also for not see- 
 ing what they could see. It was with a some- 
 what similar sense of anomaly and incongruity 
 that I learnt that, without the least suspicion of 
 
ii8 Among My Books 
 
 profanity, such an accomplished man as Dodgson 
 had, in the first draft of * Alice in Wonderland,' 
 made the passion-flower do duty for a flower in a 
 passion. Fortunately he showed the manuscript to 
 a lady friend, who informed or reminded him of the 
 sacred source from which that flower derives its 
 name. The correction was at once made ; and the 
 passion-flower yielded its place to the tiger-lily. 
 
XVII 
 A SECOND COLLOQUY ON CRITICISM 
 
 BY AUGUSTINE BIRRELL 
 
 IN an earlier number of this Review I remarked 
 on the fact that acquaintance with authors 
 dulls the edge of criticism. Since then I have 
 noticed an apparent unwillingness on the part of 
 critics to admit this ; but surely to deny it is to fly 
 in the face of human nature. You cannot impale 
 a friend upon your hook as if you loved him ; 
 wriggle the silly fellow will until the mildest- 
 mannered critic finds himself using the language 
 of the fishwife, famous in story, who was over- 
 heard cursing the eels she was skinning alive for 
 not lying still. Lordly editors may declare them- 
 selves able to select from their huge roll-call of 
 critics ' kinless loons ' who, like the Prince Regent, 
 * have no predilections,' but one critic is not always 
 so good as another. 
 
 So important a thing is a free hand that young 
 men, with all their rashness and crudity, are not 
 infrequently the best critics of contemporary books, 
 
I20 Among My Books 
 
 for, knowing hardly * anybody,' and with their way 
 in the world still to make, they are alike ruthless 
 and unembarrassed, and consequently delightfully 
 well able, with their whoops and cries, to flutter the 
 dove-cotes where, drooping a little over their perches, 
 sit sunning themselves the crop-full authors. But 
 the sad years that bring the philosophic mind 
 bring other things as well, and amongst them a 
 hatred of strife and contention, of scowling faces 
 and averted glances. 
 
 * Saint Praxed's ever was the church for peace.' 
 Why should I strike even the Hospitaller's shield ? 
 What need to revile my neighbour simply because 
 he has written a novel that makes me creep all 
 down my back. He will not leave off writing be- 
 cause of my back, but I (how easily) can leave off 
 reading my neighbour, and thus in time may learn 
 to love him. Yes, but what is to become of my 
 critical faculties ? Are they to find no expression ? 
 
 To ignore the living altogether, and with the 
 poet Southey (but was Southey a poet ?) to spend 
 your critical hours among the dead, is a way out of 
 the difficulty, and a very pleasant way too, and one 
 full of peace and safety. Pope cannot lampoon 
 you, or Milton call you a dog with two g's. I have 
 never cared to deny that I like authors best when 
 they are dead. 
 
 Philosopher and Poet you shall find 
 
 Each ever after his own kind. 
 
 'Tis well to watch them ; not too near, perhaps, 
 
 One snarls at you, the other snaps. 
 
A Second Colloquy on Criticism 121 
 
 Besides, to the critic Death is of great assistance. 
 There is no more wonderful adjuster of reputations 
 than he. No sooner has 'the surly, sullen bell' 
 given witness to the world that a distinguished 
 author has departed from it, than you begin to 
 perceive with a nervous apprehensiveness how 
 much you had either over or under-estimated 
 him. In the former case, greatly though you had 
 prized him, much as you may owe to him, none the 
 less is he to be seen creeping slowly down the sky ; 
 whilst in the latter case the under-estimated author 
 proudly climbs it. 
 
 Living authors, though they despise the critics, 
 still clamour to be criticised, and no more approve 
 of an exclusive devotion being paid to the dead 
 than does an artist of to-day share your dilettante 
 conviction that the only pictures worth buying are 
 by the Old Masters ; but from the critic's point of 
 view it is hard to forget that the only English 
 critics who have any reputation chiefly concerned 
 themselves with authors who were no longer living 
 when they (these critics) wrote. Dryden, Addison, 
 Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Lamb, Bagehot, Arnold 
 were great critics who did not worry overmuch 
 about their contemporaries. Indeed, one wonders 
 whether it would be possible to fill even a thin 
 volume with criticisms of authors written by their 
 coevals which would be worth reading. I doubt it. 
 
 Nor is it hard to find the reason. Authors 
 who claim to be imaginative are divided into the 
 good, the bad, and the humdrum. Contemporary 
 
122 Among My Books 
 
 criticism finds it easy to dispose of the bad author 
 and the humdrum, the only risk it runs (no light 
 one certainly) being the occasional mistake of one 
 of the bad authors for a good one. Criticism of 
 this kind quickly loses its interest. Who wants 
 to be for ever following a murdered poetaster to his 
 long home ? Who would wish to live enshrined in 
 a sneer ? The only one of Macaulay's Essays any 
 sane man would consent to lose is his Montgomery, 
 and though Dr Johnson's review of Soame Jenyns' 
 * Origin of Evil ' is worth a king's ransom, it is not 
 a sine qua non of existence like his preface to 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 But what about the good authors ? Surely the 
 critic might have something to say to them. So 
 indeed he might, and so after a time he will, but 
 at the start it is nervous work. It was well said by 
 Carlyle, who said many things well — ' Directly in 
 the face of most intellectual tea-circles it may be 
 asserted that no good book or good thing of any 
 sort shows its best face at first ; nay, that the 
 commonest quality in a true work of art, if its 
 excellence have any depth and compass, is that at 
 first sight it occasions a certain disappointment — 
 perhaps even mingled with its undeniable beauty 
 a certain feeling of aversion! 
 
 This goes to the very root of the matter, and 
 accounts for the extraordinary reception given to 
 works of genius by critics, undeniably well equipped 
 for general purposes. These critics did but express 
 *a certain feeling of aversion,' occasioned by the 
 
A Second Colloquy on Criticism 123 
 
 first sight of an original. It is, I repeat, nervous 
 work handling the genius which has not yet created 
 its own atmosphere. 
 
