HE LEAS U RES 
 
 BOOK- W O R M 
 
 BY 
 
 J. ROGERS REES. 
 
 For him delicious flavors dwell 
 In books as in old Muscatel." 
 
 SHERMAN. 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW. 
 1886.
 
 TO 
 
 THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH 
 
 (Poet and Novelist), 
 
 1 fcefoicate these pages. 
 
 2040811
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 TAGE 
 
 CONCERNING BOOKS AND LOVERS OF 
 
 BOOKS I 
 
 HOME AND BOOKS : GLIMPSES OF 
 
 EARTHLY PARADISE. 35 
 
 THE ROMANCE AND REALITY OF DEDI- 
 CATIONS 82 
 
 AN ODD CORNER IN A BOOK-LOVER'S 
 
 STUDY 141 
 
 GENIUS AND CRITICISM . . -157 
 
 ON THE PURSUIT OF LITERATURE IN 
 
 ODD MOMENTS 184
 
 CONCERNING BOOKS AND 
 LOVERS OF BOOKS. 
 
 I. 
 
 " I PICKED it up " has become a 
 recognised phrase in all kinds of col- 
 lecting manias, and in simple English 
 means that for a few pence, shillings, 
 or pounds very much, of course, 
 below its actual value an article of 
 some peculiar and undoubted worth 
 has been secured. When a man 
 declares with gusto to a friend, " I 
 picked it up," it is tantamount to a 
 boast, on his part, of superior know- 
 ledge as well as good luck. The 
 unexpressed sentence runs just thus : 
 " You see this article was for sale ; 
 I knew its value, but the seller 
 
 i
 
 2 CONCERNING BOOKS AND 
 
 didn't ; therefore my knowledge was 
 to me power, inasmuch as through it 
 I was enabled to take advantage of 
 the seller and to ' pick up ' what I 
 wanted for a mere song." 
 
 In the list of numerous hobbies,* 
 that of accumulating books of more 
 than ordinary interest, especially 
 books which on account of associa- 
 tions have become unique, has pro- 
 cured for itself quite a prominent 
 position. And why should it not ? 
 Carefully and judiciously pursued, 
 the collecting of books is not expen- 
 sive, and is likely to ruin no one ;t 
 carried out as the result of know- 
 ledge, it is a good investment for 
 
 * And it is a curious list. In July, 1883, 
 Messrs. Puttick and Simpson sold by auction 
 "A Unique Collection of Illustrated Matchbox 
 Covers." 
 
 f " If a man spends lavishly on his library, you 
 call him mad a bibliomaniac. But you never call 
 one a horse-maniac, though men ruin themselves 
 every day by their horses, and you do not hear of 
 people ruining themselves by their books." 
 Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies.
 
 LOVERS OF BOOKS. 3 
 
 one's spare sovereigns ; as an occu- 
 pation for odd moments it is plea- 
 surable, and just exciting enough to 
 keep the head in healthy exercise and 
 the blood warm and freely flowing ; 
 as co-ordinate with a love of what 
 the books actually contain of wisdom 
 or imagination, it is elevating and 
 purifying ; as dependent on a hero- 
 worship of great authors, it lifts one 
 up through sympathy into com- 
 munion with them, thus giving a 
 mental access to their friendship 
 which external circumstances can 
 neither hinder nor take away. In 
 short, it seems to me that a great 
 love of books has in it at all times 
 the power to enlarge men's hearts, 
 and to fill them with wider and truly 
 educating sympathies. This educa- 
 tion may be misunderstood and 
 neglected by the many, but its effects 
 are as certain and decided as those 
 which came to Hawthorne's Ernest, 
 
 I 2
 
 4 CONCERNING BOOKS AND 
 
 from his persistent fellowship with 
 The Great Stone Face. 
 
 The pleasure of possessing a unique 
 volume does not lie solely in the fact 
 that by so much one is wealthier 
 than anybody else at the same time ; 
 it depends rather on a laying hold of 
 the associations which constitute the 
 real value of the book. The worth 
 of a copy of the first edition of an 
 early work by a famous author, arises 
 not so much from its containing the 
 original expression of thoughts, which 
 in subsequent issues get so polished 
 or twisted as to become, in many 
 instances, scarcely recognisable, as 
 that it tells to one capable of creeping 
 into the author's soul the tale of his 
 hopes and fears, his ambitions and 
 disappointments, his yearnings and 
 successes. The book speaks, to an 
 appreciative possessor, of the circum- 
 stances, happy or sorrowful, under 
 which it was conceived, written,
 
 LOVERS OF BOOKS. 5 
 
 published ; the difficulty or ease with 
 which it found its way through the 
 press to the public ; and its reception, 
 favourable or otherwise, by critics 
 and general readers. Nothing, in 
 short, is too trivial about a book to 
 interest the genuine book-lover ; the 
 amount gained or lost by its publica- 
 tion ; the particulars of the disposal 
 of the copyright ; the letters or 
 opinions of competent judges re- 
 garding it, all help to fill up the 
 nook allotted in his mind to that 
 particular work. 
 
 If, however, the book, by dedica- 
 tion or inscription, carries indication 
 of a friendship existing between its 
 author and one of the world's great 
 men, so far is its value, as a centre 
 of association of ideas, enhanced. 
 If, in addition to this, it bears upon 
 it, by autograph marks or otherwise, 
 unmistakable proof of having been 
 read and loved by some famous
 
 6 CONCERNING BOOKS AND 
 
 character, its worth becomes ten- 
 fold increased. One begins then to 
 base its value upon its weight in 
 gold. 
 
 As illustrative of these remarks, 
 there lie before me now upon my 
 study-table eight volumes of no par- 
 ticular intrinsic value ; their worth 
 arising from associations shall, how- 
 ever, be decided upon by my book- 
 loving readers. But be it first simply 
 mentioned that to me they are valued 
 treasures. 
 
 Let us begin with this octavo in 
 boards. Its title-page runs thus : 
 British Galleries of Art. London: 
 Printed for G. and W. B. Whittaker, 
 Ave-M aria-Lane. 1824. On its fly- 
 leaf, in Hazlitt's autograph, is 
 inscribed: "To J. Northcote, Esq., 
 with the respects of the Author." 
 Indirectly, this book repeats to me 
 the story of Hazlitt's connection and 
 quarrel with Northcote, the famous
 
 LOVERS OF BOOKS. 7 
 
 painter. During Campbell's editor- 
 ship of the New Monthly Magazine, 
 the former wrote for it a series of 
 papers entitled " Boswell Redivivus," 
 which professed to contain the sub- 
 stance of conversations between the 
 author (Hazlitt) and Northcote. It 
 is, however, pretty certain that often 
 in these papers Hazlitt recorded his 
 own views, indifferent as to whether 
 they appeared as coming from North- 
 cote or himself. Occasionally sharp 
 and bitter sayings about living per- 
 sonages were given utterance to, and 
 in one instance a few unpleasant 
 truths concerning a certain Dr. 
 Mudge, at that time a celebrated 
 Dissenting minister, and a friend of 
 Sir Joshua Reynolds, got mixed up 
 in the reported conversations. Just 
 after the appearance of the paper in 
 question No. VI. of the series 
 P. G. Patmore called upon North- 
 cote, and thus describes the interview
 
 8 CONCERNING BOOKS AND 
 
 and its sequel in My Friends and 
 A cquaintance : 
 
 " 1 1 am very ill, indeed,' said he, 
 in reply to my inquiry as to his 
 health. * I did not think I should 
 have lived. That monster has nearly 
 killed me.' 
 
 " I inquired what he meant. 
 
 '"Why, that diabolical Hazlitt. 
 Have you seen what lies he has 
 been telling about me in his cursed 
 " Boswell Redivivus ?" I have been 
 nearly dead ever since the paper 
 appeared. Why, the man is a 
 demon. Nothing human was ever 
 so wicked. Do you see the dreadful 
 hobble he has got me into with the 
 Mudges ? Not that I said what he 
 has put down about Mudge. But 
 even if I had, who could have sup- 
 posed that anyone in a human form 
 would have come here to worm 
 himself into my confidence, and get 
 me to talk as if I had been thinking
 
 LOVERS OF BOOKS. g 
 
 aloud, and then go and publish it all 
 to the world ! Why, they will think 
 we go snacks in the paltry profits of 
 his treachery. It will kill me. What 
 am I to do about it ? I would give 
 a hundred pounds to have the paper 
 cancelled. But that would do no 
 good now. It has gone all over the 
 world. I have never had a moment's 
 rest since it appeared. I sent to 
 Mr. Colburn to come over to me 
 about it ; but he took no notice of 
 my message, so I went over to him. 
 But they wouldn't let me see him ; 
 and all I could get out of his people 
 was, that they would tell him what I 
 said. I told them to tell him that it 
 would be the death of me. But 
 Campbell has been a little more civil 
 about it. I wrote him a letter 
 such a letter ! I'll show it you. 
 And he has replied very handsomely, 
 and seems to be touched by my 
 situation. At any rate,' added he,
 
 io CONCERNING BOOKS AND 
 
 bitterly, ' I have put a spoke into 
 the wheel of that diabolical wretch 
 Hazlitt.' 
 
 " And then he showed me the 
 letter he had written to Campbell, 
 and Campbell's reply. I think I 
 never read anything more striking in 
 its way then his letter to Campbell. 
 Though brief, it was a consummate 
 composition pathetic even to the 
 excitement of tears painting the 
 dreadful state of his mind under the 
 blow which the (alleged) treachery of 
 Hazlitt had given to it, and treating 
 the thing as a deliberate attempt to 
 ' bring his grey hairs in sorrow to 
 the grave.' I particularly seem to 
 remember that these very words 
 were used in it. The whole ten- 
 dency of the letter was to create an 
 inference in Campbell's mind that 
 the thing had come upon the writer 
 like a thunder-clap, and that even in 
 regard to those parts of the conver-
 
 LO I 'ERS OF BOOKS. 1 1 
 
 sations which were truly reported 
 (which he denied to be the case in the 
 matter in question), he was the most 
 betrayed and ill-used person in the 
 world. And all this in the face of the 
 fact that the paper of which he com- 
 plained was the sixth of a series that 
 had appeared in the (then) most 
 popular literary periodical of the 
 day ; that they had all appeared 
 there with his full knowledge and 
 consent ; that he had, ever since the 
 commencement of them, been almost 
 daily complimented on the conspicu- 
 ous figure he was cutting in his new 
 character of the best converser of the 
 day ; and that a considerable portion 
 of what had appeared of the ' Boswell 
 Redivivus ' up to that time had con- 
 sisted (on Northcote's part, at least) 
 of depreciating estimates of many of 
 the most conspicuous living writers, 
 artists, etc. 
 
 " It is, of course, with reference to
 
 12 CONCERNING BOOKS AND 
 
 these facts that I have spoken of 
 Northcote's feelings as ' ludicrous,' 
 on this unlooked-for exposure of 
 truths of which he did not wish to 
 be known as the author : for the 
 astonishing force and pungency of 
 the unpalatable truths that he put 
 forth about every living individual 
 of whom he spoke (sometimes in 
 their presence, and even to them- 
 selves), and the double edge and 
 effect that were given to his words 
 by the exquisitely simple and naive 
 manner in which he uttered them 
 as if an inspired infant were speaking 
 was the characteristic of his talk. 
 And he knew all this better than 
 anybody could tell him, and evidently 
 prided himself upon it. 
 
 " Campbell's reply to Northcote 
 was, I remember, in a tone precisely 
 correspondent with the letter which 
 called for it. He declared his un- 
 mitigated horror at the outrage that
 
 LOVERS OF BOOKS. 13 
 
 had been committed on Northcote's 
 feelings ; absolved himself from all 
 participation in it by naively stating 
 that he had not seen a line of the 
 paper till its publication, having been 
 absent from town on other business ; 
 and declared that ' the diabolical 
 Hazlitt should never write another 
 line in the magazine during his 
 management of it.'* These, I think, 
 were his very words. 
 
 * # * 
 
 " The sequel of the history of these 
 conversations includes the most cha- 
 racteristic point of all. Not very 
 long after the incident I have re- 
 ferred to above, the conversations 
 were republished in a separate form, 
 with large and valuable additions 
 from the same source, and obtained 
 
 * This letter was offered for sale by a second- 
 hand bookseller some time ago, and, according to 
 Percy Fitzgerald, contained the following, which 
 differs but slightly from the above : "The infernal 
 Hazlitt shall never more be permitted to write for 
 the A T cw Monthly.'"
 
 14 CONCERNING BOOKS AND 
 
 through the same means and agent ; 
 and this with the knowledge and 
 tacit consent of Northcote himself, 
 and with all their obnoxious truths 
 unexpunged, excepting those in which 
 Northcote's own personal connexions 
 were concerned ; and the ' diabolical 
 Hazlitt ' continued to write as usual 
 in the New Monthly, under Camp- 
 bell's (ostensible) editorship !" 
 
 The title-page of the volume next 
 claiming our attention, and which 
 once belonged to William Johnson 
 Fox, minister of Finsbury Chapel 
 and M.P. for Oldham, bears the 
 imprint: Discourses by William Ellery 
 Channing. Boston : Published by 
 Charles Bowen. 1832. On the first 
 blank page, in the handwriting of the 
 author, is the following : " Rev. W. 
 J. Fox, from his friend Wm. E. 
 Channing." What a binding link 
 this between two great souls, each 
 eager and earnest in his proclama-
 
 LOVERS OF BOOKS. 15 
 
 tion of the necessity of liberty for the 
 individual conscience, and yet so di- 
 vergent in attachment to the trifles 
 which get to be insisted on in a 
 ministry of any duration and influ- 
 ence ! What increase the interest 
 and peculiar value of this volume are 
 the corrections, nine in number, in 
 Channing's own handwriting, of 
 errors which had crept into the text 
 in its passage through the press. 
 Several of these corrections are 
 wanting in both Barker's and the 
 Centennial editions of Channing's 
 Collected Works. 
 
 The next three volumes are the 
 Burns which belonged to Dr. John 
 Aitken Carlyle (brother of Thomas 
 Carlyle, and translator of Dante), of 
 whom the author of Sartor Resartus 
 spoke when, upon being offered the 
 degree of LL.D., he excused himself 
 by saying that he had a brother a 
 Doctor, and that if two Dr. Carlyles
 
 1 6 CONCERNING BOOKS AND 
 
 should appear in Paradise mistakes 
 might arise ; the Byron once pos- 
 sessed by William Harrison Ains- 
 worth the novelist, and which bears 
 his book-plate ; and a presentation 
 copy, in the author's autograph, of 
 Lyric Offerings, by Laman Blanchard, 
 published by William Harrison Ains- 
 worth, Old Bond Street, in 1828, 
 and inscribed to Charles Lamb. 
 What a delightful conjunction of 
 three great names, all in a thin 
 red-boarded volume ! about which, 
 however, Charles Lamb said, " I 
 shall put them up among my poeti- 
 cal treasures ;" and Robert Brown- 
 ing, "What would I do to once 
 again run (real running, for I was a 
 boy) to Bond Street from Camber- 
 well, and come back with a small 
 book brimful of the sweetest and 
 truest things in the world!" 
 
 A volume of Wordsworth next 
 claims our notice : The Poetical Works
 
 LOVERS OF BOOKS. 17 
 
 of William Wordsworth. Complete in 
 one volume. Paris. Published by A. 
 and W. Galignani, No. 18, Rue Viv- 
 icnne. 1828.* This book once be- 
 longed to a friend of the poet, who 
 
 * Mr. S. C. Hall, in his Book of Memories, refers 
 to this issue in the following paragraph : " One 
 morning in 1831, when Mr. Wordsworth honoured 
 me with his company at breakfast, our talk fell on 
 his 'lack of popularity.' I, who was among the 
 most devout of his worshippers, sought to argue 
 him out of so depressing a belief, and I showed 
 how I had become so familiar with his writings by 
 placing before him a copy of Galignani's edition 
 of his works, collected in a form, and at a price, 
 that brought the whole of them within my reach. 
 I expressed a belief that of that book many 
 hundreds, probably thousands, were annually sold 
 in England. That led to an appointment with a 
 view to inquiry, and next day I accompanied him 
 to a bookseller's in Piccadilly a firm with the 
 encouraging and ominous name of ' Sustenance 
 and Stretch.' The sale of the work, as of all 
 English reprints, was strictly 'prohibited.' I 
 asked for a copy of Galignani's edition ; it was 
 produced. I asked if I could have six copies, and 
 was told I could. Fifty copies ? yes, at a month's 
 notice. And further questions induced conviction 
 that by that one house alone between two hundred 
 and three hundred copies have been sold during 
 the year. I believe \Vordsworth was far more 
 pleased than vexed to know that, although he 
 derived no profit from them, at least his poems 
 were read."
 
 1 8 CONCERNING BOOKS AND 
 
 resided at Cardiff, and has inserted 
 in it in Wordsworth's autograph, and 
 dated "The Eve of St. Swithin, 
 1848," ten verses of the " Extempore 
 Effusion upon the Death of James 
 Hogg," which are here, for the 
 nonce, christened " Yarrow Re- 
 visited." 
 
 Thus far we have had Art, The- 
 ology, and Poetry. Next come Poli- 
 tics : Seven Letters on the Recent Politics 
 of Switzerland, by George Grote, Esq., 
 author of a " History of Greece," pub- 
 lished by Newby in 1847. This also 
 is a presentation copy in the auto- 
 graph of the author, who sends with 
 it his "best compliments and re- 
 gards." What Lord Palmerston 
 would have given to have been the 
 happy recipient of this volume may 
 be gathered from the following anec- 
 dote related in Mrs. Grote's ad- 
 mirable life of her husband : " Some 
 months subsequent to this volume's
 
 LOVERS OF BOOKS. 19 
 
 appearance, Mr. Newby was applied 
 to one morning by Lord Palmerston's 
 private secretary, for a copy of the 
 ' Letters on Switzerland.' 
 " ' Have not a copy left, sir !' 
 " ' Well, but ) r ou must get me one 
 somehow or another.' 
 