 Perhaps the safest method of criticism is the 
 comparative. It is also the most interesting. And 
 yet people professed to grow weary of Matthew 
 Arnold's pocket- scale of poetical weights and 
 measures with which he was so fond of test- 
 ing the value of men's wares. The meritorious 
 Howard did the like with prison rations. * Is that 
 a ration ? ' he would exclaim, and then, whipping 
 out a scale, would demonstrate to the affrighted 
 gaoler it was half a pound short of weight. But 
 for all that Mr Arnold's was an excellent way. Is 
 it blank verse we are invited to consider ? Surely 
 it is no sin to murmur 
 
 Standing on earth, not rapt above the pole, 
 More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged 
 To hoarse or mute, though fall'n on evil days, 
 On evil days though fall'n and evil tongues. 
 In darkness, and with dangers compassed round. 
 And solitude ; yet not alone, while thou 
 Visit'st my slumbers nightly, or when morn 
 Purples the East. Still govern thou my song 
 Urania, and fit audience find, though few. 
 
 Is it an ode ? Well, well ! 
 
 Who are these coming to the sacrifice ? 
 To what green altar and mysterious priest 
 Lead'st thou that heifer, lowing at the skies, 
 And all her silken flanks with garlands drest ? 
 What little town by river or sea-shore. 
 Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, 
 Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn ?^ 
 
124 Among My Books 
 
 It is only by some such means as those employed 
 by Mr Arnold that the great tradition is kept alive, 
 and with the passages he was so fond of quoting 
 for ever sounding in our ears, it ought not to be 
 difficult to conquer one's first feelings of aversion 
 to the next great poet who comes among us, even 
 though he should not appear clothed in his might, 
 but (as is generally the case) with all his faults 
 lying thick upon the surface of his verse. It ought 
 not perhaps — but it will be. Who need wish to be 
 a critic in the twentieth century? When, what 
 with American copyright, royalties on the drama, 
 and heavy death-duties, I may live to see Chats- 
 worth inhabited by a really bad author, whilst all 
 my satisfaction in the reflection that I at all events 
 never opened my mouth without abusing him may 
 be destroyed by the mournful knowledge that I 
 allowed the really good author of my day to pass 
 without a tribute by. 
 
XVIII 
 OLD LAMPS FOR NEW 
 
 BY GEORGE W. SMALLEY 
 
 * T T THEN a new book comes out/ said Sam 
 V V Rogers, ' I read an old one.' Among all 
 the maxims about reading, this — for a maxim it 
 is — seems to me the one most apt for the present 
 day. It is also the one to which least attention 
 is paid. There is a fashion in reading, as in hats 
 and coats, and, in most circles which desire to be 
 thought literary, the fashion is novelty. Whoso 
 would be esteemed a person of culture must 
 know, not, as Arnold said, the best which has been 
 thought and done in the world, but the latest. 
 You may perhaps escape without reproach if you 
 know nothing of Homer or Dante, but if you 
 cannot show yourself familiar with the last blend of 
 fiction and pseudo-Christianity or pseudo-socialism, 
 or have not some smattering of such literature as 
 the circulating library provides, and especially of 
 the books best advertised, you must endure the 
 censure of those who have. ' There is nothing so 
 contemptible,' said Mazzini, ' as a literary coterie.' 
 
126 Among My Books 
 
 Tennyson, who was not without literature, quotes 
 the saying and approves it. And there is perhaps 
 no extant literary coterie in which the modern note 
 is not heard continually. 
 
 Emerson advised us to read no book which is 
 not a year old. He thought that a book which had 
 lived a year might have a presumption in its favour ; 
 not foreseeing by what publishing arts a book may 
 be kept alive after the breath is out of it. Nor did 
 he value periodical literature overmuch. 'If,' he 
 said, 'we should give to Shakespeare, to Bacon, 
 to Wordsworth, the time we give to the news- 
 papers — but who dare speak of such a thing ? ' It 
 is plain that he did not think newspapers the best 
 food for the mind — even the newspapers of his day. 
 To them, and to the inexorable necessity weighing 
 upon them to publish what is new, he may well 
 enough have traced the passion for mere newness 
 which affects the modern reader of modern books. 
 He had another view. I went to see him at Con- 
 cord while I was reading in the Harvard Law 
 School. After some questions about the study of 
 law — for he liked to know the practical side of 
 things — and after commending it, he added : * But 
 do not read law only. Keep your mind open. 
 Read Plato.' Then and after, he urged the students 
 who came to him for counsel, while mastering their 
 own branch of learning, to master also some other, 
 and to read in a direction as different as possible 
 from that of their professional pursuits. He would 
 have them, in Burke's phrase, diversify their minds. 
 
Old Lamps for New 127 
 
 He may well enough have borrowed his view of the 
 law from Burke's well-known criticism, that it does 
 not open and liberalise the mind exactly in the 
 same proportion as it quickens and invigorates the 
 understanding. However that may be, Emerson's 
 remedy was not to read a book of the day, but a 
 Greek author of whom he has said that perhaps not 
 more than a dozen men in any one generation have 
 a full perception of his philosophy and purpose. 
 
 There is little chance that any protest, or any 
 number of protests, against the futility of what 
 passes for literature in the market-place will 
 diminish either the publishers' output or the 
 ambition or industry of the writers of the day. 
 The yearly statistics of printed books are, I believe, 
 a little more appalling in England than in the 
 United States, but in both countries the produc- 
 tivity increases yearly. The expression of a pre- 
 ference for books which have stood the test of time 
 would be less intelligible perhaps in New York 
 than in London, at any rate less acceptable ; and 
 less in Chicago than in New York. There is, 
 among large classes of Americans, a fierce im- 
 patience of what is venerable or remote, whether 
 in literature or other matters. They would declare 
 with Macbeth that- 
 All our yesterdays have lighted fools 
 The way to dusty death. 
 
 — and therefore they are for to-day. 
 
 It has been said that there are in France but 
 two parties — those who believe that the history of 
 
128 Among My Books 
 
 France began in 1789, and those who believe that 
 it ended then. There is a type of American who 
 considers that on this side of the Atlantic, and for 
 the people of this country, history began in 1776, 
 on the fourth of July of that year—and not political 
 history only. He it is whose voice has been heard 
 for years past rather loudly insisting that the 
 literature which best deserves the attention of 
 Americans is American literature. When M. Paul 
 Bourget, following Tocqueville and others, too 
 bluntly replied, ' There is none,' this patriot re- 
 joined hotly that Mr Paul Bourget and Tocqueville 
 and the rest knew nothing about it — they were 
 foreigners and Frenchmen, and how could they? 
 The truth, of course, lies midway. It is unhappily 
 true, that even the great West has not yet given 
 birth to a Shakespeare, though Minnesota is re- 
 sponsible for Mr Ignatius Donnelly, who sought to 
 prove that Shakespeare's plays were written by 
 Bacon — not perhaps a long step toward the creative 
 energy of the Elizabethan period. Mr Howells has 
 announced that in the writing of novels the method 
 of Thackeray is obsolete, and yet Thackeray is not 
 wholly superseded. There was to be a new fiction ; 
 the advent of the American novel was long since pre- 
 dicted, and is still awaited. It is like what Gambetta 
 said when challenged to take sides on the social 
 question, ' There is no social question ; there are 
 social questions.' So there is no ' American novel,' 
 but there are American novels in multitude, and 
 many of them admirable. 
 
Old Lamps for New 129 
 
 A ^more rational, though less patriotic, theory of 
 criticism has of late prevailed. It is seen that even 
 in America the laws which since the dawn of letters 
 have governed the production of literature must 
 govern it still. It was an American artist of 
 originality who surprised the Royal Academy by 
 enunciating the canon that there was no such thing 
 as English art or French art — there was simply 
 Art, and it was universal and of all time. Mr 
 Whistler's opinion cannot be put aside. There is, 
 of course, a sense in which there is an English or 
 French school of Art, and an English or French or 
 American Literature, as there was a Greek and 
 Roman Literature. 
 
 We have in the United States a body of litera- 
 ture of which we are justly proud. But its greatest 
 names belong, as in England, to the past, and 
 every one of them is an argument for the reading 
 of old books and not of new books. The intellec- 
 tual activities of to-day, whether in England or in 
 America, seem to many of us of a high order, but 
 they are not pre-eminently literary. Who doubts 
 that in England the golden period of the Victorian 
 age is past? Who expects in America a new 
 Emerson, a new Hawthorne, a new Lowell, ere the 
 century dies out ? I do not mean to disparage, if I 
 could, by a single word, the well-earned fame of 
 those living writers who are, as Johnson said, 
 among the chief glories of every people. Some of 
 them are well known in England, some less well 
 known. Mr Henry James, Mr Howells, Mr Bret 
 
 I 
 
130 Among My Books 
 
 Harte, * John Oliver Hobbes ' — these are novelists 
 whose names are household words in two countries. 
 But Octave Thanet and Owen Wister, who have 
 taken up the story of Western life as it is lived 
 to-day, both of whom write with picturesque fidel- 
 ity, have yet a transatlantic reputation to achieve. 
 Stedman, the poet-critic ; Aldrich, the poet-novelist ; 
 Hay, the poet-historian and ambassador, are writers 
 who, though living, have kept their honourable place 
 for a generation. In history, in political economy, 
 in law, in science, in many other great departments 
 of intellectual life, there have been and are great 
 American names, and in pure literature there are 
 others. 
 
 Mr Goldwin Smith, writing the other day in 
 these columns, remarked that American historio- 
 graphy had of late years advanced greatly in purity 
 of style. There he suggests the service which 
 literature may do, and I hope is doing. There 
 really is no reason in the nature of things why 
 history, whether in books or newspapers, should be 
 written in slovenly English. Froude, with his in- 
 comparable beauty of style, is a witness to the 
 contrary. But is a good style to be acquired other- 
 wise than by much study of the great writers who 
 have gone before us ? Let Stevenson answer — he 
 has told us how he acquired his. How many living 
 writers can be named to whom the student of style 
 could usefully go to school ? An exception may be 
 made in favour of the French : even if we include 
 some of the living. A good French writer is 
 
Old Lamps for New 131 
 
 probably the best guide to the young English or 
 American writer, because the Frenchman abounds 
 in precisely those qualities of style in which the 
 Englishman or American is most deficient. And 
 when you go to a foreign land, it is like going to 
 another generation ; you pass out of the present 
 atmosphere and you escape the influences which 
 make the atmosphere of to-day injurious. 
 
 So, whether we love literature for what we may 
 get from it, or love it, as I hope we do, for its own 
 sake, we come back to the same point and to the 
 writers whose fame is established. And if we want 
 another counsellor we may take Lord Kenyon, who, 
 in the weightier matters of the law, wished always 
 stare supra antiquas vias — bad Latin, but sound 
 sense. 
 
XIX 
 BACON ENTHRONED 
 
 BY D. H. MADDEN 
 
 THE writer of the following paper can lay no 
 claim to originality. His method of liter- 
 ary investigation and his mode of reasoning 
 are simply those in vogue among Baconians ; 
 nor do his revelations differ widely from those 
 upon which their faith is founded. If his com- 
 munication has any value, it is because he has 
 carried his inquiries somewhat further than his 
 predecessors, who have failed to detect traces of 
 Bacon's handiwork in Venus and Adonis^ and, 
 for the most part, leave Ben Jonson severely 
 alone. The identity of the writer and the reasons 
 which induced him to confide his discoveries to 
 my care can interest no one. And so, without 
 further preface, I leave my correspondent to speak 
 for himself: — 
 
 * Sir, — The faith of the simple folk who still 
 believe that the " Shakespeare " plays were the 
 
134 Among My Books 
 
 workmanship of a sporting attorney's clerk from 
 Stratford-on-Avon must have been rudely shaken 
 by the discovery announced in a recent magazine 
 article entitled " Shakespeare Dethroned." 
 
 * " Hi ludi, tuiti sibi, Fr. Bacono nati." This is 
 the statement which the ingenuity of Mr Bucke 
 has evolved from the hitherto unintelligible word in 
 Love's Labour's Lost — "honorificabilitudinitatibus." 
 It is little to the purpose to point out that the 
 sentence is not Latin. It is the best that even 
 the genius of Bacon could do with the word 
 selected as the repository of his great secret, and 
 what satisfied Bacon may well be accepted by 
 Baconians. 
 
 ' I must not be understood as minimising the 
 importance of this most convincing anagram when 
 I say that even it must yield to a direct and 
 categorical statement of fact. Such a statement 
 it has been my good fortune to discover. 
 
 ' There is a scene in the Merry Wives of Windsor 
 so devoid of apparent meaning that it has been 
 omitted from acting versions of the play. It is 
 that in which William, son of Master Page, is put 
 through his Latin accidence by Sir Hugh Evans. 
 He is made to decline the pronoun " hie," which 
 finally resolves itself into " banc, hoc," pronounced 
 by the Welshman "hang hog." 
 
 * Now, Sir, this passage, read in the light of 
 modern discoveries, is absolutely clear. 
 