 " ' Wherefore so urgent, sir ?' 
 " ' Because,' replied the secretary, 
 ' Lord Palmerston, being at Windsor 
 yesterday, Prince Albert manifested 
 unusual earnestness on the subject 
 of Swiss disputes, and soon asked 
 Lord Palmerston whether he had 
 read Grote's little book. Lord Pal- 
 merston replied he had not seen it. 
 " Then," said the Prince, " you can- 
 not be qualified to enter fairly upon 
 the discussion of the affairs of 
 Switzerland ; pray go and study it 
 directly." ' " 
 
 And yet another presentation copy, 
 also in the author's autograph ! Three 
 Speeches delivered in the House of Com- 
 
 2 2
 
 20 CONCERNING BOOKS AND 
 
 mons in favour of a measure for an 
 Extension of Copyright, by T. N. Tal- 
 fourd, Serjeant-at-Law, published by 
 Moxon, in 1840, and dedicated to 
 William Ewart Gladstone, Esq. , M. P. 
 A remarkable association, again, of 
 well-known names ! Gladstone ; 
 Thomas Noon Talfourd, the friend 
 and biographer of Lamb ; and 
 Moxon, who married Lamb's adopted 
 daughter, Emma Isola. To these 
 speeches are added, " Petitions to 
 the House of Commons in favour of 
 the Copyright Bill," by a number of 
 famous authors, to wit, amongst 
 others, Wordsworth, Carlyle, and 
 Hood. From a note affixed to 
 Hood's petition we learn that it 
 " was thought too richly studded 
 with jests to be presented to the 
 House of Commons ; but its wit 
 embodies too much wisdom to allow 
 of its exclusion from this place." 
 And, forsooth, a truly marvellous
 
 LOVERS OF BOOKS. 21 
 
 composition it is ! Never was pro- 
 duction like to it exhibited before the 
 august assembly of our nation's law- 
 makers ; and yet each of its quips 
 and cranks throws abundant light 
 upon the mooted question. 
 
 II. 
 
 THE experiences of a book-col- 
 lector often bring him into close 
 connection with strange characters, 
 and lead him to explore mar- 
 vellously queer and out-of-the-way 
 corners. I have in my mind's eye 
 just now an old dealer in the second- 
 hand-book line, to whom I am in- 
 debted for many first editions, and 
 who, certainly a strange product as 
 regards himself and his surround- 
 ings, is well-deserving of enshrine- 
 ment in the best work of the con- 
 temporary novelist. He once had a 
 little corner-shop all to himself, filled
 
 22 CONCERNING BOOKS AND 
 
 with many truly desirable books ; 
 but unfavourable circumstances pitted 
 themselves against him, and he was 
 compelled to " put the shutters up." 
 Now, early each day, he goes the 
 round of his customers with the 
 morning newspapers, upon the sale 
 of which he chiefly depends for 
 a livelihood. A little later on in 
 the day he makes another round, 
 this time with a few carefully-picked 
 volumes the gods only know where 
 he gets them. With his serious old 
 grizzled face he appears at the office, 
 and quietly hands across 
 
 "A small, rare volume, black with tarnished gold," 
 
 and lo ! behold it is the very book 
 which silently in our heart of hearts 
 we had desired for many a long 
 day. He knows his customers and 
 their several requirements, and in 
 answer to an interrogatory look, 
 meaning : How the deuce came you
 
 LOVERS OF BOOKS. 23 
 
 to know I wanted this ? he returns a 
 grim smile, the unwashed, unkempt, 
 thought-reading old sinner that he 
 is ! Occasionally, of an odd after- 
 noon, I have sought him out sitting 
 like a big spider up among his 
 treasures. His residence and store- 
 room are two attics innumerable 
 steps up an old house, the easily 
 accessible rooms of which are let out 
 as offices. What a glorious hunting- 
 ground is here, notwithstanding the 
 filthy plight one's hands and clothes 
 get into long before the hunt is 
 over ! And then, having secured an 
 armful of treasures, and paid the 
 price, one prepares to descend. But 
 not so quickly, my friend ! You 
 may have gone down a dozen steps 
 or so to the first turn of the stairs, 
 but here your progress is stayed. 
 The late owner of your treasures has 
 perched himself above, and having 
 thrown his arms across the balus-
 
 24 CONCERNING BOOKS AND 
 
 trade, is bending over, assuring you 
 in a confidential tone that he would 
 rather have given you the volumes 
 than have taken their full value for 
 them from many another gentleman. 
 
 " Because," whispers the insinuat- 
 ing old grizzly, " I know you will 
 care for them and love them as I 
 have done." 
 
 This is all very well, no doubt, 
 with its fringe of pathos, especially 
 the hint about the price, when all 
 the while there lies in his pocket, to 
 the utmost sou, the sum first asked 
 by him for his books. And yet with 
 it all, I honestly believe that the 
 extraction of a single volume from 
 his garret-store gives a tug at the 
 old boy's sensibilities, sharp and 
 painful as that attendant on the 
 drawing of a tooth. 
 
 Another character pleads with my 
 pen for portraiture this one a book- 
 buyer. Though he has never been
 
 LOVERS OF BOOKS. 25 
 
 in receipt of an income exceeding 
 200 a year, yet has he found ways, 
 by dint of self-denial and severe 
 economy, to gather around him an 
 admirable library. His wife, lov- 
 ingly sympathetic with him in his 
 tastes, rarely has a word of expostu- 
 lation to offer against the expendi- 
 ture in this manner of the common 
 fund. His own conscience, however, 
 troubles him occasionally, and bids 
 him remember the total .of the 
 various small sums lately parted with 
 in exchange for odd volumes. So 
 the next book carried home is stuffed 
 beneath his waistcoat or down into 
 the bottom of his overcoat-pocket 
 until time and opportunity favour its 
 transfer to a vacant nook on one of 
 his shelves. 
 
 " Hollo, Frank !" his wife exclaims 
 sometimes, " when did you get this 
 book ? I have not seen it before." 
 
 " Oh," answers Frank, " you
 
 26 CONCERNING BOOKS AND 
 
 must have been sleeping, Nellie ; 
 that volume has been there a long 
 while now." 
 
 " You see," he said to me one day, 
 when we were chatting together 
 about books and book-buying, " it is 
 all very well to buy, buy, buy, when 
 a fellow can't help it ; and I know 
 Nellie would say but little were I to 
 cram every room with purchases ; 
 but somehow it strikes me occasion- 
 ally that there are trifles needed 
 about the house which would add 
 greatly to my wife's comfort ; if so, 
 my book-buying at this point merges 
 into selfishness. The worst of it is, 
 however, this view of the case does 
 not always stay with me/' 
 
 Poor near-sighted friend, not to 
 see clearly and definitely that many 
 household comforts must of neces- 
 sity be wanting when any part of a 
 narrow "200 is spent in his book- 
 pursuit !
 
 LOVERS OF BOOKS. 27 
 
 He told me that on going home 
 one afternoon with a neat little 
 parcel of purchases, this idea of the 
 selfishness of the whole matter came 
 with such force upon him, that he 
 positively dreaded meeting his wife 
 with her welcome, and felt more like 
 a thief slinking to the scene of some 
 depredation than a respectable man 
 going home to the comfort of his 
 own hearth-stone. 
 
 " I laid the parcel," he said, "on 
 the outside of the bay-window at a 
 point where the folds of the curtains 
 inside effectually hid it from the 
 view of anyone within the room. 
 Then I knocked at the door, and 
 skipping and smiling, Nellie came to 
 let me in. Very soon afterwards I 
 found opportunity to raise the 
 window, draw in my parcel, and put 
 it carefully aside to be examined 
 later on, and its contents arranged 
 on a suitable shelf."
 
 28 CONCERNING BOOKS AND 
 
 I think this friend must be a trifle 
 mad just let us remember him as a 
 third-of-a-bibliomaniac. 
 
 Then the mere perusal of a second- 
 hand catalogue is in itself a pleasure 
 of no mean extent. Leigh Hunt, 
 with truth and tenderness, once said : 
 
 " A catalogue is not a mere cata- 
 logue or list of saleables, as the un- 
 initiated may fancy. Even a common 
 auctioneer's catalogue of goods and 
 chattels suggests a thousand reflec- 
 tions to a peruser of any knowledge. 
 Judge then what the case must be 
 with a catalogue of books ; the very 
 titles of which run the rounds of the 
 whole world, visible and invisible ; 
 geographies biographies histories 
 loves hates joys sorrows 
 cookeries sciences fashion, and 
 eternity ! We speak on this subject 
 from the most literal experience ; for 
 often and often have we cut open a 
 new catalogue of old books, with all
 
 LOVERS OF BOOKS. 29 
 
 the fervour and ivory folder of a first 
 love ; often read one at tea ; nay, at 
 dinner ; and have put .crosses against 
 dozens of volumes in the list, out of the 
 pure imagination of buying them, the 
 possibility being out of the question /" 
 The very errors which creep into 
 the letterpress of a catalogue are 
 amusing. Were such a thing 
 possible, methinks that many old 
 authors must needs turn in their 
 graves at the sacrilege daily carried 
 on in this direction. Before me just 
 now, and issued at no distant date, 
 are the following advertisements : 
 " Lord Bacon's New Atlantic, edited 
 with Notes by J. A. St. John ; 12 mo., 
 cloth, 35., 1852."" Helen Plumtre's 
 Christ and Christendom [Boyle 
 Lectures for 1866]; Svo., cloth, 6s., 
 1867." W. C. Prince's I Go a 
 Fishing; thick crown 8vo., cloth, 
 2s. 3d., 1873" And the list could be 
 extended ad libitum.
 
 30 CONCERNING BOOKS AND 
 
 A careful and cautious collector 
 soon distinguishes the dear catalogue 
 from the cheap, notwithstanding the 
 practice (which cannot be suffici- 
 ently deprecated) of some book- 
 sellers of cataloguing volumes which 
 they never had in their possession at 
 perhaps a tenth or twentieth part of 
 their true value. Of course in reply 
 to the order for the volume thus 
 advertised comes the inevitable : 
 "We regret," etc. A thorough- 
 going book-buyer, however, cares 
 little whether the catalogue be 
 issued by an expensive house or not. 
 The book is required upon his 
 shelves, and it must be had. This 
 is generally the state in which even 
 the cautious buyer is found at last. 
 The book must be had, dear or 
 cheap, and consequently is sent for. 
 
 In book-hunting, the prime object 
 is to have something to hunt for 
 something for which auction-sales are
 
 LOVERS OF BOOKS. 31 
 
 to be frequented, catalogues perused, 
 old stalls examined, and book-boxes 
 searched. One need not take to 
 collecting Elzevirs or Aldines if his 
 pocket be other than deep ; let him 
 rather look for a copy of each issue 
 of such books as The Secretes of the 
 reverendc Maister Alexis of Piemount ;* 
 The Oxford Sausage, the quaint wood- 
 cuts of the first edition (1764) of 
 which are attributed to Bewick, 
 although at that date he was scarcely 
 eleven years of age, and was not 
 apprenticed till three years after- 
 wards ; and The economy of Human 
 Life. However, this is but a hint, 
 and the volumes here mentioned may 
 be supplemented or supplanted by 
 
 * The copy in the possession of the writer 
 (dated 1563-68) bears the two following curious 
 inscriptions in the handwriting of previous owners : 
 " Alexander Jones, His Book ; The Lord of heaven 
 upon him Look, and when his passing Bell Doth 
 Toll, The Lord of heaven Reward his soul. 
 September ye 9th, 1787 ;" and " Harry Row, his 
 hand And pen. God Save king george and all his
 
 32 CONCERNING BOOKS AND 
 
 others according to the taste or 
 requirements of the collector. Also 
 worth having, if it can be secured 
 clean and uncut, with Garrick's por- 
 trait unspotted, and measuring in its 
 original boards 5 by 8f , is Thomas 
 Davies's "Memoirs of the Life of David 
 Garrick, Esq. Two vols. Printed for 
 the Author, and Sold at his Shop in 
 Great Russell Street, Covent-Garden, 
 1780." 
 
 III. 
 
 WHAT a delightful heterogeneity 
 pervades a book-lover's collection, 
 even if it results only from the dif- 
 ference in size of first editions ! 
 How perkily, on the shelf upon 
 which my eyes now rest, does the 
 little I2mo. Poet's Pilgrimage to 
 Waterloo, by Southey, shoulder it 
 alongside his bigger brother in 4to., 
 Roderick, the Last of the Goths ! There 
 also are the big Odes and Epistles and
 
 LOVERS OF BOOKS. 33 
 
 the little Fables for the Holy A lliance 
 of Moore, in close propinquity. Cer- 
 tainly the value of a book, be it 
 intrinsic or adventitious, does not 
 depend on its size ! 
 
 A certain amount of pleasure is to 
 be obtained on a wet evening from 
 the arranging and sorting of one's 
 treasures. Perhaps during the week 
 a volume on Gipsies, or Wales, or 
 Occult Science has been " picked 
 up," and must needs be given a 
 place with proper associates. So a 
 book has to be taken out here and 
 placed there, in what for years has 
 been the resting-place of another, at 
 which a general confusion takes 
 place, needing a little scheming and 
 planning to set to rights. But of this 
 quiet occupation we must whisper 
 only to the initiated, and even to 
 them in low and subdued tones. 
 
 One gets thus by degrees to under- 
 stand, with rare sympathy, the affec- 
 
 3
 
 34 BOOKS AND LOVERS OF BOOKS. 
 
 tion expressed by Lamb in the quiet 
 kiss with which he sometimes greeted 
 his best-loved books, and the careful, 
 fondling manner with which rare 
 spirits handle the companions of their 
 most blissful moments. What a broad 
 gleam of sunshine is shot through the 
 dark dotage of Southey's last days by 
 his son, who thus writes: " His dearly 
 prized books were a pleasure to him 
 almost to the end, and he would 
 walk slowly round his library look- 
 ing at them, and taking them down 
 mechanically." Wordsworth, on visit- 
 ing the poet, found him "patting with 
 both hands his books affectionately 
 like a child."
 
 HOME AND BOOKS: GLIMPSES 
 OF EARTHLY PARADISE. 
 
 " A little peaceful home 
 
 Bounds all my wants and wishes ; add to this 
 My book and friend, and this is happiness." 
 Francesco Di Rioja. 
 
 I. 
 
 HOME. 
 
 WE have nothing to say against the 
 summer, with its long sunny days, in 
 which it sometimes seems possible 
 to cram a very eternity of delightful 
 existence ; but to the book-lover the 
 winter is, emphatically, his season. 
 The tinkle of the sheep-bell on the 
 hillside and the ripple of the trout- 
 stream, the scent of the new-mown 
 
 32
 
 36 HOME AND BOOKS: 
 
 hay and the rustle of the breeze-bent 
 corn, are all thoroughly enjoyable in 
 their way; but the reader's song is 
 of the drawn curtain and the fire- 
 flicker, the subdued light of the lamp 
 and the wild rush of the wind with- 
 out. At such a time his books are 
 doubly friends ; they partake of his 
 security from the raging inclemency, 
 and share the hospitality which friend 
 proffers friend in storm-time and in 
 need. " My hour of inspiration," 
 says Hawthorne, " is when the green 
 log hisses upon the. hearth, and the 
 bright flame, brighter for the gloom 
 of the chamber, rustles high up the 
 chimney, and the coals drop tinkling 
 down among the growing heaps of 
 ashes. When the casement rattles 
 in the gust, and the snow-flakes or 
 the sleety raindrops pelt hard against 
 the window-panes, then I spread out 
 my sheet of paper, with the certainty 
 that thoughts and fancies will gleam
 
 GLIMPSES OF EARTHLY PARADISE. 37 
 
 forth upon it, like stars at twilight, or 
 like violets in May." 
 
 Some of the most delightful word- 
 pictures to be found in our literature 
 are those in which we see great men 
 in the midst of their books. De 
 Quincey, with his marvellous hand- 
 ling of English prose, gives us this : 
 " Let there be a cottage standing in 
 a valley eighteen miles from any 
 town. . . . Let the mountains be real 
 mountains, between 3,000 and 4,000 
 feet high ; and the cottage a real 
 cottage not (a a witty author has 
 it) ' a cottage with a double coach- 
 house ;' let it be, in fact (for I must 
 abide by the actual scene), a white 
 cottage, embowered with flowering 
 shrubs, so chosen as to unfold a 
 succession of flowers upon the walls, 
 and clustering round the windows 
 through all the months of spring, 
 summer, and autumn beginning, in 
 fact, with May roses, and ending with
 
 38 HOME AND BOOKS: 
 
 jasmine. Let it, however, not be 
 spring, nor summer, nor autumn 
 but winter, in his sternest shape. . . . 
 Surely everybody is aware of the 
 divine pleasures which attend a 
 winter fireside ; candles at four 
 o'clock, warm hearthrugs, tea, a fair 
 tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains 
 flowing in ample draperies on the 
 floor; whilst the wind and rain are 
 raging audibly without, 
 
 " 'And at the doors and windows seem to call, 
 As heaven and earth they would together mell ; 
 Yet the least entrance find they none at all ; 
 Whence sweeter grows our rest secure in massy 
 hall.' 
 
 Castle of Indolence. 
 
 But here, to save myself the 
 trouble of too much verbal descrip- 
 tion, I will introduce a painter, and 
 give him directions for the rest of 
 the picture. Painters do not like 
 white cottages, unless a good deal 
 weather-stained ; but as the reader 
 now understands that it is a winter
 
 GLIMPSES OF EARTHLY PARADISE. 39 
 
 night, his services will not be re- 
 quired except for the inside of the 
 house. 
 
 " Paint me then a room seventeen 
 feet by twelve, and not more than 
 seven and a half feet high. This, 
 reader, is somewhat ambitiously 
 styled in my family the drawing- 
 room ; but being contrived 'a double 
 debt to pay/ it is also, and more 
 justly, termed the library ; for it 
 happens that books are the only 
 article of property in which I am 
 richer than my neighbours. Of these 
 I have about five thousand, collected 
 gradually since my eighteenth year. 
 Therefore, painter, put as many as 
 you can into this room. Make it 
 populous with books ; and, further- 
 more, paint me a good fire; and 
 furniture plain and modest, befitting 
 the unpretending cottage of a scholar. 
 And near the fire paint me a tea- 
 table, and (as it is clear that no
 
 40 HOME AND BOOKS: 
 
 creature can come to see one such 
 a stormy night), place only two cups 
 and saucers on the tea-tray; and if 
 you know how to paint such a thing, 
 symbolically or otherwise, paint me 
 an eternal teapot eternal a parte 
 ante, and d parte post ; for I usually 
 drink tea from eight o'clock at night 
 to four o'clock in the morning. And, 
 as it is very unpleasant to make tea, 
 or to pour it out for one's self, paint me 
 a lovely young woman sitting at the 
 table. Paint her arms like Aurora's, 
 and her smiles like Hebe's." 
 
 Robert Buchanan has given us, in 
 his personal reminiscence of Thomas 
 Love Peacock, a few delightful peeps 
 at the author of Nightmare Abbey, 
 and his library, " and it was a good 
 one full of books it was a luxury to 
 handle, editions to make a scholar's 
 mouth water, bound completely in 
 the old style in suits as tough as 
 George Fox's suit of leather."
 
 GLIMPSES OF EARTHLY PARADISE. 41 
 
 Two other rooms we would make 
 mention of rooms round which our 
 hearts often circle in dreamy loving- 
 ness. To us, as we now write, the 
 rooms are still what they were, and the 
 books yet look out from their resting- 
 places upon their owners, and are 
 silently satisfied to see them curl 
 themselves up in their own particular 
 " lap of luxury." The first is the 
 "cheery library" in Douglas Jerrold's 
 cottage at Putney, with its book- 
 shelves running round the walls, and 
 which were " carried no higher than 
 would permit of easy access to the 
 top shelf." Concerning Jerrold, 
 Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, 
 in their Recollections of Writers, make 
 friendly mention. " He had," say 
 they, " an almost reverential fond- 
 ness for books books themselves 
 and said he could not bear to treat 
 them, or see them treated, with dis- 
 respect. He told us it gave him pain
 
 42 HOME AND BOOKS: 
 
 to see them turned on their faces, 
 stretched open, or dog's-eared, or 
 carelessly flung down, or in any way 
 misused. He told us this holding a 
 volume in his hand with a caressing 
 gesture, as though he tendered it 
 affectionately and gratefully for the 
 pleasure it had given him. He spoke 
 like one who had known what it was 
 in former years to buy a book when 
 its purchase involved a sacrifice of 
 some other object, from a not over- 
 stored purse. We have often noticed 
 this in book-lovers who, like ourselves, 
 have had volumes come into cherished 
 possession at times when their glad 
 owners were not rich enough to 
 easily afford book-purchases. Charles 
 Lamb had this tenderness for books, 
 caring nothing for their gaudy 
 clothing, but hugging a rare folio 
 all the nearer to his heart for its 
 worn edges and shabby binding." 
 The second room to which we would
 
 GLIMPSES OF EARTHLY PARADISE. 43 
 
 make reference is the study of Samuel 
 Palmer, so lovingly depicted in the 
 memoir of that famous artist pub- 
 lished by the Fine Art Society. 
 " The study of Samuel Palmer at 
 Furze Hill," writes his biographer, 
 "was a small, comfortable room, to 
 which only a chosen and privileged 
 few were admitted. It had a large 
 bow-window of western aspect, and 
 looked towards Leith Hill. . . . 
 Along the opposite end ran curtained 
 shelves, laden with a heterogeneous 
 but precious burden of plaster casts 
 and gems from the antique, waxen 
 models, colours, and the all-pervading 
 books ; while in one corner lay the 
 old violin, silent now, upon which 
 long years ago, in the quiet Kentish 
 village, he had so often fingered 
 many a beautiful old English air, 
 with other sweet and ancient music. 
 On one side were other and much 
 larger shelves, holding portfolios, in
 
 44 HOME AND BOOKS: 
 
 which were classified the innumerable 
 sketches of all sizes, in all materials, 
 and of all degrees of finish a life's 
 selection from Nature's material, 
 landscape and figure. Under these 
 in box-folios were the elaborate out- 
 door studies, English and Italian. 
 . . . Some more book-laden shelves 
 on either side the fireplace, and an 
 easy-chair or so, completed the 
 arrangement of the study a room 
 bare of the smallest pretension to 
 luxury or superficial elegance, yet the 
 birthplace of so many masterpieces 
 of refined beauty and poetic senti- 
 ment, and so redolent of literature. 
 Here while the north wind without 
 was drifting the snow over the deso- 
 late landscape . . . Samuel Palmer 
 would light the lamp (for gas was an 
 abomination), and with drawn cur- 
 tains would 'refresh the fire and 
 have tolerable weather with the 
 poets.' " Here is Palmer's own
 
 GLIMPSES OF EARTHLY PARADISE. 45 
 
 confession : " Much as I love my 
 calling, I am a true book-worm, and 
 hope on my return to find, about 
 once a month, a whole day for a 
 Great Read ! . . . Some place the 
 bliss in action ; I, in a dull, pattering, 
 gusty December day, which forbids 
 our wishes to rove beyond the tops 
 of the chimney-pots a good fire, a 
 sofa strewed with books, a reading 
 friend, and, above all, a locked 
 door, forbidding impertinent intru- 
 sion. There should be a light dinner 
 about one o'clock ; then a little 
 prosy chat not too argumentative 
 just to help digestion ; then books 
 again, till blessed green -tea -time 
 winds us up for Macbeth, or Hamlet, 
 and ecstasy !" 
 
 Surely in the presence of such 
 pictured homeliness, the " never 
 contented spirit that ever seeks 
 the new " must see that at least 
 some ideals are realizable. Dreams
 
 46 HOME AND BOOKS : 
 
 of glory and fame may prove as 
 inconstant as the brown leaves of 
 autumn which dance along the road 
 coquetting with every passing breeze ; 
 but the fireside remains, and the 
 book, and the recollections of days 
 gone by, and, perhaps, more dreams 
 of what might yet be a little 
 sobered, no doubt, and with some of 
 the wild readiness of belief in man- 
 kind extracted from them ; but 
 dreams, nevertheless, and, as such, 
 sure indications that the soul has 
 not been smitten unto death. We 
 have said that the book remains ; 
 to the thoughtful reader and the 
 book-lover this is tantamount to a 
 declaration that there is still a 
 " heaven on earth."
 
 GLIMPSES OF EARTHLY PARADISE. 47 
 
 II. 
 BOOKS. 
 
 IF the Tenth Commandment really 
 does include books, we freely confess 
 to having often broken it. See how 
 glaring it looks in definite black and 
 white : " Thou shalt not covet thy 
 neighbour's books." Horror of hor- 
 rors ! and there are so many 
 volumes that once belonged, and 
 still belong, to other folks which we 
 heartily wish were helping to crowd 
 our already over-crowded shelves. 
 Let us enumerate a few ; and if any 
 one of our readers, a professed 
 book-lover, can hereafter, with clear 
 conscience, affirm that the breach of 
 the Commandment referred to does 
 not weigh upon his soul, well bah ! 
 he is no book-lover at all. 
 
 Leigh Hunt, once sending a friend 
 a volume of Montaigne, mentioned
 
 48 HOME AND BOOKS: 
 
 his having marked it " so that I shall 
 be in a manner in your company if you 
 read any of it" In a well-chosen 
 library we are, undoubtedly, in the 
 presence of the wisest and best of 
 the world's great children. And yet 
 at some seasons any great display of 
 wisdom overtaxes and overpowers 
 us ; the tender friendships of purely 
 literary souls are infinitely preferable. 
 The very sight of a Locke or Adam 
 Smith compels one to draw his hand 
 across his head from sheer weariness ; 
 the insinuating grace, however, and 
 tenderness, and imaginative humour 
 which we know to be in our posses- 
 sion when we have our grasp upon 
 a Lamb, or an honest Isaac Walton, 
 serve at once to refresh our tired 
 powers. Something of this kind 
 Longfellow must have felt when he 
 penned his well-known Proem to the 
 Waif, in which he desires to be read 
 to him :
 
 GLIMPSES OF EARTHLY PARADISE. 49 
 
 " Some simple and heartfelt lay, 
 That shall soothe this restless feeling, 
 And banish the thoughts of day. 
 
 " Not from the grand old masters, 
 
 Not from the bards sublime, 
 Whose distant footsteps echo 
 Through the corridors of Time. 
 
 " For like strains of martial music, 
 Their mighty thoughts suggest 
 Life's endless toil and endeavour ; 
 And to-night I long for rest." 
 
 The avidity with which first edi- 
 tions of famous books, and volumes 
 containing authors' autographs, or 
 otherwise having special associations, 
 are sought after and purchased is 
 noticeable, and not in any way to be 
 lamented. The book-hunter's hobby 
 is surely as sensible as any other, 
 and makes, moreover, a direct appeal 
 to both the heart and the head, the 
 affections and the understanding. 
 " Sitting last winter among my 
 books," once wrote a famous author, 
 "... I began to consider how I 
 loved the authors of those books ; 
 how I loved them, too, not only 
 
 4
 
 50 HOME AND BOOKS: 
 
 for the imaginative pleasures they 
 afforded me, but for their making 
 me love the very books themselves, 
 and delight to be in contact with 
 them." The volumes mentioned in 
 the following list, could they but be 
 gathered together, would, we think, 
 not only form a small ideal collec- 
 tion, but would also cause their 
 lucky owner to more than " delight 
 to be in contact with them :" 
 
 Charles Lamb's Chapman's Homer, 
 which Leigh Hunt once saw him 
 kiss. 
 
 Any of the volumes mentioned in 
 the following extract from Leigh 
 Hunt's essay " My Books," in The 
 Indicator : " The books I like to have 
 about me most are Spenser, Chaucer, 
 the minor poems of Milton, the 
 Arabian Nights, Theocritiis, Ariosto, 
 and such old good-natured specula- 
 tions as Plutarch's Morals. For most
 
 GLIMPSES OF EARTHLY PARADISE. 51 
 
 of these I like a plain good old 
 binding, never mind how old, pro- 
 vided it wears well ; but my Arabian 
 Nights may be bound in as fine and 
 flowery a style as possible, and I 
 should love an engraving to every 
 dozen pages." 
 
 Dr. Johnson's copy of Fielding's 
 A melia which he read through with- 
 out stopping ; also his Burton's 
 A natomy of Melancholy, the only book, 
 he confessed, that ever took him out 
 of bed two hours sooner than he 
 wished to rise. 
 
 The presentation copy of Franken- 
 stein, with its autograph gift-words 
 from the author (Mary Shelley), to 
 Mary Cowden Clarke. 
 
 Felix Mendelssohn's Burns. [Once 
 happening to express a wish to read 
 Burns's poems, and regretting that 
 he could not get them before he left, 
 
 42
 
 52 HOME AND BOOKS : 
 
 as he was starting next morning for 
 Germany, Alfred Novello and C.C.C. 
 (Charles Cowden Clarke) procured 
 a copy of the fine masculine Scottish 
 poet at Bickers's, in Leicester 
 Square, on their way down to the 
 boat by which Mendelssohn was to 
 leave, and reached there in time to 
 put into his hand the wished-for 
 book, and to see his gratified look 
 on receiving the gift. It is perhaps to 
 this incident we owe the charming 
 two-part song, " O wert thou in 
 the cauld blast." Clarke's Recollec- 
 tions of Writers.] 
 
 The presentation copy of the first 
 edition of Leigh Hunt's translation 
 of Tasso's Amyntas from the trans- 
 lator to Vincent Novello, with which 
 is bound up in green and gold the 
 " original " manuscript of the same. 
 On the title-page (vide Recollections of 
 Writers) is written in Leigh Hunt's
 
 GLIMPSES OF EARTHLY PARADISE. 53 
 
 hand: "To Vincent Novello, from 
 his affectionate friend the trans- 
 lator ;" and inside the cover, in 
 Novello's autograph, beneath his own 
 name and address are these words : 
 " I prize this volume, which was so 
 kindly presented to me by my dear 
 friend Leigh Hunt, as one of the 
 most valuable books in my library; 
 and I particularly request that it 
 may be carefully preserved as an 
 heirloom in my family when I am 
 no more. V. N." 
 
 The presentation copy of Mrs. 
 Caudle's Curtain Lectures from 
 Douglas Jerrold to Mary Cowden 
 Clarke, in which the author wrote : 
 " Presented with great timidity, but 
 equal regard, to Mrs. Cowden 
 Clarke." 
 
 The gift copy of Bleak House from 
 Dickens to Mrs. Clarke, on the title- 
 page of which the author wrote :
 
 54 HOME AND BOOKS: 
 
 " Mary Cowden Clarke, with the 
 regard of Charles Dickens, De- 
 cember, 1853 ;" and accompanying 
 which was a note containing the 
 request : " Pray give the book a 
 place on your shelves, and (if you 
 can) in your heart." 
 
 Charles Cowden Clarke's copies of 
 Leigh Hunt's works which the 
 binders would not bind according to 
 instructions. 
 
 [" I can at least send you your 
 long-promised books. The binder, 
 notwithstanding my particular in- 
 junctions, and not having seen, I 
 suppose, the colour of the fields 
 lately enough to remember it, has 
 made the covers red instead of 
 green. You must fancy the books 
 are blushing for having been so long 
 before they came. Yours most 
 sincerely, LEIGH HUNT." 
 
 The books here referred to were
 
 GLIMPSES OF EARTHLY PARADISE. 55 
 
 The Descent of Liberty and The Feast 
 of the Poets, with other pieces in verse. 
 The binder to whom I (Charles 
 Cowden Clarke) subsequently en- 
 trusted the task of putting Leigh 
 Hunt's volume of poems, entitled 
 Foliage, into an appropriately 
 coloured cover of green, played me 
 a similar trick to the one above re- 
 corded, by sending the book home 
 encased in bright blue ! Recollections 
 of Writers.] 
 
 The volume of Emerson, upon the 
 fly-leaf of which is inscribed in the 
 autograph of Professor Tyndall : 
 " Purchased by inspiration." 
 
 Robert Browning's copy of Laman 
 Blanchard's Lyric Offerings. [What 
 would I do to once again run (real 
 running, for I was a boy), to Bond 
 Street from Camberwell, and come 
 back with a small book brimful of 
 the sweetest and truest things in the
 
 56 HOME AND BOOKS: 
 
 world ? Robert Browning to Laman 
 Blanchard.~\ 
 
 Robert Browning's early copies of 
 Shelley and Keats. [There came 
 into his (Robert Browning's) hands 
 a miserable pirated edition of 
 Shelley's works ; the window was 
 dull, but he looked through it into 
 an enchanted garden. He was im- 
 patient to walk there himself, but in 
 1825 it was by no means easy to 
 obtain the books of Shelley. No 
 bookseller that was applied to knew 
 the name, although Shelley had been 
 dead three years. At last, inquiry 
 was made of the editor of* the 
 Literary Gazette, and it was replied 
 that the books in question could be 
 obtained of C. and J. Oilier, of Vere 
 Street. To Vere Street, accord- 
 ingly, Mrs. Browning proceeded, 
 and brought back as a present for 
 her son, not only all the works of
 
 GLIMPSES OF EARTHLY PARADISE. 57 
 
 Shelley, but three volumes written 
 by a Mr. John Keats, which were 
 recommended to her as being very 
 much in the spirit of Mr. Shelley. 
 A bibliophile of to-day is almost 
 dazed in thinking of the prize which 
 the unconscious lady brought back 
 with her to Camberwell. There 
 was the Pisa Adonais, in its purple 
 paper cover; there was Epipsychidion, 
 in short, all the books she bought 
 were still in their first edition, 
 except The Cenci, which professed to 
 be in the second. " The Early 
 "Writings of Robert Browning," by 
 E. W. Gosse, in The Century Maga- 
 zine:} 
 
 John Stuart Mill's copy of Robert 
 Browning's Pauline. [But a more 
 curious incident was that a copy fell 
 into the hands of John Stuart Mill, 
 who was only six years the senior of 
 the poet. It delighted him in the
 
 5 8 HOME AND BOOKS: 
 
 highest degree, and he immediately 
 wrote to the editor of T ait's Maga- 
 zine, the only periodical in which he 
 was at that time free to express him- 
 self, for leave to review Pauline at 
 length. The reply was that nothing 
 would have been more welcome ; but 
 that, unfortunately, in the preced- 
 ing number the poem had been dis- 
 missed with one line of contemptu- 
 ous neglect. Mr. Mill's opportunities 
 extended no further than this one 
 magazine ; but at his death there 
 came into Mr. Browning's possession 
 this identical copy, the blank pages 
 of which were crowded with Mill's 
 annotations and remarks. The late 
 John Forster took such an interest 
 in this volume that he borrowed it, 
 " convey, the wise it call," and 
 when he died, it passed with his 
 library into the possession of the 
 South Kensington Museum, where 
 the curious relic of the youth of two
 
 GLIMPSES OF EARTHLY PARADISE. 59 
 
 eminent men has at last found a 
 resting-place. Ibid.] 
 
 Charles Lamb's Beaumont and 
 Fletcher. [(Bridget Elia loquitur) 
 " Do you remember the brown suit 
 which you made to hang upon you, 
 till all your friends cried shame upon 
 you, it grew so thread-bare and all 
 because of that folio Beaumont and 
 Fletcher, which you dragged home 
 late at night from Barker's in 
 Covent Garden ? Do you remember 
 how we eyed it for weeks before we 
 could make up our minds to the 
 purchase, and had not come to a 
 determination till it was near ten 
 o'clock of the Saturday night, when 
 you set off from Islington, fearing 
 you should be too late and when 
 the old bookseller, with some 
 grumbling, opened his shop, and by 
 the twinkling taper (for he was 
 setting bedwards) lighted out the
 
 60 HOME AND BOOKS: 
 
 relic from his dusty treasures and 
 when you lugged it home, wishing it 
 were twice as cumbersome and 
 when you presented it to me and 
 when we were exploring the perfect- 
 ness of it (collating, you called it) 
 and while I was repairing some of the 
 loose leaves with paste, which your 
 impatience would not suffer to be 
 left till daybreak was there no 
 pleasure in being a poor man ? or 
 can those neat black clothes which 
 you wear now, and are so careful to 
 keep brushed, since we have become 
 rich and finical, give you half the 
 honest vanity with which you 
 ilaunted it about in that over-worn 
 suit your old corbeau for four or 
 five weeks longer than you should 
 have done, to pacify your conscience 
 for the mighty sum of fifteen or 
 sixteen shillings was it ? a great 
 affair we thought it then which you 
 had lavished on the old folio. Now
 
 GLIMPSES OF EARTHLY PARADISE. 6l 
 
 you can afford to buy any book 
 that pleases you, but I do not see 
 that you ever bring me home any 
 nice old purchases now." Etta's 
 
 Essays: Old China. 1 cannot 
 
 read Beaumont and Fletcher but 
 in folio. The Octavo editions are 
 painful to look at. I have no sym- 
 pathy with them. Detached Thoughts 
 
 on Books and Reading. It just 
 
 caught my eye in a little extract- 
 book I keep, which is full of quota- 
 tions from Beaumont and Fletcher 
 in particular, in which authors I 
 can't help thinking there is a greater 
 richness of poetical fancy than in 
 anyone, Shakspeare excepted. 
 