 ' For here we have a " page " associated with 
 the name " William," and denoted by the pronoun 
 
Bacon Enthroned 135 
 
 " hie," gradually resolved into the words " hang 
 hog," whereupon ensues the following dialogue : — 
 
 'Mrs Quickly.—'' Hang-hog" is Latin for bacon, I warrant you. 
 ' Evans. — Leave your prabbles [parables] 'oman. 
 
 * In other words, " hie " {i.e., William) is shown, by 
 the medium of the Latin language, to be no other 
 than Baeon. 
 
 'Baeon and the learned Ben Jonson seem to 
 have agreed in seleeting the Latin tongue as the 
 means of eonveying to posterity their cryptic 
 information. The writer of the article to which 
 I have referred boldly appeals to the testimony 
 of Jonson. He does well ; for if Jonson, who 
 knew both Bacon and Shakespeare intimately, 
 and who could be under no mistake as to the 
 authorship of the plays, had really attributed 
 them to Shakespeare, I should have felt some 
 difficulty in getting over his evidence. Here, 
 again, I think that I may fairly claim credit for 
 a remarkable discovery. 
 
 * The passage upon which Shakespearians mainly 
 rely is that in which Jonson explains his wish that 
 Shakespeare had blotted a thousand lines ; adding, 
 " I loved the man, and do honour his memory, on 
 this side idolatry, as much as any." 
 
 * This remarkable statement is found under the 
 significant heading, " Discoveries." It is intro- 
 duced by the words, " De Shakespeare nostrat." 
 The last word has been generally taken to be an 
 abbreviated form of "nostrate." But who ever 
 
136 Among My Books 
 
 abbreviated a word merely to avoid the use of a 
 single letter ? It is evident that " Shakespeare 
 nostrat" is a fragment of a longer sentence. In 
 the light of the "discoveries" at which Jonson 
 hints, we can supply the missing words, and read, 
 " Shakespeare, no Strat[ford man]." If the pre- 
 ceding word " De " be also (as seems probable) an 
 abbreviation, it may well stand for " dethroned," 
 and the whole " discovery " (with slight transposi- 
 tion) will read : " Shakespeare de[throned] no 
 Strat[ford man]." Thus Jonson as well as Bacon 
 made elaborate preparations for the inevitable 
 discovery, and he has left it on record that if he 
 lent himself to Bacon's scheme, he, at all events, 
 was not deceived. 
 
 * The Anagram and the Cryptogram we know of 
 old. More valuable, because more characteristic 
 of the author, is what I may call the Crypto-pun, 
 or hidden play upon words, suggesting to the 
 initiated the name of Bacon. " What is a.b. spelt 
 backward, with the horn on his head ? " asks 
 Moth in Loves Labour^ s Lost. In these apparently 
 unmeaning words Mr Bucke finds a cryptic allu- 
 sion. The answer to that, of course, is " Ba, with 
 a horn added." Now Ba with a horn added is 
 Bacornu^ " which is not, but suggests, and was 
 probably meant to suggest, Bacon." 
 
 ' I venture to suggest that even a better example 
 of the Crypto-pun may be found in the word by 
 which the author of the " Shakespearian " dramas 
 has associated his real name with the greatest 
 
Bacon Enthroned 137 
 
 creation of his genius. We like to think of David 
 Copperfield as Dickens, and of Maggie Tulliver as 
 George Eliot. Every true Baconian would gladly 
 connect the name of his master with that of 
 Hamlet. It would have been impossible for the 
 author, consistently with his scheme of conceal- 
 ment, to have called the Prince of Denmark 
 Bacon. But, foreseeing the inevitable time of 
 discovery, he named him Ham : — let, or hindered 
 from discovering himself to the world. 
 
 * I have no doubt that a careful search would 
 reveal many more examples of this most interest- 
 ing device. Take for instance Sonnet cxi., in 
 which the poet admittedly speaks in his proper 
 person. It is impossible to extract from this 
 sonnet any Crypto-pun on the name of " Shake- 
 speare." But what of " Bacon ? " When the 
 writer after a reference to " eisel " (vinegar) as 
 a remedy for some "strong infection" (possible 
 trichinosis), adds, "pity is enough to cure me" is 
 it not evident that this phrase (in Mr Bucke's 
 words) "suggests, and was probably meant to 
 suggest. Bacon?" Is it not at least as evident 
 as the suggestion of Bacon by the words "a.b. 
 spelt backward, with the horn on his head ? " On 
 this point I appeal with confidence to even the 
 most bigoted of Shakespearians. 
 
 ' The profusion with which allusions to field 
 sports and to horsemanship are scattered through- 
 out the works attributed to Shakespeare, taken in 
 connection with the fact that Bacon shows no 
 
138 Among My Books 
 
 interest in sport, has been eagerly laid hold on 
 by Shakespearians. These allusions have been 
 described as " purposeless," often out of place with 
 their surroundings, and alien to the plot or charac- 
 ter in hand. 
 
 ' " Purposeless " they certainly are, on the assump- 
 tion that Shakespeare wrote the pieces into which 
 they are intruded. But surely this circumstance 
 ought to suggest a doubt to a thinking mind. 
 Why attribute "purposeless" action to one cap- 
 able of writing Othello and As You Like It? But 
 if Bacon be the author, the purpose becomes at 
 once apparent, and the part played by Shake- 
 speare in the production of the Baconian plays is 
 clearly discernible. Their purpose was to aid in 
 the scheme of concealment. That Shakespeare 
 was the transcriber, not the author, of the Baconian 
 dramas is suggested by the recorded fact that the 
 MSS., as delivered to the players, contained no 
 blots or erasures. He was, I venture to suggest, 
 something more than a transcriber. To him was 
 intrusted the task of interlarding the plays with 
 sporting allusions and phrases, introduced in such 
 a manner as to avert all suspicion from their true 
 author. It must be admitted that he performed 
 his allotted task faithfully. Indeed, he may be 
 said to have overdone it. For instance, the 
 words "heart" and "dear," in season and out of 
 season, suggest the inevitable pun. So coarsely 
 was this done that the suspicions of critics were 
 aroused, and they were more than once on the 
 
Bacon Enthroned 139 
 
 verge of a discovery. Coleridge absolutely rejects 
 the line containing Mark Antony's pun on the 
 death of Caesar as an "alien conceit" intruded 
 into the original text. Professor Dowden, refer- 
 ring to the description of the horse in Venus and 
 Adonis, asks whether it is poetry or an extract 
 from the catalogue of an auctioneer. 
 
 ' I observe that Mr Bucke does not hesitate to 
 attribute this poem, together with the Sonnets and 
 Lucrece, to the author of the plays. In so doing 
 he has deprived Shakespearians of their strongest 
 argument. Who but the author of Venus and 
 Adonis (I have heard it asked) could have 
 written Love's Labour's Lost, and who but the 
 author of the Sonnets could have conceived the 
 Tragedies ? 
 
 * I cannot pursue in detail the train of thought 
 thus suggested. I can only indicate a few results 
 of the discovery, (i) The identification of Mr 
 W. H. (the "only begetter" of the Sonnets and 
 the despair of Shakespearians) with William 
 Herbert, an elder brother of the poet, George 
 Herbert, to whom Bacon dedicated his only 
 acknowledged volume of verse, and whose brother 
 would naturally be chosen as the interme- 
 diary between the author and the publisher of 
 the Sonnets. (2) A clear understanding of the 
 poet's meaning when he tells us that "public 
 manners" (the exigencies of public life) caused 
 his name to receive a brand ("Bacon" branded 
 as "Shakespeare"), adding that the poet made 
 
140 Among My Books 
 
 himself " a motley [play-actor] to the view." (3) 
 The solution of the enigma of the black woman 
 of Sonnets cxxvii.-cxlii. (the " worser spirit " 
 striving for mastery over the poet's soul) by the 
 Black Art of the Middle Ages — the " rough magic " 
 finally abjured by Bacon in the person of Prosper©, 
 which he contrasts with his " better angel " — />., 
 the Baconian Philosophy, the keynote of which is 
 to be found in the first line of the first Sonnet, 
 " From fairest creatures we desire increase," and of 
 which Macaulay writes : " What, then, was the 
 end which Bacon proposed to himself? It was, 
 to use his own emphatic expression, fruit." 
 * I am. Sir, 
 
 'Your obedient servant, 
 
 'Hang Hog.' 
 
 I see no reason in the nature of things why the 
 speculations of my correspondent should not be 
 adopted by Baconians, Their creed is essentially 
 progressive. The hints and conjectures of half a 
 century ago have become the beliefs of to-day. 
 To my mind his Crypto-puns are quite as con- 
 vincing as the Cryptograms or Anagrams of his 
 predecessors ; and if his explanation of the 
 ' Shakespearian " allusions to sport and to horse- 
 manship be rejected, I really do not know what 
 can be offered in its place. 
 
XX 
 
 AN OLD PUZZLE 
 BY LESLIE STEPHEN 
 
 THERE is a charm in old stones of crime 
 which must be admitted even by people 
 who are too prudish to confess to pleasure in 
 modern police reports. Perhaps in reading the 
 * State Trials ' we flatter ourselves that we are 
 studying history ; or it may be that there is some- 
 thing impressive — as Carlyle so often insists — in 
 the sudden gleam which for a moment illuminates 
 one little spot of light in the vanishing past. Any- 
 how the history of Miss Canning, which occupied 
 all London for a year in the middle of the last 
 century, has a perennial interest. Fielding, un- 
 luckily for himself, got mixed up in the story; 
 Voltaire wrote an account of it as having some 
 remote bearing upon the famous Calas proceedings ; 
 Lord Campbell and Mr John Paget agree that it 
 was one of the most extraordinary cases on record ; 
 and Mr Courtney Kenny, reader in law at Cam- 
 bridge, has elaborately discussed it in a pamphlet 
 
142 Among My Books 
 
 recently republished from the Law Quarterly 
 Review. There are questions of more pressing im- 
 portance, inasmuch as Miss Canning and her 
 victims or persecutors have probably been dead 
 for a century. Yet there is something still fascinat- 
 ing in the story, both as an incidental picture of 
 English life at the period, and as an illustration of 
 some points in the theory of evidence — perhaps, 
 we should say, in the genesis of lies. 
 
 The main facts are simple. Elizabeth Canning 
 was a servant girl in London. She was allowed to 
 visit an uncle on the ist January, 1753. She set 
 out to return at 9 P.M., but never reached her 
 home. Four weeks afterwards she suddenly ap- 
 peared at her mother's house in a state of squalor 
 and emaciation. The problem is, Where had she 
 been in the interval ? If her own account be true, 
 she had been attacked by two men and dragged to 
 a house ten miles off at Enfield Wash, occupied by 
 ' Mother Wells,' a woman of the worst character. 
 An old gipsy woman called Mrs Squires, with two 
 girls, was in the kitchen. Mrs Squires' face was 
 not one to be forgotten. * God Almighty,' as she 
 said herself, 'never made such another,' and her 
 portrait is extant to confirm the statement. This 
 hideous old lady asked if Canning would * go their 
 way ? ' She said ' No ' ; whereupon she was con- 
 fined in a back room, where she stayed without 
 further molestation for four weeks. She had 
 nothing to eat except some bits of bread and a 
 mince-pie, which happened to be in her pocket. 
 
An Old Puzzle 143 
 
 At the end of the time, she pulled some boards 
 from a window, and escaped. Mrs Wells and Mrs 
 Squires were tried upon charge of this outrage, and 
 on 26th February both were convicted and sen- 
 tenced to death. The Lord Mayor, however, who 
 was on the bench, thought the case suspicious, 
 obtained a reprieve, and made inquiries. Mrs 
 Squires declared that during the time of the 
 alleged imprisonment she had been making her 
 rounds in Dorsetshire with her son and daughter. 
 Confirmatory evidence was collected, and after 
 certain delays Canning was tried for perjury and 
 convicted in May, 1753. 
 
 The excitement at the trial was intense. Mobs 
 collected round the Court and threatened the 
 witnesses. It was the first criminal trial which was 
 not finished at a single sitting. Till eclipsed by 
 the Tichborne case, it was scarcely surpassed by 
 any non-political case in the interest excited. 
 Omitting a number of subsidiary questions, the 
 issue seems to be pretty simple. Thirty-five 
 witnesses swore that Mrs Squires was travelling in 
 Dorsetshire and elsewhere during January, 1753. 
 Twenty-five swore that they had seen her during 
 that time at Enfield Wash. Which are we to 
 believe, and how is the false evidence (for one set 
 of witnesses must have given false evidence) to be 
 accounted for ? It does not appear that any of 
 the witnesses except Canning herself lied inten- 
 tionally. We must also ask how the original story, 
 if false, was suggested ; and this seems to be easily 
 
144 Among My Books 
 
 explicable. Miss Canning did not mention an 
 names when she came home. She spoke of bein 
 confined in some unknown house. Then, said on 
 of her friends, it must have been * Mother Wells' 
 house. She accepted the name when suggestec 
 and a warrant was thereupon taken out agains 
 Mrs Wells. A large party of excited friends wen 
 with Miss Canning to identify the place. Some c 
 them got there before her, and finding that a roor 
 in it did not correspond to her description (sh 
 had not mentioned, for example, some hay, c 
 which it was partly full), went back to her an( 
 asked whether they were on the right track. Sh 
 immediately modified her account to meet the case 
 now, for the first time, mentioning the hay. Whei 
 she had reached the house, the gipsy came in wit! 
 the crowd, and Miss Canning, when asked t< 
 identify her assailant, immediately pitched upoi 
 this hideous old lady as her gaoler. This alone i 
 enough to suggest how the story was constructee 
 by degrees, as the materials were provided bj 
 ofificious assistants. 
 