 Charles Lamb to Coleridge. It may 
 
 interest some of the many lovers of 
 Charles Lamb to hear that the copy 
 of Beaumont and Fletcher which 
 belonged to him, and was used in 
 making selections for his specimens, 
 is at present in the British Museum,
 
 62 HOME AND BOOKS: 
 
 having been picked up accidentally 
 at a sale a few years ago.* G. C. 
 
 Macaulay's Francis Beaumont : a 
 Critical Study.] 
 
 Any of the volumes mentioned by 
 Lamb in his Detached Thoughts on 
 Books and Reading. 
 
 Any book which Coleridge 
 borrowed of Lamb. [Reader, if 
 haply thou art blessed with a 
 moderate collection, be shy of show- 
 ing it ; or if thy heart overfloweth 
 to lend them, lend thy books ; but 
 let it be to such a one as S. T. C. : 
 he will return them (generally anti- 
 cipating the time appointed) with 
 usury, enriched with annotations 
 tripling their value. I have had 
 
 v " It was the late Lieut. -Col. Cunningham who 
 ' picked up ' the precious folio, which at the sale of 
 that scholar's books was purchased by the British 
 Museum authorities for 2$. It is strange that a 
 volume of such surpassing interest excited so little 
 competition." Athenaum.
 
 GLIMPSES OF EARTHLY PARADISE. 63 
 
 experience. Many are these pre- 
 cious MSS. of his (in matter often- 
 times, and almost in quantity not 
 unfrequently, vying with the 
 original) in no very clerkly hand 
 legible in my Daniel ;* in old 
 Burton ;t in Sir Thomas Browne ; 
 and those abstruser cogitations of 
 the Greville now, alas, wandering 
 in Pagan lands ! I counsel thee, 
 shut not thy heart nor thy library 
 against S. T. C. The Two Races of 
 Men.] 
 
 The pocket-copy of Thomson's 
 Castle of Indolence that belonged to 
 
 * "The works of Samuel Daniel, 1718, I2mo., 
 2 vols. The annotations by Coleridge and Lamb 
 himself are of great interest and of considerable 
 extent. The Civil Wars, however, appeared to 
 have attracted almost exclusive attention. There 
 is very little writing in the other parts of the book ; 
 but there is the extract from Tetley's Festival t 
 1610, in Lamb's own hand on a spare page, which 
 occurs in the Dramatic Specimens.' Notes to 
 Lamb's Complete Works, 4 vols., Moxon, 1870. 
 
 t "The first edition, 1621, 410., was the one 
 which Lamb owned." Ibid.
 
 6.j HOME AND BOOKS: 
 
 Wordsworth, and in which he wrote 
 the stanzas commencing : 
 
 "Within our happy Castle there dwelt one." 
 
 The copy of Emerson's English 
 Traits which belonged to Leigh Hunt. 
 [Early in the morning he (Emerson) 
 was once more in the library (of 
 J. T. Fields). I found him there 
 laughing over a little book he had 
 discovered. It was Leigh Hunt's 
 copy of English Traits, and was full 
 of marginal notes, which amused 
 Emerson greatly. " Glimpses of 
 Emerson," by Annie Fields, in 
 Harper's New Monthly Magazine.'] 
 
 Alfred Austin's copy of William 
 Morris's Earthly Paradise. [Under 
 a blossoming thorn, stretched 'neath 
 some umbrageous beech, or sheltered 
 from the glare of noon by some fern- 
 crested Devonshire cliff, with lazy 
 summer sea-waves breaking at one's
 
 GLIMPSES OF EARTHLY PARADISE. 65 
 
 feet such were the fitting hour and 
 mood in which criticism all forgot 
 to drink in the honeyed rhythm of 
 this melodious storier. Such has 
 been my happy lot ; and I lay before 
 this giver of dainty things thanks 
 which even the absence of all per- 
 sonal familiarity cannot restrain from 
 being expressed affectionately. The 
 Poetry of the Period.] 
 
 The copy of Rousseau's Nouvelle 
 Hcloise which P. G. Patmore had in his 
 pocket during the prize-fight to which 
 he and Hazlitt went. [I put the book 
 aside not thinking of looking into 
 it ; for I had removed it from my 
 pocket only because it incommoded 
 me. But Hazlitt asked : " What's 
 that ?" I handed the book to him 
 with a smile ; and I shall not forget 
 the burst of half-comic, half-pathetic 
 earnestness with which he read the 
 title the Nouvelle Hcloise ! And 
 
 5
 
 66 HOME AND BOOKS: 
 
 then his countenance fell as he 
 turned over the pages silently, and 
 the tears came into his eyes as he 
 looked, for the first time, perhaps, 
 for twenty years, on words, thoughts, 
 and sentiments on which his soul 
 had dwelt and banqueted in its 
 early days, with a passionate ecstasy 
 only equalled by that in which they 
 had been conceived and written ; for 
 the Nouvelle He'lo'ise was the idol of 
 Hazlitt's youthful imagination, and 
 he himself resembled its writer more 
 curiously and remarkably than, per- 
 haps, any one distinguished man 
 ever resembled another. Patmore's 
 My Friends and Acquaintance.^ 
 
 Shelley's volume of the same work. 
 [After passing a fortnight in the 
 hotel, the two travelling parties sepa- 
 rated ; Byron and Polidori moving 
 into the Villa Diodati, and Shelley, 
 with Mary and Miss Clairmont, into
 
 GLIMPSES OF EARTHLY PARADISE. 67 
 
 a small house hard-by on the Mont 
 Blanc side of the lake. The Villa 
 Diodati is very beautifully situated 
 on the high banks, named Belle 
 Rive, of the lake near Coligny. 
 Shelley's house was termed the 
 Maison Chapuis, or Campagne Mont 
 Alegre. He and his would some- 
 times sleep at Byron's after sitting 
 up talking till dawn. It was a re- 
 markably wet summer, which did 
 not, however, prevent Shelley from 
 being out on the lake at all hours of 
 the day and night. On the 23rd of 
 June (1816), he and Lord Byron, 
 accompanied only by two boatmen 
 and his lordship's servant, undertook 
 a voyage round the lake, lasting 
 nine days ; they visited Meillerie, 
 Clarens, Chillon, Vevai, Lausanne. 
 On this occasion Shelley read for 
 the first time the Nouvelle Helo'ise : 
 " an overflowing (as it now seems, 
 surrounded by the scenes which it 
 
 52
 
 68 HOME AND BOOKS: 
 
 has so wonderfully peopled) of sub- 
 limest genius, and more than human 
 sensibility." He would have liked 
 to weep at the so-called Bosquet de 
 Julie. In sailing near St. Gingoux 
 (the scene of a similar incident in 
 the Nouvelle Hclo'ise), the voyagers 
 were overtaken by a tempest ; and, 
 through the mismanagement of one 
 of the boatmen, were very nearly 
 upset. Shelley, who somehow could 
 never be taught to swim, considered 
 himself in imminent danger of 
 drowning. He refused assistance, 
 sat on a locker, grasped the rings at 
 both ends, and said he would go 
 down. " I felt in this near prospect 
 of death " (he wrote to Peacock on 
 the I2th of July) " a mixture of 
 sensations, among which terror 
 entered, though but subordinately. 
 My feelings would have been less 
 painful had I been alone ; but I 
 knew that my companion would
 
 GLIMPSES OF EARTHLY PARADISE. 69 
 
 have attempted to save me, and I 
 was overcome with humiliation when 
 I thought that his life might have 
 been risked to preserve mine." 
 Rossetti's Memoir of Shelley.'] 
 
 Mrs. Shelley's Queen Mab. [The 
 following passionate outpouring of a 
 woman's heart was exposed to the 
 public gaze in the auction-room of 
 Messrs. Sotheby, Wilkinson and 
 Hodge. It occurs on the fly-leaves 
 of the first edition of Shelley's Queen 
 Mab (Lot 63), the author's presenta- 
 tion copy to " Mary Wollstonecraft 
 Godwin, P. B. S.," with his autograph 
 inscriptions, one at end in pencil : 
 " You see, Mary, I have not forgotten 
 you." On the fly-leaves at end Mary 
 Wollstonecraft Godwin has written, 
 "July, 1814.* This book is sacred 
 to me, and as no other creature shall 
 
 * On the 28th of July, Shelley and Mary God- 
 win left England together.
 
 70 HOME AND BOOKS: 
 
 ever look into it I may write in it 
 what I please yet what shall I write ? 
 that I love the author beyond all 
 powers of expression, and that I am 
 parted from him. Dearest and only 
 love by that love we have promised 
 to each other, although I may not 
 be yours I can never be another's. 
 But I am thine, exclusively thine : 
 
 By the kiss of love, by the glance none saw 
 beside, 
 
 The smile none else might render, 
 The whispered thought of hearts allied, 
 
 The pressure of the thrilling hand, 
 
 I have pledged myself to thee, and 
 sacred is the gift. I remember your 
 words : ' You are now, Mary, going 
 to mix with many, and for a moment 
 I shall depart ; but in the solitude of 
 your chamber I shall be with you.' 
 Yes, you are ever with me, sacred 
 vision. 
 
 But ah ! I feel in this was given 
 A blessing never meant for me ; 
 
 Thou art too like a dream from heaven, 
 For earthly love to merit thee."]
 
 GLIMPSES OF EARTHLY PARADISE. 71 
 
 Shelley's Ossian with the poet's 
 signature on the title-page, bought 
 by a lucky collector lately in Book- 
 sellers' Row. 
 
 The copy of Foppens's rare edition 
 of Petrarch's Le Sage Resolu contre 
 I'une et Vautre Fortune, that once be- 
 longed to Sir Hudson Lowe, the gaoler 
 of Napoleon, " and which may have 
 fortified, by its stoical maxims, the 
 soul of one who knew the extremes 
 of either fortune, the captive of St. 
 Helena." 
 
 The Imitatio Cliristi which belonged 
 to J. J. Rousseau. [It was in 1827 
 that M. de Latour was walking on 
 the quai of the Louvre. Among the 
 volumes in a shop he noticed a 
 shabby little copy of the Imitatio 
 Christi. M. de Latour, like other 
 bibliophiles, was not in the habit of 
 examining stray copies of this work,
 
 72 HOME AND BOOKS: 
 
 except when they were of the Elzevir 
 size, for the Elzevirs published a 
 famous undated copy of the Imitatio, 
 a book which brings considerable 
 prices. However, by some lucky 
 chance, some Socratic daemon 
 whispering, maybe, in his ear, he 
 picked up the little dingy volume of 
 the last century. It was of a Paris 
 edition 1751 ; but what was the 
 name on the fly-leaf? M. de Latour 
 read a J. J. Rousseau. There was 
 no mistake about it ; the good 
 bibliophile knew Rousseau's hand- 
 writing perfectly well. To make still 
 more sure, he paid his seventy-five 
 centimes for the book, and walked 
 across the Pont des Arts to his book- 
 binders, where he had a copy of 
 Rousseau's works with a facsimile of 
 his handwriting. As he walked, M. 
 de Latour read in his book, and 
 found notes of Rousseau's on the 
 margin. The facsimile proved that
 
 GLIMPSES OF EARTHLY PARADISE. 73 
 
 the inscription was genuine. The 
 happy de Latour now made for the 
 public office, in which he was a 
 functionary, and rushed into the 
 bureau of his friend the Marquis de 
 
 V . The Marquis, a man of 
 
 great strength of character, re- 
 cognised the signature of Rousseau 
 with but little display of emotion. 
 M. de Latour now noticed some 
 withered flowers among the sacred 
 pages ; but it was reserved for a 
 friend to discover in the faded petals 
 Rousseau's favourite flower, the 
 periwinkle. Like a true French- 
 man, like Rousseau himself in his 
 younger days, M. de Latour had not 
 recognised the periwinkle when he 
 saw it. That night, so excited was 
 M. de Latour, he never closed an 
 eye ! What puzzled him was that 
 he could not remember, in all 
 Rousseau's works, a single allusion 
 to the Imitatio Christi. Time went
 
 74 HOME AND BOOKS: 
 
 on, the old book was not rebound, 
 but kept piously in a case of russia 
 leather. M. de Latour did not 
 suppose that " dans ce bas monde 
 il fut permis aux joies du biblio- 
 phile d'aller encore plus loin." He 
 imagined that the delights of the 
 amateur could only go further in 
 heaven. It chanced, however, one 
 day that he was turning over the 
 (Euvres Inedites of Rousseau, when 
 he found a letter, in which Jean 
 Jacques, writing in 1763, asked 
 Motiers-Travers to send him the 
 Imitatio Christi. Now the date 1764 
 is memorable, in Rousseau's Confes- 
 sions, for a burst of sentiment over a 
 periwinkle, the first he had noticed 
 particularly since his residence at 
 Les Charmettes, where the flower 
 had been remarked by Madame de 
 Warens. Thus M. Tenant de Latour 
 had recovered the very identical peri- 
 winkle which caused the tear of
 
 GLIMPSES OF EARTHLY PARADISE. 75 
 
 sensibility to moisten the fine eyes 
 of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Andrew 
 Lang's The Library. ,] 
 
 Lord Byron's copy of Shenstone's 
 Works. [An interesting Byron relic 
 was sold last week at the auction- 
 rooms of Messrs. Sotheby, Wilkinson 
 and Hodge. This was a copy of 
 Shenstone's Works in Verse and Prose 
 (three vols., 1777), with Byron's 
 autograph signature in each volume, 
 and with four pages of his writing in 
 vol. iii. " eulogistic of Shenstone." 
 Perhaps the chief interest in the relic 
 lies in an epigram written by Byron 
 in one of the volumes. This epigram 
 we quote from memory as follows : 
 
 " ' I cannot understand,' says Dick, 
 ' What 'tis that makes my legs so thick.' 
 ' You do not understand,' says Harry, 
 ' How great a calf they have to carry.' " 
 Athentzum, Nov. 21, 1885.] 
 
 The copy of American Notes for 
 General Circulation which belonged
 
 76 HOME AND BOOKS: 
 
 to Dickens' father. [It was a pre- 
 sentation copy to the author's father, 
 and bears on each title his autograph, 
 "John Dickens, 18 Oct., 1842." It 
 also contains a document of two 
 pages, 4to., entirely in the hand- 
 writing of Charles Dickens, and 
 signed by him, being the original 
 minutes of a meeting held on board 
 the Britannia steamship from Liver- 
 pool to Boston, 2ist January, 1842, 
 the Earl of Mulgrave in the chair, 
 Charles Dickens, Esquire, secretary 
 and treasurer to the meeting. The 
 resolutions were : i. Recognising 
 the nautical skill of the captain 
 during a tempestuous voyage. 2. Sub- 
 scription to purchase a piece of silver 
 plate. 3. Appointment of a com- 
 mittee. Then follows an account of 
 the captain attending to give thanks, 
 the amount subscribed, and the in- 
 scription to be engraved on the 
 plate ; the whole finished with a very
 
 GLIMPSES OF EARTHLY PARADISE. 77 
 
 characteristic signature of Dickens. 
 Fitzgerald's Recreations of a Literary 
 Man.] 
 
 But we shall never cease enumer- 
 ating these " to be desired " volumes. 
 A few more, however, and we finish 
 for the present. Of great and pecu- 
 liar value are the miniature i8mo. 
 Chaucer which belonged to Charles 
 Cowden Clarke, and in which Keats 
 marked out his favourite passages ; 
 the folio copy of Shakespeare con- 
 taining Keats' marginal note ; the 
 folio Chapman's Homer, the property 
 of Mr. Alsager of the Times, the peru- 
 sal of which called forth from Keats 
 his famous sonnet," On First Looking 
 into Chapman's Homer ;" either of 
 the books to purchase which George 
 Henry Lewes went without food ; 
 any volume of the two piles which 
 supported the fire-tongs in Shelley's 
 room at Oxford on the memorable
 
 ;S HOME AND BOOKS: 
 
 morning of Hogg's first call upon the 
 poet ; either of the copies of The 
 Necessity of Atheism which Shelley 
 boldly circulated among the college 
 authorities, before whom he was sub- 
 sequently summoned and by whom 
 he was expelled from Oxford ; the 
 Queen Mab forwarded by its author 
 to Byron ; John Milton's Bible, 
 recently purchased by the British 
 Museum ; Robert Buchanan's copy 
 of his friend David Gray's Luggie ; 
 and Sydney DobelPs copy of Alexan- 
 der Smith's first volume of Poems.* 
 
 * " You have seen doubtless by the papers that 
 Alexander Smith is elected Secretary to the 
 University. It was a hard-fought contest, and 
 you would have been amused to drop suddenly 
 on Edinburgh, and find me one of the canvassers. 
 Simpson came for me unexpectedly, early in the 
 day, to use my ' influence and testimony ' with the 
 town council ; and, finding myself fairly in for it, 
 I let what my hand found to do be done with my 
 might, and did not leave off work till eight in the 
 evening. Several influential people had got 
 notions of Alexander's ' immorality.' I took the 
 book with me, and gave extempore lectures on the 
 pure passages to counteract the effect of the 
 others." Sydney Dobell to his Father and Mother.
 