 The two masses of evidence as to the alibi ma3 
 now be contrasted. It is hardly possible to doub 
 that the Dorsetshire witnesses were speaking 
 honestly. The stories which they told were in 
 dependent ones, but fitted into each other very ac 
 curately. The gipsies were traced to a number o 
 different villages in succession. Various little in 
 cidents occurred ; a dance at one place, crossing i 
 flood at another, a meeting of the gipsy's daughtei 
 
An Old Puzzle 145 
 
 •with her sweetheart, and so forth. All the inci- 
 dents, mentioned by independent witnesses at 
 different places and times, dovetail with each 
 other. To combine so various a set of incidents 
 with a single thread would be scarcely possible 
 if they were not substantially true. The only real 
 question was as to the date. Here, again, the 
 evidence was satisfactory. One of the witnesses, 
 for example, was an exciseman, the date of whose 
 presence at a village was clearly fixed by the 
 official record of his employment. The gipsy's 
 daughter, in another place, had got a woman to 
 write a letter to her sweetheart, and, though the 
 postmark was injured, the date seems to have been 
 sufficiently proved. Although, therefore, the evi- 
 dence had, no doubt, been carefully got up by one 
 of the gipsy's supporters, it seems to be very diffi- 
 cult to account for it by any hypothesis of honest 
 mistake. 
 
 The conflicting evidence, on the other hand, is 
 throughout liable to an obvious objection. A 
 number of people swore, and, no doubt, honestly, 
 that they had seen old Mrs Squires at Enfield in 
 January. In some cases they fixed the time by 
 some incident which was of tolerably certain date. 
 But in almost all, if not all, cases the gipsy had no 
 specific connection with the incident. She was 
 merely passing at the time, and it might well be 
 that they had simply made some error as to the 
 connection between the two events or as to the 
 time at which the incident occurred. In one case 
 
 K 
 
146 Among My Books 
 
 this was clearly made out. The gipsy had been 
 really seen by a person bringing back some work 
 to a shop. It was proved from the books that the 
 work was really brought back some days later than 
 the witness supposed, and, therefore, at a time when 
 the gipsy had admittedly returned. Consequently 
 it is easy to suppose that the facts alleged really 
 happened, but in different connections. There was 
 great excitement at Enfield, where subscriptions 
 were being raised, and everybody taking a side in 
 the question which had made the place famous. 
 There was, as one witness puts it, a ' hurly-burly ' ; 
 everybody was trying to remember anything that 
 could throw light upon the story ; many people did, 
 in fact, remember having seen the gipsy pass, and 
 even having had some words with her about her 
 business — which was hawking smuggled goods ; 
 and the one thing necessary to make the evidence 
 relevant was some blunder about dates. It 
 happened that the change of style had just taken 
 place ; and there is a confusion between old and 
 new Christmas Day, which perplexes several of the 
 witnesses. Many of them could not read, and had 
 vague notions about the calendar. Finally, the 
 stories are not mutually confirmatory ; they do not, 
 like the Dorsetshire stories, dovetail with each 
 other ; and it is, therefore, perfectly easy to be- 
 lieve that, without conscious lying, the witnesses 
 had become honestly confused about dates which 
 had occurred some months beforehand. 
 
 On the whole, when we can see how the original 
 
An Old Puzzle 147 
 
 story might be, and in fact apparently was con- 
 cocted ; and when we can accept an hypothesis 
 which fully accounts for one mass of erroneous 
 evidence without supposing perjury, while it seems 
 impossible to explain the conflicting evidence 
 without supposing its substantial truth, the con- 
 clusion seems to be as clear as can be expected. 
 We fully believe that Miss Canning was guilty of 
 perjury ; though she had not, it is said, any other 
 stain upon her character. Where she was in 
 January, 1753, can never be known ; but it is easy 
 to suggest reasons why retirement might be con- 
 venient which it would be very undesirable either 
 for her or her friends to reveal. Still she has given 
 us so much amusement that we have a kind of 
 pleasure in hearing that, when transported to 
 America, she was kindly treated, made a respect- 
 able marriage, lived very happily ever afterwards, 
 and has left descendants living at this day. Per- 
 haps they still believe her story. Voltaire inferred 
 from the case the inferiority of English criminal 
 law to the French procedure, illustrated by the 
 persecution of Calas. Certainly any one reading 
 the case will admit that in the abused i8th century 
 trials might be fairly conducted, and that some 
 people escaped the gallows on rather easy terms. 
 
XXI 
 * PICKWICK' 
 
 BY PERCY FITZGERALD 
 
 IT would be vain to praise or to disparage the 
 immortal * Pickwick.' Everything about it is 
 remarkable. No modern work of the century 
 has engendered so many other books, commen- 
 taries, illustrations, etc., or been so Protean in its 
 developments. Drama, opera, music, translations 
 pictures, topography, philology, almanacs, song- 
 sters, advertisements, pens, cigars, all exhibit this 
 generative influence. There is a little library of 
 writers on 'Pickwick.' Grave Professors, men of 
 law, politicians, schoolmasters, have been drawn 
 to it. Mr Lang, Professor Ward, Rimmer, Frost, 
 Hughes, Kitton, Ashby S terry — American as well 
 as English — all have expatiated on the subject. 
 Neither Scott, nor Thackeray, nor Byron, nor 
 Macaulay, nor Tennyson can show anything 
 like it. The commentary on the Waverleys is 
 quite meagre by comparison. The oddity, too, 
 is that no other work of * Boz's ' has had this 
 fruitfulness. 
 
150 Among My Books 
 
 The reason would seem to be the tone of perfect 
 conviction and reality in which it is conceived and 
 carried out. The characters are treated almost 
 biographically, and move forward according to its 
 dates. A single passage, selected at random, will 
 show this feeling : 
 
 The remainder of the period which Mr Pickwick had assigned as 
 the duration of his stay at Bath passed over without the occurrence 
 of anything material. Trinity Term commenced. On the expiration 
 of its first week, Mr Pickwick and his friends returned to London, 
 and the former gentleman, attended of course by Sam, straightway 
 repaired to his old quarters at the George and Vulture. 
 
 It is impossible to resist this particularity; it is as 
 though we were reading the movements of a living 
 person in some newspaper. Further, the changes 
 recorded in Mr Pickwick's character, who, from a 
 foolish creature, became sensible, will not, as 
 Dickens himself explains, * appear forced or un- 
 natural, for in real life the peculiarities and oddities 
 of a man generally impress us at first ; it is not 
 until we are better acquainted with him that we 
 begin to look below these superficial traits.' One 
 reason we have had no second ' Pickwick ' from the 
 same 'eminent hand,' though the theatrical pass- 
 ages in ' Nickleby ' are thoroughly Pickwickian, 
 may be that Dickens, like so many comic actors, 
 believed that his real forte lay in the highly- 
 strained and highly-strung pathetic. His broad 
 humour, as he fancied, was to come in, like 
 the comic scenes in Otway's 'Venice Preserved/ 
 just to relieve the gloom. We can see how he put 
 
' Pickwick ' 151 
 
 his whole soul into those gruesome, sentimental 
 stories introduced into ' Pickwick.' This gained 
 more and yet more on him as he went along, until, 
 after ' Chuzzlewit,' it became the staple of his work. 
 Indeed, he and his friend Forster always thought 
 rather poorly of ' Pickwick,' and he would accept 
 compliments with a sort of good-natured tolerance. 
 
 The name Pickwick was supplied from Bath, near 
 which city there is, or was, a hamlet so called. A 
 foundling, discovered here by a mail-coach guard, 
 was named after the place, and grew up to be a 
 great coach proprietor, and ' Boz,' going down to 
 Bath in 1835, must have noted 'Moses Pick- 
 wick' on the door of the carriage. The book 
 was begun at Furnival's Inn, and continued at 
 another set of rooms — some of it was written at 
 Chalk, a village in Kent — and it was concluded at 
 No. 48 Doughty Street. Forster revised some of 
 the proofs, but the MS., with the exception of a 
 few leaves now in America, has disappeared. 
 
 As a record of the changes in manners, 
 customs, habits, feelings, and dress during the past 
 sixty years, nothing could be more valuable, no 
 other book could be named furnishing the same 
 details. 
 
 We have now 'An Index to Pickwick,' lately 
 issued by Mr Neale, a barrister of the Temple, 
 which is, perhaps, the most striking tribute to the 
 force and fulness of the book. It is almost 
 scientifically done, and, from the variety of its 
 entries, furnishes quite a Pickwickian panorama- 
 
152 Among My Books 
 
 Here we have quaint pre- Victorian phrases, traits 
 of manners and customs, long since exploded ; 
 old rare jests, topographical allusions, and descrip- 
 tions, costumes, etc. It is curious what a gro- 
 tesque sort of mosaic is thus presented — something 
 almost macaronic. Thus under 'Jingle' we have 
 all the salient points of that odd creature's career 
 gathered up, and the analysis of his proceedings 
 strikes us as odd indeed. Any one who had 
 never seen * Pickwick ' and glanced over this index 
 would say — as did the ostler of Burke — ' Here is a 
 most extraordinary man.' I myself have just com- 
 pleted a * Pickwick Dictionary and Cyclopaedia,' 
 which forms an amazing repertory of all the hetero- 
 geneous matters, controversies, and facts of all kinds 
 engendered by the book. We can find no refer- 
 ence to the profuse drinking that goes on; cold 
 punch is not even named, nor is Jingle's odd phrase 
 * through the button-hole,' which called for a regular 
 exegesis from Mr Walter Wren. Neither is there 
 any heading on the important subject of marriage, 
 as to which there are many wise and profound 
 remarks scattered through the book. Witness 
 that admirable caution of old Weller's : ' To see 
 you married, Sammy — to see you a deluded 
 wictim, and thinking in your innocence that it 
 is all werry capital.' Another advantage of the 
 index is that it emphasizes the many humorous 
 remarks that are scattered through the work. 
 ' There's a providence in it all,' said Sam. ' O' 
 course there is,' replied his father, with a nod 
 
' Pickwick ' 153 
 
 of grave approval. ' Wot 'ud become of the 
 undertakers vithout it, Sammy ? ' — which is one 
 of the most humorous sayings in the whole, and 
 perfectly sincere — for Mr Weller may have been 
 thinking ' wot 'ud become ' of his own profession 
 threatened by the railways. ' As 'ud turpentine 
 and beeswax his memory ' ; ' I wish I was behind 
 him with a bradall ' — these are racily Pickwickian, 
 and our memory for them needs not such stimulants. 
 But where could this young fellow — then no 
 more than twenty-four years old — have found this 
 sagacity, this deep knowledge of the world, of 
 human nature, and of manners? Assuredly in 
 the hard school in Chandos Street, among the 
 waifs of London, and, later, when grinding at the 
 reporting business. He is a Pickwickian Marcus 
 Aurelius. He drew what he saw. Jingle's elope- 
 ment, and the chaise and four, the hot pursuit — 
 so vividly done — were recollections of his own re- 
 porting excursions to Bath, when he was flying 
 through behind four horses bearing a speech to 
 town. Dickens never could resist drawing from a 
 living model, and was most successful when he did 
 so. He did not even spare his father and mother, 
 or intimate friends like Forster, Landor, and Leigh 
 Hunt. ' Pickwick ' is full of such portraits. Count 
 Smorltork was from Prince Puckler-Muskau ; the 
 traveller, Dowler, had some touches of Forster ; 
 Mr Pickwick himself from an old gentleman 
 named Foster, described and introduced by the 
 publisher; Jingle and Job from Robert Macaire, 
 