 GLIMPSES OF EARTHLY PARADISE. 79 
 
 Every great and remarkable man 
 has had some one book as a favourite. 
 That one book is, to us, sacred for 
 all time on account of its associa- 
 tions, and is a treasure sedulously 
 to be sought after in booksellers' 
 catalogues, on stalls, and at auction- 
 sales. Alas ! the magnitude of the 
 loss when Leigh Hunt caused his 
 copy of Keats' Lamia, which was 
 found on the person of the drowned 
 Shelley, to be burnt with his remains. 
 'Twas a cursed and heinous, as well 
 as a sacred and loving, act on the 
 part of its owner. That volume was 
 one for a bibliomaniac to dream, 
 storm, lie, swear, go stark mad 
 about.* 
 
 * " Firmly clasped in the hand of Shelley when 
 the boat went down -,vas a copy of .rEschylus (not 
 of Keats' poems). Shelley was passionately 
 enamoured of /Eschylus, and was apparently read- 
 ing him at the very moment when the vessel was 
 
 struck There was a volume of Keats in 
 
 his breast-pocket, but the volume of ^ischylus, as 
 already intimated, was in his hand, and with the 
 finger clasped in its pages. The volume still
 
 So HOME AND BOOKS: 
 
 That these rare association-volumes 
 are getting to have a monetary as 
 well as a sentimental value, is to be 
 seen from a single instance which 
 occurred at the sale of the late D. G. 
 Rossetti's effects, at which Swin- 
 burne's Atalanta in Calydon, contain- 
 ing, inscribed in the author's auto- 
 graph, " Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 
 from his affectionate A. C. Swin- 
 burne," realized thirty-one guineas. 
 It seems, on reading an account like 
 
 opens at the page where Shelley had been reading 
 when the storm arose, and the print of his finger 
 is still to be perceived upon the page. The book 
 was in his hand when the body was found, and it 
 was taken from him by Mr. Trelawny as he laid 
 him on the pile for the burning ; the volume 
 remains in the possession of Sir Percy Shelley. 
 The poet had probably, however, been reading 
 Keats' last volume not long before the disaster, 
 for it was found with some of the pages doubled 
 buck, thrust away, probably in haste, into his 
 breast-pocket. The copy of Keats had been lent 
 by Leigh Hunt, who told Shelley to keep it till 
 he could give it to him again with his own hands. 
 As the lender would receive it from no one else, 
 it was burnt with the body." George Barnett 
 Smith's Shelley, a critical Biography.
 
 GLIMPSES OF EARTHLY PARADISE. Si 
 
 this, to be all a dream of the olden 
 times, when usurers considered books 
 as precious objects of pawn. And 
 who shall say that Emerson may not 
 yet, in some future migration on 
 earth, learn the opposite to what he 
 once ascertained of a surly bank- 
 director, " that in bank-parlours they 
 estimate all stock of this kind as 
 rubbish " ?
 
 THE ROMANCE AND REALITY 
 OF DEDICATIONS. 
 
 WHAT romance as well as reality do 
 we find in " dedications," pregnant 
 as they so often are with love-indi- 
 cations or friendship-avowals nay, 
 sometimes even with the burden of 
 grief's bitter self ! As D'Israeli the 
 elder confessed to always gather 
 amusement from a preface, so confess 
 I often to the getting of more plea- 
 surable insight into the soul of an 
 author from a perusal of his dedica- 
 tions, than from many readings of 
 what he wishes his friends to look 
 upon as his " works."
 
 DEDICATIONS. 83 
 
 I. 
 
 Shelley's love-stories are, to a great 
 extent, told in his dedications. Queen 
 Mab has this one prefixed to it : 
 
 " To HARRIET * * * * *. 
 
 " Whose is the love that, gleaming through the 
 
 world, 
 
 Wards off the poisonous arrow of its scorn? 
 Whose is the warm and partial praise, 
 Virtue's most sweet reward ? 
 
 " Beneath whose looks did my reviving soul 
 Riper in truth and virtuous daring gro'i* ? 
 Whose eyes have I gazed fondly on, 
 And loved mankind the more ? 
 
 " Harriet! on thine: thou ivcrt my purer mind ; 
 Thou wert the inspiration of my song ; 
 Thine are these early wilding flowers, 
 Though garlanded by me. 
 
 " Then press into thy breast this pledge of love, 
 And know, though time may change and years 
 
 may roll, 
 
 Each flo't-tfret gathered in my heart 
 It consecrates to thine." 
 
 The poem to which this is attached 
 was first written in 1810, but was not 
 finished before 1813, when it was 
 printed for private circulation. In 
 
 62
 
 84 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 the summer of 1809 Shelley had 
 fallen in love with his cousin, Harriet 
 Grove, who, when the poet was but 
 nineteen, married some one else. 
 Medwin is of opinion that to Miss 
 Grove the poem in its original form 
 was dedicated,* for in his Life of 
 Shelley, speaking of this attachment, 
 he says : " Shelley's love, however, 
 had taken deep root, as proved by the 
 dedication to Queen Mab, written in 
 the following year." But this state- 
 ment of Shelley's friend receives flat 
 contradiction from a letter of the 
 poet's to his publisher, Mr. Oilier 
 (quoted in Shelley Memorials), in which 
 he tells him explicitly that the dedi- 
 cation in question was to his first wife. 
 But we must return a step. Soon after 
 his cousin's marriage Shelley eloped 
 to Scotland with Harriet Westbrook, 
 
 * Mr. H. Buxton Forman shares this belief of 
 Medwin; Mr. W. M. Rossetti, on the contrary, 
 treats it as sheer romancing.
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 85 
 
 a school-fellow of his sister, and 
 daughter of a coffee-house keeper, 
 nicknamed " Jew " Westbrook, and 
 was there married in the early 
 autumn of 1811, he being at that time 
 nineteen years of age and his wife 
 sixteen. Shelley distinctly affirms, 
 as we have seen, that to this Harriet 
 Queen Mab was dedicated ; and yet 
 three of his letters lead one to doubt 
 whether, after all, his love for her 
 was such as to cause him really to 
 believe that she was (to quote from 
 the dedication in question) " the in- 
 spiration of A/s song." His biographer, 
 Hogg, has published two of these 
 letters. The first refers to Harriet 
 Westbrook and the writer's feelings re- 
 garding her. "If I know anything about 
 love" he says in it, "/ am not in love" 
 The second also refers to Harriet : 
 " Her father has persecuted her in a 
 most horrible way, by endeavouring 
 to compel her to go to school. She
 
 86 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 asked my advice ; resistance was the 
 answer, at the same time that I 
 essayed to mollify Mr. W. in vain ! 
 And in consequence of my advice, she has 
 thrown herself upon my protection. . . . 
 I advised her to resist. She wrote to 
 say that resistance was iiseless, but that 
 she would fly with me, and threw herself 
 upon my protection ." From the third 
 letter (written by Shelley almost im- 
 mediately after his marriage, and 
 first made public by Mr. W. M. 
 Rossetti in a lecture printed in the 
 University Magazine, Feb., 1878) we 
 extract the following : " The fre- 
 quency of her letters " (Harriet's, of 
 course) " became greater during my 
 stay in Wales. I answered them. 
 They became interesting. They con- 
 tained complaints of the irrational 
 conduct of her relations, and the 
 misery of living where she could love 
 no one. Her letters became more 
 and more gloomy. At length one
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 87 
 
 assumed a tone of such despair as 
 induced me to quit Wales precipi- 
 tately. I arrived in London. I was 
 shocked at observing the alteration of her 
 looks. Little did I divine its cause : 
 she had become violently attached to me, 
 and feared that I should not return her 
 attachment. Prejudice made the con- 
 fession painful. It was impossible to 
 avoid being much affected. I promised 
 to unite my fate with hers. ... 7 pro- 
 posed marriage for the reasons which I 
 have given you, and she complied.'" 
 This mode of love-making and the 
 subsequent events are rather peculiar 
 comments on Shelley's declaration 
 that this Harriet was his inspiration. 
 After his marriage, however, he says : 
 "Harriet is very happy, and I am very 
 happy;" and again: "When I come 
 home to Harriet, I am the happiest 
 of the happy." Fit expressions 
 these to set beside that last verse of 
 the dedication of Queen Mab :
 
 88 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 " Then press into thy breast this pledge of love, 
 And know, though time may change and years 
 
 may roll, 
 
 Each flow'ret gathered in my heart 
 It consecrates to thine." 
 
 And yet three years after their 
 marriage Shelley looked for the last 
 time upon the face of his Harriet. He 
 had seen Mary Godwin, for whom he 
 conceived "a sudden, violent, irresis- 
 tible, uncontrollable passion." and in 
 July, i8i4,he,incompanywithhisnew 
 love, left England. Some time after- 
 wards he penned the following, in 
 explanation of his conduct : " Every- 
 one who knows me must know that 
 the partner of my life should be one 
 who can feel poetry and understand 
 philosophy. Harriet is a noble animal, 
 but she can do neither." In 1816, 
 she, whom he once declared to be "the 
 inspiration of his song," committed 
 suicide by drowning. In the following 
 December Shelley and Mary Godwin 
 were married.
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 89 
 
 Early in 1818 was published The 
 Revolt of Islam (issued at first under 
 the title of Laon and Cythna), which 
 the poet dedicated to his new wife in 
 the following language : 
 
 "To MARY . 
 
 " So now my summer task is ended, Mary, 
 And I return to thee, mine own hearts home : 
 ***** 
 
 " The toil which stole from thee so many an hour 
 Is ended and the fruit is at thy feet ! 
 No longer where the woods to frame a bower 
 With interlaced branches mix and meet, 
 Or where, with sound like many voices sweet, 
 Waterfalls leap among wild islands green, 
 AVhich framed for my lone boat a lone retreat 
 Of moss-grown trees and weeds, shall I be seen :* 
 But beside thee, where still my heart has ever been. 
 ***** 
 
 " Yd never found I one not false to me, 
 Hard hearts, and cold, like weights of icy stone, 
 Which crushed and withered mine, that could 
 
 not be 
 Aught but a lifeless clog until revived by thee. 
 
 * Mrs. Shelley in her " Note on the Revolt of 
 Islam" says: "During the year 1817, we were 
 established at Marlow, in Buckinghamshire. . . . 
 The poem was written in his boat, as it floated 
 under the beech groves of Bisham, or during 
 wanderings in the neighbouring country, which is 
 distinguished for peculiar beauty."
 
 90 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 " No more alone through the world's wilderness, 
 Although I trod the paths of high intent, 
 I journeyed now ; no more companionless, 
 Where solitude is like despair, I went. 
 * * * * - 
 
 " Now has descended a serener hour, 
 
 ***** 
 
 And from thy side two gentle babes are born 
 To fill our home with smiles, and thus are we 
 Most fortunate beneath life's beaming morn ! 
 And these delights, and thou, have been to me 
 The parents of the song I consecrate to thee." 
 
 As a sequel to these lines may be 
 quoted an extract from a letter ad- 
 dressed by the poet to Mr. Gisborne 
 just before his death : " I only feel 
 the want of those who can feel 
 and understand me. Whether from 
 proximity or the continuity of do- 
 mestic intercourse, Mary does not. 
 The necessity of concealing from her 
 thoughts that would pain her neces- 
 sitates this, perhaps. It is the curse 
 of Tantalus that a person, possessing 
 such excellent powers and so pure 
 a mind as hers, should not excite the 
 sympathy indispensable to their ap- 
 plication to domestic life."
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 91 
 
 With what Shelley's thoughts and 
 feelings were, somewhat later, towards 
 the Lady Emilia Viviani, to whom 
 his Epipsychidion was addressed, and 
 towards Mrs. Williams (the Jane of 
 some of his touching lyrics), we have 
 nothing to do. Our object has been 
 to confine our remarks to that portion 
 of his heart's story which, with some 
 show of reason, could be based upon 
 the language of his dedications. In 
 Shelley's love affairs we have the 
 supremest revelation of the impas- 
 sioned fickleness and lightsome 
 changefulness of the true poetic 
 nature. Not long after the issue of 
 Epipsychidion, the poet wrote of it, to 
 Leigh Hunt, as " a portion of me 
 already dead," adding, as apologetic 
 for the state of his mind : " Some of 
 us have, in a prior existence, been in 
 love with an Antigone, and that 
 makes us find no full content in any 
 mortal tie." Later on he writes :
 
 92 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 " The Epipsychidion I cannot look 
 at ; the person whom it celebrates 
 was a cloud instead of a Juno ; and 
 poor Ixion starts from the Centaur 
 that was the offspring of his own 
 embrace. If you are curious, how- 
 ever, to hear what I am and have 
 been, it will tell you something 
 thereof. It is an idealized history of 
 my life and feelings. I think one 
 is always in love with something or 
 other ; the error and I confess it is 
 not easy for spirits cased in flesh and 
 blood to avoid it consists in seeking 
 in a mortal image the likeness of 
 what is, perhaps, eternal." 
 
 The dedication to Leigh Hunt of 
 The Cenci by Shelley, and the early 
 volume of Poems by Keats recalls to 
 our memory how inextricably were 
 interwoven the fates of these three 
 friends. At Hunt's house Shelley 
 first met Keats, who, in amicable 
 rivalry of the Revolt of Islam, under-
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 93 
 
 took the writing of Endymion. It 
 was Hunt who walked with Keats in 
 one of the lanes near Highgate when 
 they met Coleridge, and it was to 
 him the author of The Rime of the 
 Ancient Mariner turned, after he had 
 shaken Keats' hand, and in a whisper 
 said: " There is death in that hand." 
 Alas ! that the prophecy should so 
 soon have been fulfilled. In 1821 
 Keats was buried in the Protestant 
 cemetery at Rome,* the spot so 
 
 "" Lord Houghton writes: "Keats was buried 
 in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, one of the 
 most beautiful spots on which the eye and heart 
 of man can rest. ... In one of those mental 
 voyages into the past, which precede death, Keats 
 had told Severn that he thought ' the intensest 
 pleasure he had received in life was in watching 
 the growth of flowers,' and another time, after 
 lying a while quite still, he murmured, ' I feel the 
 flowers growing over me.' And there they do 
 grow, even all the winter long, violets and daisies 
 mingling with the fresh herbage, and, in the words 
 of Shelley, ' making one in love with death, to 
 think one should be buried in so sweet a place.' " 
 Nowadays one of the earliest excursions of the 
 literary man at Rome is to the graves of Keats 
 and Shelley. And very tender are some of the
 
 94 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 graphically described in Shelley's 
 Adonais. The ensuing year the ashes 
 of Shelley were laid to rest near 
 those of his brother-poet, of whom 
 he had sung with such sweet lament. 
 It will be remembered that it was in 
 connection with the arrival of Hunt 
 in Italy that the voyage, which ended 
 
 productions born of these visits ; witness William 
 Bell Scott's sonnet On the Inscription, Keats' 
 Tombstone, and the etching, by the author, which 
 accompanies it in his volume of poems. Note- 
 worthy also is the mention made in two charming 
 sonnets by Aldrich. We quote fully the one en- 
 titled Three Flowers : 
 
 " Herewith I send you three pressed withered flowers : 
 This one was white, with golden star ; this, blue 
 As Capri's cave ; that, purple and shot through 
 With sunset-orange. Where the Duomo towers 
 In diamond air, and under hanging bowers 
 The Arno glides, this faded violet grew 
 On Landor's grave ; from Landor's heart it drew 
 Its magic azure in the long spring hours. 
 Within the shadow of the Pyramid 
 Of Cams Cestius was the daisy found, 
 White as the soul of Keats in Paradise. 
 The pansy there were hundreds of them, hid 
 In the thick grass that folded Shelley's mound, 
 Guarding his ashes with most lovely eyes." 
 
 The reference here made to the daisy and the 
 pansy will recall to our readers the fancy of Keats 
 that he " felt the daisies growing over him," 
 nnd the words of Shelley: " Pansies let my 
 flowers be."
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 95 
 
 so fatally for Shelley, was under- 
 taken ; and it was Hunt's own copy 
 of Keats' last volume (Lamia, Isabella, 
 the Eve of St. Agnes, and other Poems) 
 which was found in Shelley's jacket- 
 pocket when his dead body was 
 washed ashore. 
 
 "Whom the gods love die young:" 
 how the gods must have loved Keats 
 and Chatterton, to whose memory 
 Endymion was dedicated ! 
 
 The mention of Shelley's name 
 bids us remember the friend who at 
 one time received from the poet's 
 purse an annual allowance of 100, 
 and who subsequently, the lines 
 having fallen to him in pleasant places, 
 was referred to by Thackeray in The 
 Hoggarty Diamond as " one Peacock, 
 a clerk in the India House, and a 
 precious good place he has, too." In 
 Peacock's Nightmare A bbey, Scythrop, 
 the son and heir of Mr. Glowry, the 
 owner of the Abbey, is intended for
 
 96 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 a portrait of Shelley, who admitted 
 its truthfulness, and was amused by 
 it. In 1851 George Meredith pub- 
 lished his first volume of Poems (now 
 exceedingly rare, and fetching a high 
 price when met with). This little 
 book, dated from Weybridge, May, 
 1851, is dedicated to Thomas Love 
 Peacock, Esq., " with the profound 
 admiration and affectionate respect 
 of his son-in-law," and contains the 
 following unrhymed quatrain : 
 
 "THE POETRY OF SHELLEY. 
 
 " Seest thou a Skylark whose glistening winglets 
 
 ascending 
 
 Quiver like pulses beneath the melodious dawn? 
 Deep in the heart-yearning distance of Heaven 
 
 it flutters- 
 Wisdom and beauty and love are the treasures 
 
 it brings down at eve." 
 
 II. 
 
 MUCH of what we find in Robert 
 Buchanan's dedications is charm- 
 ingly autobiographical. His first
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 97 
 
 volume (Undertones, 1863) is grace- 
 fully dedicated to John Westland 
 Marston, in these words: "To 
 whom can I more appropriately dedi- 
 cate these Undertones than to the 
 man whose friendship has been a 
 comfort to me during four years of 
 the bitterest struggle and disappoint- 
 ment, and whose voice has whis- 
 pered 'Courage!' when I seemed 
 faltering down the easy descent to 
 Acheron ? The world knows least 
 of your noble soul. High-minded, 
 gracious-hearted, possessed of the 
 true instinct of an artist, you have 
 laid me under a debt of affection 
 which I can never repay ; yet take 
 the Book, as a token that I love and 
 honour you." 
 
 Another famous name appears in 
 conjunction with the author's on the 
 dedicatory page of London Poems, 
 published in 1866. This volume 
 is inscribed to William Hepworth 
 
 7
 
 93 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 Dixon, in terms none the less manly 
 because of their genuine gratitude. 
 " My dear Dixon," writes Buchanan, 
 " This book is inscribed to you ; 
 and lest you should ask wherefore, 
 I will refresh your memory. Seven 
 years ago, when I was an ambi- 
 tious lad in Scotland, and when 
 the north-easter was blowing coldly 
 on me, you sent me such good words 
 as cheered and warmed me. You 
 were one of two (the gentle, true, and 
 far-seeing George Henry Lewes was 
 the other) who first believed that I 
 was fitted for noble efforts. Since 
 then you have known me better, and 
 abode by your first hope. Nor have 
 you failed to exhibit the virtue, not 
 possessed by one writer in a hundred, 
 of daring to express publicly your 
 confidence in an unacknowledged 
 author. One word concerning the 
 present volume. London Poems are the 
 last of what I may term my 'poems of
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 99 
 
 probation,' wherein I have fairly 
 hinted what I am trying to assimilate 
 in life and thought. However much 
 my method may be confounded with 
 the methods of other writers, I am 
 sure to get quartered (to my cost, 
 perhaps) on my own merits by-and- 
 by. Accept these poems, given under 
 a genuine impulse, and not merely in 
 compliment. Of your fine qualities 
 I will say nothing. Your candour 
 may offend knaves, and your reticence 
 mislead fools ; but be happy in your 
 goodness, and in the loving homage 
 of those dearest to you." 
 
 The inscription of White Rose and 
 Red (issued anonymously in 1873) 
 " to Walt Whitman and Alexander 
 Gardiner, with all friends in Wash- 
 ington," tells of the author's tour in 
 America, and furthermore serves to 
 recall to us his earnest championship, 
 in eulogistic language, of " the good 
 grey poet." The other volume of 
 
 72
 
 ioo THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 poetry which Buchanan published 
 without his name (St. Abe and his 
 Seven Wives) is dedicated in pic- 
 turesque and forcible language to 
 " old Dan Chaucer," the soul and life 
 of " wise old English Jollity " 
 
 The dedicatory lines of The Book of 
 Orm to F. W. C. are tender and 
 heartfelt : 
 
 " Flowers pluckt upon a grave by moonlight, pale 
 And suffering, from the spiritual light 
 They grew in : these, with all the love and 
 
 blessing 
 That prayers can gain of God, I send to thee ! 
 
 " If one of these poor flowers be worthy thee, 
 The sweetest Soul that I have known on earth, 
 The tenderest Soul that I can hope to know, 
 Hold that one flower, and kneel, and pray for 
 me. 
 
 " Now, as thou risest gently from thy knees, 
 Must we go different ways ? thou followest 
 Thy path ; I mine ; but all go westering, 
 And all will meet among the Hills of God ! 
 
 " Thy ace sails with me on a darker path, 
 And smiles me onward ! For a time, farewell I 
 Wear in thy breast a few of these poor flowers, 
 And let their scent remind my Friend of me !
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 101 
 
 " Flowers of a grave, y e t deathless ! Be my love 
 For thee as deathless ! I am beckon'd on ; 
 But meantime, these, with all the love and 
 
 blessing 
 That prayers can gain of God, I give to thee !" 
 
 What ever might be said and written 
 by critics of the merits and defects 
 of The Drama of Kings, there are, 
 nevertheless, vigorous lines and dis- 
 tinct and definite out-spokenness in 
 the inscription of it to " The Spirit of 
 Auguste Comte": 
 
 " Comte, look this day on France 
 Behold her struck with swords and given to shame, 
 She who on bended knee 
 First to Humanity 
 Knelt, and with blood of Man heap'd Man's new 
 
 Altar-flame. 
 " She who first rose and "dared ; 
 
 She who hath never spared 
 
 Blood of hers, drop by drop, from her great breast; 
 She who, to free mankind, 
 Left herself bound and blind ; 
 She whose brave voice let loose the Conscience of 
 
 the West. 
 " Lo, as she passes by 
 
 To the earth's scornful cry, 
 
 What are those shapes who walk behind so wan? 
 Martyrs and prophets born 
 Out of her night and morn : 
 Have we forgot them yet ? these the great friends 
 of Man.
 
 102 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 " We name them as they go, 
 
 Dark, solemn-faced, and slow 
 Voltaire, with sadden'd mouth but eyes still bright ; 
 Turgot, Malesherbes, Rousseau, 
 Lafayette, Mirabeau 
 
 These pass, and many more, heirs of large realms 
 of Light. 
 
 " Greatest and last, pass ihou, 
 
 Strong heart and mighty brow, 
 Thine eyes surcharged with love of all things lair ; 
 Facing with those grand eyes 
 The light in the sweet skies, 
 
 While thy shade earthward falls, dark'ning my 
 soul to prayer. 
 
 " Go by, O mighty dead ! 
 My soul is comforted 
 
 The Shepherd on the summit needs no prayers 
 Best worshipper is he 
 Who suffers and is free 
 
 That Soul alone blasphemes which trembles and 
 despairs." 
 
 Now pass we on to the mingled 
 sorrow and hope of the dedication, 
 " To Mary," of Buchanan's Selected 
 Poems, 1882. The words in which it 
 is framed seem too heavily burdened 
 with the heart's deepest feelings to 
 be bandied about by every flippant 
 reader and writer. Let them be
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 103 
 
 transferred to paper tenderly and 
 with love ; and may no rude hand 
 press in to ruthlessly destroy the 
 delicate bloom which tremblingly 
 rests upon them : " Weeping and 
 sorrowing, yet in sure and certain 
 hope of a heavenly resurrection, I 
 place these poor flowers of verse on 
 the grave of my beloved Wife, who, 
 with eyes of truest love and tender- 
 ness, watched them growing for 
 more than twenty years." Let this 
 volume, of picked poetic treasures, 
 nestle ever close to the side of 
 that other in which Mary's name 
 is also mentioned with affection and 
 veneration. Ah, the tale the years 
 complete ! The little book to which 
 we have already referred Undertones, 
 Buchanan's first publication bears 
 as title to its prologue " To David in 
 Heaven,"* and to its epilogue "To 
 
 * David Gray, the poet, the friend of Buchanan's 
 early days.
 
 104 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 Mary on Earth." Among the lines 
 of the latter occur these : 
 
 ; My heart to-night is calm as peaceful dreams, 
 Afar away the wind is shrill, the culver 
 Blows up and down the moors with windy 
 
 gleams, 
 
 The birch unlooseneth her locks of silver 
 And shakes them softly on the mountain streams, 
 And o'er the grave that holds my David's dust 
 The Moon uplifts her empty dripping horn ! 
 Thither my fancies turn, but turn in trust, 
 Not wholly sadly, faithful though forlorn. 
 For you, too, love him, mourn his life's quick 
 
 fleeting ; 
 
 We think of him in common. Is it so ? 
 Your little hand has ansvver'd, and I know 
 His name makes music in your heart's soft beat- 
 ing ; 
 And well, 'tis something gain'd for him and 
 
 me 
 
 Him in his heaven and me in this low spot 
 Something his eyes will see, and joy to see 
 That you, too, love him, though you knew him 
 not." 
 
 Alas ! the poet's David and Mary 
 are both "in heaven" now; but 
 who shall say that still the one is 
 a stranger and unknown to the 
 other? 
 
 Comparatively few there are in
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 105 
 
 literary circles who fail to remember 
 the hubbub raised by the publica- 
 tion, in the Contemporary Review for 
 October, 1871, of an article entitled 
 "The Fleshly School of Poetry," 
 and bearing the signature, " Thomas 
 Maitland." This article, subsequently 
 enlarged and published in pamphlet- 
 form, with the name of its avowed 
 author, Robert Buchanan, upon the 
 title-page, contained a fierce and 
 sweeping criticism of the poetry of 
 Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In the pub- 
 lication of this article much un- 
 pleasant and rancorous feeling had 
 birth, which grew and spread until it 
 culminated in an action for libel 
 brought by Mr. Buchanan against 
 the proprietor of the Examiner, which 
 resulted in a verdict for the plaintiff, 
 with 150 damages. This was in 
 June, 1876. In 1881 was published 
 God and the Man, a Romance, by Robert 
 Buchanan, which contained, as dedi-
 
 io6 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 cation, the two following stanzas 
 addressed to " An Old Enemy " : 
 
 " I would have snatch'd a bay-leaf from thy brow, 
 Wronging the chaplet on an honoured head ; 
 In peace and tenderness I bring thee now 
 A lily flower instead. 
 
 " Pure as thy purpose, blameless as thy song, 
 Sweet as thy spirit, may this offering be ; 
 Forget the bitter blame that did thee wrong, 
 And take the gift from me !" 
 
 A later edition of the same book was 
 enriched by a secondary and supple- 
 mentary dedication, dated August, 
 1882, and inscribed in bold characters 
 " To Dante Gabriel Rossetti": 
 
 " Calmly, thy royal robe of Death around thee, 
 Thou sleepest, and weeping Brethren round 
 
 thee stand 
 Gently they placed, ere yet God's angel crown'd 
 
 thee, 
 My lily in thy hand ! 
 
 " I never knew thee living, O my brother ! 
 
 But on thy breast my lily of love now lies ; 
 And by that token we shall know each other 
 When God's voice saith, ' Arise !' " 
 
 In the preface to the last-named 
 edition the author writes : " Since 
 this work was first published, the
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 107 
 
 ' Old Enemy ' to whom it was dedi- 
 cated has passed away. Although 
 his name did not appear on the front 
 of the book, as it would certainly 
 have done had I possessed more 
 moral courage, it is a melancholy 
 pleasure to me to reflect that he un- 
 derstood the dedication, and accepted 
 it in the spirit in which it was offered. 
 That I should ever have underrated 
 his exquisite work is simply a proof 
 of the incompetency of all criticism, 
 however honest, which is conceived 
 adversely, hastily, and from an un- 
 sympathetic point of view ; but that 
 I should have ranked myself for the 
 time being with the Philistines, and 
 encouraged them to resist an en- 
 nobling and refining literary influence 
 (of which they stood, and stand, so 
 mournfully in need), must remain to 
 me a matter of permanent regret." 
 Thus omnipotent Time heals the 
 deepest wounds.
 
 io8 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 in. 
 
 HOWEVER epigrammatic and throb- 
 bing with passion the poetry and 
 some of the letters of Byron may be, 
 his dedications are, with very slight 
 exceptions, singularly destitute of any- 
 thing but the baldest' commonplace. 
 To " John Hobhouse, Esq., A.M., 
 F.R.S., etc.," he dedicated more 
 than one of his works in 1816 and 
 1818. In 1813 he inscribed his 
 Giaour " To Samuel Rogers, Esq., as 
 a slight but most sincere token of 
 admiration for his genius, respect for 
 his character, and gratitude for his 
 friendship." The following year he 
 published anonymously, in the same 
 volume with Rogers' Jacqueline, his 
 Lara, " an unnatural and unintelli- 
 gible conjunction, which, however, 
 gave rise to some pretty good jokes." 
 " I believe," says Byron in one of 
 his letters, " I told you of Larry and
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 109 
 
 Jacquy. A friend of mine was read- 
 ing said Larry and Jacquy in a 
 Brighton coach. A passenger took up 
 the book and queried as to the author. 
 The proprietor said, ' There are two ;' 
 to which the answer of the un- 
 known was : ' Ay, ay a joint con- 
 cern, I suppose, suinmot like Sternhold 
 and Hopkins.' Is not this excellent ? 
 I would not have missed the ' vile 
 comparison ' to have escaped being 
 the Arcades ambo et contare pares." 
 
 In December, 1821, was published 
 Sardanapalus, and in the following 
 November Werner, the latter of which 
 bore the inscription, " To the Illus- 
 trious Goethe." It was Byron's inten- 
 tion to inscribe the earlier of these 
 works to the great German, and he 
 accordingly sent him a manuscript 
 dedication, with an obliging inquiry 
 whether it might be prefixed to the 
 tragedy. Goethe was, however, by 
 no means dissatisfied when, after a
 
 no THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 long delay, Sardanapalus appeared 
 without the Dedication. It was, 
 nevertheless, printed in subsequent 
 editions, and runs thus : " A 
 stranger presumes to offer the 
 homage of a literary vassal to his 
 liege lord, the first of existing 
 writers, who has created the litera- 
 ture of his own country, and illus- 
 trated that of Europe." That 
 Goethe was pleased at this indica- 
 tion of the noble lord's admiration, 
 is to be gathered from his own 
 words : " Well knowing myself and 
 my labours, in my old age, I could 
 not but reflect with gratitude and dif- 
 fidence on the expressions contained 
 in this dedication, nor interpret 
 them but as the generous tribute of 
 a superior genius, no less original in 
 the choice than inexhaustible in the 
 materials of his subjects." 
 
 In 1817, Walter Scott reviewed 
 Byron's Third Canto of Childe
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. in 
 
 Harold in the Quarterly Review in a 
 manner pleasing to the author, who 
 duly acknowledged it in 1821, in his 
 dedication of Cain. On hearing 
 from Scott that the dedication had 
 been accepted " with feelings of 
 great obligation," he wrote : " I am 
 glad that you accepted the Inscrip- 
 tion. I meant to have inscribed 
 The Foscarini to you instead ; but, 
 first, I heard that Cain was thought 
 the least bad of the two as a com- 
 position ; and, 2ndly, I have abused 
 Southey like a pickpocket, in a note 
 to The Foscarini, and I recollected 
 that he is a friend of yours (though 
 not of mine), and that it would not 
 be the handsome thing to dedicate 
 to one friend anything containing 
 such matters about another. How- 
 ever, I'll work the Laureate before 
 I have done with him, as soon as I 
 can muster Billingsgate therefor. I 
 like a row, and always did from a
 
 H2 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 boy, in the course of which pro- 
 pensity I must needs say that I 
 have found it the most easy of all to 
 be gratified, personally and poeti- 
 cally." Poor Southey ! " Til work 
 the Laureate before I have done with 
 him," as if Byron hadn't already 
 "worked" him. In a letter to Moore 
 in 1818, Byron had written relative 
 to Don Juan : " I have finished the 
 first canto of a poem in the style 
 and manner of Beppo ... It is 
 called Don Juan, and is meant to be 
 a little quietly facetious upon every- 
 thing. But I doubt whether it is 
 not at least, as far as it has gone 
 too free for these very modest days. 
 ... It is dedicated to Southey in 
 good, simple, savage verse, upon 
 the * * * *'s politics, and the way he 
 got them." We give the first three 
 of the seventeen dedicatory stanzas,* 
 
 * "This ' Dedication ' was suppressed in 1819, 
 with Lord Byron's reluctant consent ; but shortly
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 113 
 
 leaving our readers to judge of their 
 goodness, simplicity and savageness : 
 
 "Bob Southey ! You're a poet poet-laureate, 
 And representative of all the race, 
 
 Although 'tis true that you turn'd out a Tory at 
 Last yours has lately been a common case. 
 
 And now, my Epic renegade ! what are ye at ? 
 With all the Lakers, in and out of place ? 
 
 A nest of tuneful persons, to my eye 
 
 Like 'four-and-twenty Blackbirds in a pye ; 
 
 " ' Which pye being open'd they began to sing,' 
 (This old song and new simile holds good), 
 
 ' A dainty dish to set before the King,' 
 Or Regent, who admires such kind of food ; 
 
 And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing, 
 But like a hawk encumber' d with his hood 
 
 Explaining metaphysics to the nation 
 
 I wish he would explain his Explanation. 
 
 " You, Bob, are rather insolent, you know, 
 
 At being disappointed in your wish 
 To supersede all warblers here below, 
 
 And be the only Blackbird in the dish ; 
 And then you overstrain yourself, or so, 
 
 And tumble downward like the flying-fish 
 Gasping on deck, because you soar too high, 
 
 Bob, 
 And fall, for lack of moisture quite a-dry, Bob !" 
 
 after his death its existence became notorious, in 
 consequence of an article in the Westminster 
 J\eview, generally ascribed to Sir John Hobhouse." 
 For several years the verses were sold in the streets 
 as a broadside. 
 
 8
 
 H4 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 In 1821, Southey published a piece 
 in English hexameters, entitled A 
 Vision of Judgment, the preface to 
 which contained some severe stric- 
 tures on the " Satanic School " of 
 poetry. After some observations on 
 the peculiar style of the versifica- 
 tion of his poem, Southey continues : 
 " I am well aware that the public 
 are peculiarly intolerant of such 
 innovations ; not less so than the 
 populace are of any foreign fashion, 
 whether of foppery or convenience. 
 Would that this literary intolerance 
 were under the influence of a saner 
 judgment, and regarded the morals 
 more than the manner of a com- 
 position ; the spirit rather than the 
 form ! Would that it were directed 
 against those monstrous combina- 
 tions of horrors and mockery, lewd- 
 ness, and impiety with which English 
 poetry has, in our days, first been pol- 
 luted ! . . . These remarks are not
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 115 
 
 more severe than the offence deserves, 
 even when applied to those immoral 
 writers who have not been conscious 
 of any evil intention in their writ- 
 ings ; who would acknowledge a 
 little levity, a little warmth of colour- 
 ing, and so forth, in that sort of 
 language with which men gloss over 
 their favourite vices, and deceive 
 themselves. What then should be 
 said of those for whom the thought- 
 lessness and inebriety of wanton 
 youth can no longer be pleaded, but 
 who have written in sober manhood 
 and with deliberate purpose ? Men 
 of diseased hearts and depraved 
 imaginations, who, forming a system 
 of opinions to suit their own un- 
 happy course of conduct, have re- 
 belled against the holiest ordinances 
 of human society, and hating that 
 revealed religion which, with all 
 their efforts and bravadoes, they are 
 unable entirely to disbelieve, labour 
 
 82
 
 Ii6 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 to make others as miserable as 
 themselves, by infecting them with 
 a moral virus that eats into the 
 soul ! The school which they have 
 set up may properly be called the 
 Satanic School ; for though their 
 productions breathe the Spirit of 
 Belial in their lascivious parts, and 
 the Spirit of Moloch in those loath- 
 some images of atrocities and 
 horrors which they delight to repre- 
 sent, they are more especially cha- 
 racterized by a Satanic spirit of 
 pride and audacious impiety which 
 still betrays the wretched feeling of 
 hopelessness wherewith it is allied." 
 Byron rejoined by stigmatizing 
 Southey's poem as one " whose 
 blasphemy is as harmless as the 
 sedition of Wat Tyler, because it is 
 equally absurd with that sincere 
 production," and continued : " There 
 is something at once ludicrous and 
 blasphemous in this arrogant scrib-
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 117 
 
 bier of all work sitting down to deal 
 damnation and destruction upon his 
 fellow-creatures." 
 