154 Among My Books 
 
 then being played in London ; the hero of ' The 
 Stroller's Tale/ from the younger Grimaldi. 
 Weller senior was from a well-known stage coach- 
 man on the Rochester road, whom Mrs Lynn 
 Linton recalls ; ' the fat boy ' was taken from one 
 Buddcn in the same district ; Nupkins from Mr 
 Laing, a London magistrate, also brought on in 
 * Oliver Twist* The election at Eatanswill was 
 the election at Ipswich in which Mr Morrison and 
 Sir Fitzroy Kelly were the candidates. I have 
 heard the late Mr Alfred Morrison tell how 
 Dickens was brought into the committee-room at 
 the Great White Horse, in reference to a report of 
 the speeches. Fizkin, the other candidate, suggests 
 Fitzroy. Bantam, the M.C., is said in Bath to 
 have been drawn from Colonel Jervoise, who was 
 M.C. at the time of Boz's visit. He was scarcely, 
 however, the ridiculous person Bantam is shown to 
 be, for he later became a knight, general, and 
 governor of a colony. Still, Dickens sends Sam 
 up to the M.C.'s house in Queen Square, Bath ; 
 and, oddly enough. No. 14 Queen Square was 
 the actual house in which this Colonel Jervoise lived. 
 It is now in the occupation of Mr Austin King. 
 Buzfuz was the father of the present Mr Bompas, 
 Q.C., and Judge Stareleigh, Sergeant, afterwards 
 Judge Gazelee. The "Chops and Tomato Sauce" 
 letters were parodies of those in the Norton case, 
 to which also a strange burst in the story of Prince 
 Bladud, dealing with his treatment of wives, refers 
 One striking social change that has occurred since 
 
Pickwick' 155 
 
 'Pickwick' is that the world has, as it were, 
 put back the clock in the matter of age. Mr 
 Pickwick, Mr Tupman, and Mr Wardle are all 
 spoken of as 'old gentlemen,' yet not one of the 
 trio was more than fifty. ' Old Wardle's ' mother 
 was alive and only seventy-three ; the spinster aunt 
 was ' fifty if she was an hour.' Nowadays a well- 
 preserved man of sixty is merely ' elderly.' 
 
 Mr Marcus Stone, once walking with Dickens 
 near Gadshill, noticed a grocer's cart with the 
 name ' Weller ' on it, and was told that these 
 tradesfolk had actually suggested the name. In 
 fact, there can be seen outside Chatham Church 
 the Weller tomb, with the names of the family 
 inscribed thereon. One of the oddest incidents 
 connected with the book, where all is so odd and 
 grotesque, is that Dickens should, long after, have 
 known intimately a Weller family, and admired a 
 beautiful Miss Weller, who was destined to be 
 the mother of two gifted women — Lady Butler and 
 Mrs Meynell. Further, two tragic events are 
 associated with this greatly humorous book, and 
 had well-nigh shipwrecked it — the first, the death 
 of Seymour, the artist engaged, by his own hand ; 
 the second, the death of the author's sister-in-law, an 
 interesting girl, who expired before his eyes. This 
 sad business actually suspended the publication. 
 
 Mr Croker indicated a line of inquiry as to 
 Boswell's great book, that much of it was intended 
 as a justification of his own weaknesses and follies. 
 Pickwick, in like manner, is much concerned with 
 
156 Among My Books 
 
 Boz's own experiences, feelings, etc. Here is one 
 striking specimen — Blacking, shoe cleaning, etc., is 
 gone into with curious particularity. We are even 
 told that at the White Hart, Boro', they used Day 
 & Martin's, not Warren's, blacking. In what 
 other novel would we find such a thing noted ? 
 In another place he talks of Warren's poetical 
 advertisements. But everyone knows the dismal 
 passage in Forster's 'life,' where the unhappy little 
 boy was put to paste labels on the bottles of 
 blacking, and where the misery of such a life is 
 looked back to with horror. It gave him a ghastly 
 pleasure to recur to this. 
 
 I have, in another place, shown how much 
 Boswell ran in * Boz's ' head. The crumpet story, 
 of course. Mr Pickwick kissing the old lady was 
 like Dr Johnson kissing the old Lady Eglinton. 
 But a more curious instance is the use of the 
 word * funny ' by Jack Bamber, which is exactly 
 the same sense as that adopted by the gentleman 
 who turned round to Bozzy at the play. 
 
 It is extraordinary how the Pickwickian legend 
 has developed in the case of inns where the illus- 
 trious traveller was supposed to have put up. 
 Everywhere, at the Bull, Great White Horse, 
 Angel, Leather Bottle, etc., is invariably shown a 
 Mr Pickwick's room, which enthusiasts asked to be 
 allowed to sleep in. Even at the Hop Pole at 
 Tewkesbury — of which all there is recorded is ' they 
 stopped to dine,' having ale and more Madeira, be- 
 sides ' replenishing the case bottle ' — Pickwickian 
 
Pickwick ' 1 57 
 
 memories are tenderly cherished. Mr Ashby 
 Sterry, when shown the sacred chamber at the 
 Great White Horse, rather nonplussed the 
 chambermaid by asking where Mr Peter Magnus 
 had slept. But she adroitly said it was at the 
 other side of the house, ' in the department of 
 another lady.' There is a strong link, by the 
 way, between Dickens and Scott, who died only 
 four years before ' Pickwick ' appeared. Mr George 
 Hogarth — Dickens' father-in-law — was Scott's man 
 of business, and took part in all the Ballantyne 
 imbroglio^ and Boz wrote a paper on the dispute. 
 
 All sorts of odd, out-of-the-way conditions at- 
 tended the book. It was one of the first that had 
 appeared in the unusual shape of numbers, or 
 instalments, and green covers ; to be succeeded 
 by Lever, with his * Harry Lorrequer ' in pink, and 
 Thackeray in yellow. This form has long since 
 gone out. To collect ' Pickwicks ' and Pickwickiana 
 requires a scientific education and much deep 
 learning. You must know all ' the points.' Has 
 yours the green cover * with illustrations,' or ' illus- 
 trations by Seymour and Hablot Browne ? ' Are 
 there all the advertisements — Rowland's Kalydor 
 and the rest — all ' the addresses ? ' I know of 
 collectors who have a separate cardboard case for 
 each number. Then there are the different ' states' 
 of the plates — the ' Tony Veller ' in the vignette ; 
 the two Chapters XXV HI. ; and a score of other 
 things. A really good, true, and perfect copy is 
 worth a deal of money. The late Frank Marshall's 
 
158 Among My Books 
 
 cost, or was supposed to cost, ;^ioo. * Pickwick ' is 
 quoted regularly in the text-books, in Dr Murray's 
 Dictionary, and, stranger still, in a grave legal 
 work, ' Taylor on Evidence,' where Sam's examina- 
 tion is actually given in full. 
 
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