 In reply to this, Southey addressed 
 to the Editor of the London Courier 
 a. letter dated 5th of January, 1822, 
 in which occurs the following : " His 
 lordship has thought it not unbe- 
 coming in him to call me a scribbler 
 of all work. Let the word scribbler 
 pass ; it is an appellation which will 
 not stick, like that of the Satanic 
 School. But, if a scribbler, how am I 
 one of all work ? I will tell Lord 
 Byron what I have not scribbled 
 what kind of work I have not done. 
 I have never published libels upon 
 my friends and acquaintance, ex- 
 pressed my sorrow for those libels, 
 and called them in during a mood 
 of better mind and then re-issued 
 them, when the evil spirit, which 
 for a time had been cast out, had 
 returned and taken possession, with
 
 ii8 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 seven others more wicked than 
 himself. I have never abused the 
 power, of which every author is in 
 some degree possessed, to wound 
 the character of a man, or the heart 
 of a woman. I have never sent 
 into the world a book to which I 
 did not dare to affix my name ; or 
 which I feared to claim in a court of 
 justice, if it were pirated by a 
 knavish bookseller. I have never 
 manufactured furniture for the 
 brothel. None of these things have 
 I done none of the foul work by 
 which literature is perverted to the 
 injury of mankind. My hands are 
 clean ; there is no ' damned spot ' 
 upon them no taint which ' all the 
 perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten.' 
 Of the work which I have done, 
 it becomes me not here to speak, 
 save only as relates to the Satanic 
 School, and its Coryphaeus, the 
 author of Don Juan. I have held
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 119 
 
 up that school to public detestation, 
 as enemies to the religion, the insti- 
 tutions, and the domestic morals of 
 the country. I have given them a 
 designation to which their founder and 
 leader answers. I have sent a stone 
 from my sling which has smitten 
 their Goliath in the forehead. I 
 have fastened his name upon the 
 gibbet, for reproach and ignominy, 
 as long as it shall endure. Take it 
 down who can !" 
 
 The result of all this was that 
 Byron despatched, through the 
 medium of Mr. Douglas Kinnaird, a 
 " challenge " to the Poet Laureate. 
 Mr. Kinnaird, however, seeing how 
 absurd the whole business was, 
 " put Lord Byron's warlike missive 
 aside ; and it never was heard of by 
 Mr. Southey until after the death of 
 its author." 
 
 Southey, in anticipation of this 
 challenge from Byron, had written
 
 120 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 the following reply, which, also, was 
 not heard of " until after the death 
 of its author." 
 
 " SIR, I have the honour of 
 acknowledging the receipt of your 
 letter, and do myself the pleasure of 
 replying to it without delay. 
 
 " In affairs of this kind, the 
 partners ought to meet upon equal 
 terms. But to establish the equality 
 between you and me, there are three 
 things which ought to be done ; and 
 then a fourth also becomes necessary, 
 before I can meet you on the field. 
 
 " First. You must marry, and 
 have four children ; please to be 
 particular in having them all girls. 
 
 " Secondly. You must prove that 
 the greater part of the provision 
 which you make for them depends 
 upon your life ; and you must be 
 under a bond of 4,000 not to be 
 hanged, not to commit suicide, and 
 not to be killed in a duel which are
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 121 
 
 the conditions upon which I have 
 effected an insurance of my own life 
 for the benefit of my wife and 
 daughters. 
 
 " Thirdly. I must tell three 
 direct falsehoods concerning you, 
 upon the hustings or in some other 
 not less public assembly ; and I shall 
 neither be able to do this, nor to 
 meet you afterward in the manner 
 you propose, unless you can perform 
 the fourth thing which is : 
 
 " That you must convert me from 
 the Christian religion. 
 
 " Till all this be accomplished, our 
 dispute must be carried on without 
 the use of any more iron than is 
 necessary for blackening our ink and 
 mending our pens : or any more lead 
 than enters into the composition of 
 the Edinburgh Review. I have the 
 honour to subscribe myself, Sir, 
 vours, with all proper consideration, 
 " ROBERT SOUTHEY."
 
 122 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 On the publication of the second 
 edition of English Bards and Scotch 
 Reviewers (the first to which Byron's 
 name was prefixed) Moore wrote a 
 short terse note to the author, 
 demanding satisfaction on account 
 of passages in the poem which 
 Moore considered gave the lie to a 
 public statement of his concerning 
 "an affair with Mr. Jeffrey some 
 years since." This letter never got 
 to Byron's hands ; but in the follow- 
 ing year a courteous explanation of 
 the offending passage \vas given by 
 him, and a friendship commenced 
 between himself and Moore, which 
 bore fruit in the now classic Life, 
 Letters and Journals of Lord Byron. 
 In 1814, Byron inscribed The Cor- 
 sair to his future biographer in 
 the following friendly language : " I 
 feel anxious to avail myself of 
 this . . . opportunity of adorning 
 my pages with a name, conse-
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 123 
 
 crated by unshaken public prin- 
 ciple, and the most undoubted 
 and various talents. While Ireland 
 ranks you among the firmest of her 
 patriots ; while you stand alone the 
 first of her bards in her estimation, 
 and Britain repeats and ratifies the 
 decree, permit one, whose only 
 regret, since our first acquaintance, 
 has been the years he had lost 
 before it commenced, to add the 
 humble but sincere suffrage of friend- 
 ship, to the voice of more than one 
 nation." 
 
 In 1808, Byron issued a second 
 edition of his Poems inscribed "To 
 the Right Honourable Frederick, 
 Earl of Carlisle, Knight of the 
 Garter, etc., etc., by his obliged 
 ward and affectionate kinsman, the 
 author." In March of the following 
 year, however, appeared English 
 Bards and Scotch Reviewers, in which 
 a change of sentiment on the part of
 
 124 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 Byron towards his noble kinsman is 
 noticeable. From a foot-note it is 
 clear that the following lines were 
 especially written for the Earl's 
 benefit : 
 
 " Nor e'en a hackney'd Muse will deign to smile 
 On minor BYRON or mature CARLISLE.* 
 The puny Schoolboy and his early lay 
 Men pardon, if his follies pass away ; 
 But who forgives the Senior's ceaseless verse, 
 Whose hairs grow hoary as his rhymes grow 
 
 worse ? 
 
 What heterogeneous honours deck the peer ! 
 Lord, rhymester, petit-maitre, pamphleteer ! 
 So dull in youth, so drivelling in his age, 
 His scenes alone had damn'd our sinking stage; 
 But. Managers for once cried ' Hold, enough !' 
 Nor drugged their audience with the tragic 
 
 stuff." 
 
 In a note to a further allusion to 
 Carlisle, affixed to a later edition of 
 the same poem, Byron writes : " It 
 
 * In the manuscript of English Bards and Scotch 
 Reviewers, in place of these two lines the author 
 had : 
 
 " On one alone Apollo deigns to smile, 
 And crowns a New ROSCOMMON in CARLISLE." 
 
 In later editions this appeared considerably 
 altered : 
 
 " No Muse will cheer with renovating smile, 
 The paralytic puling of CARLISLE."
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 125 
 
 may be asked why I have censured 
 the Earl of Carlisle, my guardian 
 and relation, to whom I dedicated a 
 volume of puerile poems a few years 
 ago ? The guardianship was nominal, 
 at least as far as I have been able to 
 discover ; the relationship I cannot 
 help, and am very sorry for it ; but 
 as his lordship seemed to forget it on 
 a very essential occasion to me, I 
 shall not burden my memory with 
 the recollection. I do not think that 
 personal differences sanction the un- 
 just condemnation of a brother scrib- 
 bler; but I see no reason why they 
 should act as a preventative, when 
 the author, noble or ignoble, has, for 
 a series of years, beguiled a ' discern- 
 ing public ' (as the advertisements 
 have it) with divers reams of most 
 orthodox, imperial nonsense. Besides, 
 I do not step aside to vituperate the 
 Earl : no his works come fairly in 
 review with those of other patrician
 
 126 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 literati. If, before I escaped from 
 my teens, I said anything in favour 
 of his lordship's paper-books, it was 
 in the way of dutiful dedication, and 
 more from the advice of others than 
 my own judgment, and I seize the 
 first opportunity of pronouncing my 
 sincere recantation. I have heard 
 that some persons conceive me to 
 be under obligations to Lord Carlisle : 
 if so, I shall be most particularly 
 happy to learn what they are, and 
 when conferred, that they may be 
 duly appreciated and publicly acknow- 
 ledged. What I have humbly ad- 
 vanced as an opinion on his printed 
 things, I am prepared to support, if 
 necessary, by quotations from elegies, 
 odes, episodes, and certain facetious 
 and dainty tragedies bearing his 
 name and mark. 
 
 " ' What can ennoble knaves, or fools, or 
 
 cowards ? 
 Alas ! not all the blood of all the Howards.' 
 
 So says Pope. Amen !"
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 127 
 
 Why this change on the part of 
 Byron ? His biographer, Moore, 
 shall explain in his own manner: "It 
 was not till the beginning of this 
 year (1809) that he took his Satire 
 in a state read}-, as he thought, for 
 publication to London. Before, 
 however, he had put the work to 
 press, new food was unluckily fur- 
 nished to his spleen by the neglect 
 with which he conceived himself to 
 have been treated by his guardian, 
 Lord Carlisle. The relations between 
 this nobleman and his ward had at 
 no time been of such a nature as to 
 afford opportunities for the cultiva- 
 tion of much friendliness on either 
 side ; and to the temper and in- 
 fluence of Mrs. Byron must mainly 
 be attributed the blame of widening, 
 if not of producing, this estrange- 
 ment between them. The coldness 
 with which Lord Carlisle had re- 
 ceived the dedication of the young
 
 128 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 poet's first volume was, as we have 
 seen from one of the letters of the 
 latter, felt by him most deeply. He, 
 however, allowed himself to be so 
 far governed by prudential considera- 
 tions as not only to stifle this dis- 
 pleasure, but even to introduce into 
 his satire, as originally intended for 
 the press, the following compliment 
 to his guardian : 
 
 " ' On one alone Apollo deigns to smile, 
 And crowns a new Roscommon in Carlisle.'* 
 
 The crown, however, thus generously 
 awarded, did not long remain where 
 it had been placed. In the interval 
 between the inditing of this couplet 
 and the delivery of the manuscript 
 to the press, Lord Byron, under the 
 impression that it was customary for 
 a young peer, on first taking his seat, 
 to have some friend to introduce 
 him, wrote to remind Lord Carlisle 
 that he should be of age at the com- 
 
 * See page 124.
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 129 
 
 mencement of the Session. Instead, 
 however, of the sort of answer which 
 he expected, a mere formal and, as 
 it appeared to him, cold reply, ac- 
 quainting him with the technical 
 mode of proceeding on such occa- 
 sions, was all that, in return to this 
 application, he received. Disposed 
 as he had been, by preceding circum- 
 stances, to suspect his noble guardian 
 of no friendly inclinations towards 
 him, this backwardness in proposing 
 to introduce him to the House (a 
 ceremony, however, as it appears, 
 by no means necessary or even 
 usual) was sufficient to rouse in his 
 sensitive mind a strong feeling of 
 resentment. The indignation thus 
 excited found a vent, but too tempt- 
 ingly at hand the laudatory couplet 
 I have just cited was instantly ex- 
 punged, and his satire went forth 
 charged with those vituperative verses 
 against Lord Carlisle." 
 
 9
 
 130 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 In the inscriptions of the poems 
 which Byron laid at the feet of the 
 fair sex we miss altogether the 
 warmth of feeling and impassioned 
 utterance which we found in some 
 of Shelley's dedications. In 1812 
 the following dedicatory stanzas of 
 the first cantos of Childe Harold's 
 Pilgrimage were addressed to the 
 Lady Charlotte Harley (afterwards 
 the wife of Brigadier-General Bacon), 
 who had not then completed her 
 eleventh year :* 
 
 "To IANTHE. 
 
 "Not in those climes where I have late been 
 
 straying, 
 
 Though Beauty long hath there been match- 
 less deem'd ; 
 
 Not in those visions to the heart displaying 
 Forms which it sighs but to have only 
 dream'd, 
 
 * At Byron's request Westall painted the por- 
 trait of this "juvenile beauty," which was en- 
 graved for Finden's Illustrations of the Life and 
 iVorks of Lord Byron. .
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 131 
 
 Hath aught like thee in truth or fancy seem'd ; 
 Nor, having seen thee, shall I vainly seek 
 To paint those charms which varied as they 
 
 beam'd 
 
 To such as see thee not my words were weak ; 
 To those who gaze on thee what language could 
 they speak ? 
 
 "Ah ! mayst thou ever be what now thou art, 
 Nor unbeseem the promise of thy spring, 
 As fair in form, as warm, yet pure in heart, 
 Love's image upon earth without his wing, 
 And guileless beyond Hope's imagining ! 
 And surely she who now so fondly rears 
 Thy youth, in thee, thus hourly brightening, 
 Beholds the rainbow of her future years, 
 Before whose heavenly hues all sorrow disappears. 
 
 " Young Peri of the West ! 'tis well for me 
 My years already doubly number thine ; 
 My loveless eye unmoved may gaze on thee, 
 And safely view thy ripening beauties shine ; 
 Happy, I ne'er shall see them in decline ; 
 Happier, that while all younger hearts shall 
 
 bleed, 
 
 Mine shall escape the doom thine eyes assign 
 To those whose admiration shall succeed, 
 But mix'd with pangs to Love's even loveliest 
 
 hours decreed. 
 
 " Oh ! let that eye, which, wild as the 
 
 gazelle's, 
 
 Now brightly bold or beautifully shy, 
 Wins as it wanders, dazzles where it dwells, 
 Glance o'er this page, nor to my verse deny 
 That smile for which my breast might vainly 
 
 sigh, 
 
 92
 
 132 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 Could I to thee be ever more than friend ; 
 
 This much, dear maid, accord ; nor question- 
 why 
 
 To one so young my strain I would commend, 
 But bid me with my wreath one matchless lily 
 blend. 
 
 " Such is thy name with this my verse entwined ; 
 And long as kinder eyes a look shall cast 
 On Harold's page, lanthe's here enshrined 
 Shall thus be first beheld, forgotten last : 
 My days once number'd, should this homage 
 
 past 
 
 Attract thy fairy fingers near the lyre 
 Of him who hail'd thee, loveliest as thou 
 
 wast, 
 
 Such is the most my memory may desire ; 
 Though more than Hope can claim, could Friend- 
 ship less require." 
 
 In the summer of 1819, Byron 
 wrote The Prophecy of Dante at the 
 instigation of the Countess Guiccioli, 
 to whom he dedicated it in two 
 stanzas of no particular interest or 
 merit : 
 
 " Lady ! if for the cold and cloudy clime 
 
 Where I was born, but where I would not die, 
 Of the great Poet-Sire of Italy 
 I dare to build the imitative rhyme, 
 Harsh Runic copy of the South's sublime, 
 Thou art the cause ; and howsoever I 
 Fall short of his immortal harmony, 
 Thy gentle heart will pardon me the crime.
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 133 
 
 <( Thou, in the pride of Beauty and of Youth, 
 
 Spakest ; and for thee to speak and be obey'd 
 Are one ; but only in the sunny South 
 
 Such sounds are utter'd, and such charms 
 
 displayed, 
 
 So sweet a language from so fair a mouth 
 Ah ! to what effort would it not persuade ?" 
 
 Of much more interest is the de- 
 scription by the dedicatee of the 
 origin of its composition : " On my 
 departure from Venice, Lord Byron 
 had promised to come and see me at 
 Ravenna. Dante's tomb, the classical 
 pine-wood, the relics of antiquity 
 which are to be found in that place, 
 afforded a sufficient pretext for me 
 to invite him to come, and for him 
 to accept my invitation. He came 
 in the month of June, 1819, arriving 
 at Ravenna on the day of the festival 
 of Corpus Domini. Being deprived 
 at this time of his books, his horses, 
 and all that occupied him at Venice, 
 I begged him to gratify me by writing 
 something on the subject of Dante ; 
 and with his usual facility and 
 rapidity, he composed his Prophecy. 1 "
 
 i?4 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 IV. 
 
 FROM amongst our great modern 
 teachers we summon to memory, for 
 our present purpose, two who espe- 
 cially have laid decided hands on 
 the future they hope for beyond the 
 grave. Professor Max Miiller re- 
 members with all a father's love the 
 daughter whose earthly presence 
 was once life and light to him. The 
 inscription of his Hibbert Lectures for 
 1878 runs thus : " To her whose 
 dear memory encouraged, directed, 
 and supported me in writing these 
 lectures, they are now dedicated as a 
 memorial of a father's love." And 
 the loving and poetic, yet truly real- 
 istic remembrance of days gone by 
 is not the least noticeable element 
 of the following dedication of Kenan's 
 Life of Jesus : "To THE PURE SOUL 
 
 OF MY SISTER HENRIETTA, WHO DIED 
 
 AT BYBLUS, ON THE 24TH SEP-
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 135 
 
 TEMBER, 1861. Dost thou recall, 
 from the bosom of God where thou 
 reposest, those long days at Ghazir, 
 in which, alone with thee, I wrote 
 these pages, inspired by the places 
 we had visited together ? Silent at 
 my side, thou didst read and copy 
 each sheet as soon as I had written 
 it, whilst the sea, the villages, the 
 ravines, and the mountains were 
 spread at our feet. When the over- 
 whelming light had given place to 
 the innumerable army of stars, thy 
 shrewd and subtle questions, thy 
 discreet doubts, led me back to the 
 sublime object of our common 
 thoughts. One day thou didst tell 
 me that thou wouldst love this book 
 first, because it had been com- 
 posed with thee, and also because it 
 pleased thee. Though at times thou 
 didst fear for it the narrow judgments 
 of the frivolous, yet wert thou ever 
 persuaded that all truly religious
 
 136 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 souls would ultimately take pleasure 
 in it. In the midst of these sweet 
 meditations, the Angel of Death 
 struck us both with his wing : the 
 sleep of fever seized us at the same 
 time I awoke alone ! . . . . Thou 
 sleepest now in the land of Adonis, 
 near the holy Byblus and the sacred 
 stream where the women of the 
 ancient mysteries came to mingle 
 their tears. Reveal to me, O good 
 genius, to me whom thou lovedst, 
 those truths which conquer death, 
 deprive it of terror, and make it 
 almost beloved." 
 
 In 1859 John Stuart Mill dedicated 
 his work On Liberty to the memory 
 of her who had truly been a com- 
 panion to him : " To the beloved 
 and deplored memory of her who 
 was the inspirer, and in part the 
 author, of all that is best in my 
 writings the friend and wife whose 
 exalted sense of truth and right was
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 137 
 
 my strongest incitement, and whose 
 approbation was my chief reward I 
 dedicate this volume. Like all that 
 I have written for many years, it 
 belongs as much to her as to me ; 
 but the work as it stands has had, in 
 a very insufficient degree, the in- 
 estimable advantage of her revision ; 
 some of the most important portions 
 having been reserved for a more 
 careful re-examination, which they 
 are now never destined to receive. 
 Were I but capable of interpreting 
 to the world one half the great 
 thoughts and noble feelings which 
 are buried in her grave, I should be 
 the medium of a greater benefit to 
 it than is ever likely to arise from 
 anything that I can write, un- 
 prompted and unassisted by her all 
 but unrivalled wisdom." 
 
 Somewhat similar in feeling to the 
 foregoing are the lines prefixed by 
 S. C. Hall to his Rhymes in Council,
 
 138 THE ROMANCE AND 
 
 and which are, in reality, the true 
 dedication, although the formal one 
 is worded thus : " This book of 
 Versified Aphorisms is, by direct 
 sanction of Her Majesty, dedicated 
 to the Grandchildren of The Queen." 
 The lines to which we refer are 
 these : " Since they [the Aphorisms] 
 were written while they were pass- 
 ing through the press the partner 
 of my pilgrimage, the participator in 
 all my labours and cares, my com- 
 panion, friend, counsellor, and wife, 
 during fifty-six years, has been re- 
 moved from earth and from me, from 
 many friends who dearly loved her, 
 and from a public by whom she was 
 largely appreciated since the publica- 
 tion of her first Book (followed by, 
 I think, two hundred and fifty Books) 
 in the far-off year 1828. These verses 
 are hardly less hers than mine. If I 
 have striven in humble, but fervent 
 and prayerful, hope to inculcate
 
 REALITY OF DEDICATIONS. 139 
 
 rectitude, goodness, love, sympathy, 
 gentle and generous thinking, human- 
 ity, patience, virtue, and piety, Faith, 
 Hope, and Charity my work was 
 suggested, encouraged, sustained I 
 will reverently add, inspired by her. 
 
 "This Book, therefore, although 
 written by me, I hope may be re- 
 garded as a MONUMENT To HER 
 MEMORY." 
 
 There is no uncertain ring about 
 these words ; they go straight to the 
 heart as nothing but truth can. By 
 them one is also reminded of that 
 other union similarly happy, and, in 
 more than one respect, alike in worthy 
 results that of Charles and Mary 
 Cowden Clarke, to which the latter 
 refers in the preface to Recollections 
 of Writers : " Charles and Maty 
 Cowden Clarke may with truth be 
 held in tender remembrance by their 
 readers as among the happiest of 
 married lovers for more than forty-
 
 140 DEDICATIONS. 
 
 eight years, writing together, reading 
 together, working together, enjoying 
 together the perfection of loving, 
 literary consociation ; and kindly 
 sympathy may well be felt for her 
 who is left to singly subscribe her- 
 self, 
 
 " Her readers' faithful servant, 
 " MARY COWDEN CLARKE."
 
 AN ODD CORNER IN A BOOK- 
 LOVER'S STUDY. 
 
 "Each one of the mob of curious things he 
 preserved had some story linking it with others, 
 or with his peculiar fancies." BURTON'S Book- 
 Hunter. 
 
 RECENT publications of known 
 authors, strongly bound in service- 
 able calf, are amongst the necessi- 
 ties of life, inasmuch as they contain 
 food pure and simple ; but stray 
 volumes lovingly extracted from out- 
 of-the-way nooks in old book-shops, 
 and having special associations, are 
 to be classed with the luxuries of 
 existence ; they have the fragrance 
 of the East about them, and the 
 mystery of summer-dreams.
 
 142 AN ODD CORNER IN 
 
 The little walnut-shelved recess on 
 my left as I now sit, is, gentle reader, 
 my association -corner, my luxury- 
 receptacle, the spot of all my house 
 best loved. The book-cases, reach- 
 ing half-way up the walls, and extend- 
 ing round the other portions of the 
 room, and which teem with the 
 easily procured works of great men, 
 answer but as bath-rooms and bed- 
 chambers and dining-halls ; they but 
 fit me for everyday existence, giving 
 me health and strength to live my 
 life and do my work. But the corner 
 I have whispered of is where I rest 
 and dream, and forget that 
 
 " Life is real, life is earnest," 
 
 at least for me. My own individu- 
 ality is lost, merged in that of the 
 authors or previous owners of the 
 volumes which silently nestle there. 
 Than that little nook 
 
 " The violet bed's not sweeter."
 
 A BOOK-LOVER'S STUDY. 143 
 
 In my anticipations of the future I 
 look there for 
 
 " A bower quiet for me, and a sleep 
 Full of sweet dreams .... and quiet breath - 
 ing." 
 
 The volumes, now I look round upon 
 them, seem trembling with suggestive- 
 ness and story with too much, I 
 fear, to be interpreted in this short 
 notice. But let them " tremble " 
 until they weary. 
 
 The top shelves, green and red and 
 old-calfy, yet disdaining not boards, 
 some clean, others questionable, are 
 Lamb's domains. The first bit of 
 print there, with its side to the wall, 
 is a thin paper -covered almanack 
 with " Notes to the Calendar " 
 facing the woodcuts. One of these 
 notes, daintily composed for such a 
 trifle, drew my attention for the first 
 time, when a boy, to the " gentle 
 Elia." Let it be held in reverence. 
 Stretching along from this are early
 
 144 AN ODD CORNER IN 
 
 editions of Lamb-literature, includ- 
 ing the Tales from Shakespeare, with 
 Blake's and Mulready's designs. 
 Let me pause and reckon. There 
 are nineteen volumes altogether, 
 without counting the bound extracts 
 from journals and newspapers ; and 
 they contain most of what has been 
 given of worth by and concerning 
 the humourist of the India Office. I 
 must not, however, fail to notice the 
 admirable book of Mr. Ainger, and 
 the odd number, standing sentinel- 
 like, of London Society, to which we 
 owe Charles Mathews's story of the 
 ripe live Stilton, which Lamb volun- 
 teered to 1-1-1-lead home from the 
 cheesemonger's shop. Patmore's My 
 Friends, and S. C. Hall's Memories, 
 may as well be counted as Lamb- 
 literature, as also Hazlitt's Spirit of 
 the Age, and Carlyle's Reminiscences, 
 and in a lesser degree Pebody's 
 Authors at Work. These stand on
 
 A BOOK-LOVER'S STUDY. 145 
 
 the second shelf faithful attendants 
 in case of need. I had almost for- 
 gotten what Lord Lytton's Lucretia 
 was doing in such company ; but the 
 terrible story of Thomas Griffiths 
 Wainewright flashes across my mind, 
 and I remember it all. Lord Lytton's 
 novel was founded on the career of 
 the "light-hearted Janus" of the 
 Essays of Elia, the " dandy art-critic 
 of the London Magazine, the friend 
 of Hazlitt, De Quincey, and Barry 
 Cornwall," who at last came to an 
 ignominious death in a convict settle- 
 ment. Here also is George Dyer's 
 Poet's Fate. Lamb used to speak 
 very tenderly of Dyer : "poor George " 
 he used to style him ; and in a letter 
 to Coleridge he affirmed that " all 
 poems are good poems to George 
 aH men fine geniuses." Next to 
 this stands Charles Lloyd's Duke 
 D'Ormond and Beritola, published by 
 Longman in 1822. Evidently a gift- 
 
 10
 
 I 4 6 AN ODD CORNER IN 
 
 copy to some friend, it contains the 
 author's autograph on the title-page. 
 But what a volume is locked up in 
 the fact that its leaves, with few 
 exceptions, are uncut ! Let them 
 remain so a perpetual reproach to 
 the narrow friendship that had no 
 element of self-denial in it. The 
 friend should have read it through, 
 if but to quote to its author, with a 
 clear conscience, a line here and 
 there. Oh, it does smack mightily, 
 in acknowledging such a gift, to run 
 an odd sentence of our author's into 
 our own composition to run it in 
 with a vengeance, to make it fit 
 tightly, so that it cannot be separated 
 from the context without a super- 
 human tug. Alas ! perhaps our 
 " presentation copies " are also un- 
 cut. Lloyd, it will be remembered, 
 contributed with Coleridge and Lamb 
 to the little I2mo. volume of poems 
 published in Bristol in 1797 ; and it
 
 A BOOK-LOVER'S STUDY. 147 
 
 was he who on one occasion met 
 Lamb and his sister " slowly pacing 
 together a little footpath in Hoxton 
 fields, both bitterly weeping, and 
 found, on joining them, that they 
 were taking their solemn way to the 
 asylum," at which Mary Lamb spent 
 the days in which her mind was 
 " not at home." That Lamb felt a 
 great respect for Lloyd is to be 
 gathered from the verses he addressed 
 to him in 1797, in which occurs the 
 following couplet : 
 
 " I'll think less meanly of myself, 
 That Lloyd will sometimes think of me." 
 
 Adjoining Lloyd's solitary produc- 
 tion are first editions of Bernard 
 Barton's Poems by an Amateur; 
 Poems; Napoleon; Poetic Vigils; and 
 the posthumous Letters and Poems 
 edited by his daughter. The best 
 criticism ever uttered on Barton's 
 work is that of Lamb, who in the 
 
 102
 
 148 AN ODD CORNER IN 
 
 course of conversation with P. G, 
 Patmore once said that " he did not 
 write nonsense, at any rate. He was 
 dull enough, but not nonsensical. 
 He writes English, too, which the 
 magazine poets of the day do not." 
 Looking back now upon the days in 
 which I gathered these Bartons to- 
 gether, I can remember but one 
 reason for doing so : namely, that, 
 the author was considered by Lamb 
 to have the elements of worth about 
 him sufficient to demand the famous 
 letter, unique in its way, which con- 
 tains the memorable sentences that, 
 since their first publication, have 
 drawn down upon them, from literary 
 lads, heartiest blessings and direst 
 curses : " Keep to your bank, and 
 the bank will keep you. Trust 
 not to the public : you may hang, 
 starve, drown yourself, for anything 
 that worthy personage cares." To 
 many how musical these words are,
 
 A BOOK-LOVER'S STUDY. 149 
 
 now that the young days of wild 
 impossible dreams are past ! 
 
 But who shall tell with fitting 
 pathos the story associated with the 
 little darkly covered octavo which next 
 meets our eye ? It is only Dante Ros- 
 setti's translation of the Early Italian 
 Poets, published by Smith, Elder and 
 Co., in 1861, and for which Rossetti 
 designed as a frontispiece the draw- 
 ing reproduced in the English Illus- 
 trated Magazine for October, 1883 ; 
 but on the last leaf of the volume, 
 under the errata, appears the adver- 
 tisement : " Shortly will be published, 
 * Dante at Verona and other Poems,' 
 by D. G. Rossetti." Need we tell 
 again of the overwhelming sorrow 
 that stepped in upon the poet's life 
 and laid its forbidding finger upon 
 his published intention ? The follow- 
 ing year " Dante at Verona and 
 other Poems" were laid in MS. in 
 his wife's coffin, and for a while the
 
 150 AN ODD CORNER IN 
 
 poet bade farewell to his dreams. 
 Fame was to him worthless, life 
 without an object, now that his 
 beautiful and dearly - loved com- 
 panion had been ruthlessly stolen 
 from his side. For more than seven 
 years his MS. lay in its strange 
 resting-place, and was exhumed at 
 last only at the earnest persuasions 
 of valued friends, who would not 
 suffer the world to be for ever 
 deprived of its rightful possession, 
 or the poet of his just meed of poetic 
 recognition. There, alongside of The 
 Early Italian Poets, is the first edition 
 of the delayed Poems, given to the 
 public in 1870, and in return for 
 which the public gave Rossetti a 
 name amongst the greatest of poets 
 then living. 
 
 Passing by Rossetti's other volumes 
 (one of them a reproduction of The 
 Early Italian Poets), and William Bell 
 Scott's Poems by a Painter, and the
 
 A BOOK-LOVER'S STUDY. 151 
 
 completed Poems, illustrated by his 
 own and Alma Tadema's beautiful 
 etchings, and containing his graceful 
 Dedicatio Postica to Swinburne, Ros- 
 setti and William Morris, we come 
 to five little books which together 
 tell a powerful tale of poetic struggle 
 against odds sufficient to annihilate 
 a whole multitude of less determined 
 (if not less gifted) natures. Four of 
 these volumes are the productions 
 of Scotchmen namely, David Gray, 
 John Bethune, William Thorn and 
 Robert Nicholl ; the remaining one 
 that of a Scotchwoman Janet Hamil- 
 ton. We all know the story of poor 
 David Gray, the friend and partner 
 in the early struggles of Robert 
 Buchanan : how he came up to 
 London with limitless ambition and 
 untrained powers ; how he wrote 
 The Luggie, and died before he had 
 fairly entered upon the battle of life. 
 The story of the author of the second
 
 152 AN ODD CORNER IN 
 
 volume is a dark one and strange : 
 " A hard-tasked hand-labourer, aspir- 
 ing, at the most, to be a gardener or 
 forester, and often breaking stones 
 for months together on the roads, 
 writing on his knees as his only desk, 
 and on brown-paper bags and every 
 shred that would carry ink, in the 
 scanty time which he filched from 
 toil or sleep trying a didactic poem 
 on the model of Cowper's ' Task ' at 
 seventeen, and finishing a sad and 
 pious life under thirty, after experi- 
 ments in all kinds of literary produc- 
 tion." What an existence! The 
 author of the third volume William 
 Thorn was a simple weaver of 
 Dundee, who at one time, in conse- 
 quence of the failure of certain busi- 
 ness houses, found himself and his 
 family starved down to an uncertain 
 live shillings a week. Pawning all 
 his worldly goods, he started with 
 them on a book-hawking expedition,
 
 A BOOK-LOVER'S STUDY. 153 
 
 the particulars of which are given 
 in the preface to his little book 
 Rhymes and Recollections. With heart- 
 sickening earnestness he tells of how 
 they journeyed on "through the busy 
 singing world of spring which had 
 become a nuisance, and through the 
 loaded fields that bore nothing for 
 them, not knowing where their couch 
 might be that night, or where their 
 grave to-morrow." With all a father's 
 tenderness and a poet's vivid seizing 
 upon details, he relates the death of 
 his little girl " from exposure on a 
 cold night when they had been re- 
 fused shelter at several farmhouses," 
 and how he sat up in the early dawn 
 " watching the fluttering and wheel- 
 ing of the sparrows till he could find 
 some one to speak to about the 
 burial." One evening, with fivepence 
 in his pocket, he endeavoured to ob- 
 tain shelter for the night at Methven ; 
 but the price of such accommodation
 
 154 AN ODD CORNER IN 
 
 was sixpence, which must be forth- 
 coming before the weary travellers 
 could take off their " shoon," and 
 so to obtain the penny Thorn dipped 
 his dry flute in the little burn, and 
 played the " Flowers of the Forest." 
 At one time he resolved to seek rest 
 in the House of Refuge at Aberdeen; 
 but the receipt of five pounds in 
 return for his poem, " The Blind 
 Boy's Pranks," set him again upon 
 his feet. How heavily laden with 
 lead-like sorrow are his words of ac- 
 knowledgment : "O Sir! it is difficult 
 for those in other circumstances to 
 think what a strife is his who has to 
 battle lip-deep in poverty, with a 
 motherless family and a poetical 
 temperament the last the worst, 
 inasmuch as it enhances tenfold the 
 pain that is frequent, and the joy 
 that is rare." The life of Nicholl is 
 but another chapter of the sad story. 
 Herding cattle all the summer, he
 
 A BOOK-LOVER'S STUDY. 155 
 
 made the wherewithal to pay for his 
 winter's schooling. He read Kenil- 
 worth in the woods at thirteen, and 
 wrote verses at eighteen. Burning 
 these productions, he applied himself 
 to the study of Milton's prose, 
 Locke, and Bentham. Being ap- 
 prenticed to a grocer at Perth, he 
 put by his hard-earned savings until 
 they accumulated to two pounds, 
 with which he set up his mother in a 
 little shop. His experience about 
 this time is that he finds himself 
 " fitter to do his work after a night's 
 writing than others after a night's 
 idiotical amusement." Next he opens 
 a shop as a bookseller in Dundee, 
 but fails. Then he reaches a very 
 throne of power and wealth as editor 
 of a Leeds newspaper at a hundred a 
 year. Ill-health, however, comes in 
 upon him with rapid stride, and in 
 his twenty-fourth year he dies in the 
 arms of his mother, who had worked
 
 156 AN ODD CORNER IN 
 
 all through the harvest -time for silver 
 to pay for the journey to reach him. 
 
 Janet Hamilton, the authoress of 
 Poems and Ballads, the fifth of our 
 volumes by Scottish writers, was the 
 daughter of a shoemaker, and became 
 in early life the wife of her father's 
 assistant, by whom she had ten 
 children. Although she began when 
 very young to compose verse, and 
 had when between seventeen and 
 nineteen years of age produced about 
 twenty pieces in rhyme, she could 
 not write until in her fifty-fourth 
 year. After her marriage, her read- 
 ing hours were taken from her sleep, 
 and many an hour she spent in this 
 way, holding the book in one hand, 
 and nursing the infant in her lap with 
 the other. 
 
 These are the stories of the earnest 
 battling of persevering souls against 
 external and opposing circumstances 
 which those five unpretentious little
 
 A BOOK-LOVER'S STUDY. 157 
 
 volumes tell me. Who shall say 
 with any appearance of truth that 
 the value of a book depends alto- 
 gether upon what is contained within 
 its covers ? 
 
 Next (and with them we finish for 
 the present) are Lackington's Af^zozVs 
 and Milton's Paradise Regained. The 
 former, a small octavo, is the edition 
 published by Whittaker in 1830, and 
 is quite an ordinary book, to be 
 picked up at any old bookstall. Its 
 value, however, lies in the fact that 
 on pages 204 to 208 inclusive (the 
 pages containing the supposed letters 
 of John Wesley, one on the religious 
 sect he had established, the other to 
 a young lady with whom he had 
 fallen in love, and to whom he made 
 the poetic confession : 
 
 " With thee conversing, I forget 
 All times, all seasons, and their change"), 
 
 the margins are literally covered with 
 notes bearing the initials of a once
 
 158 AN ODD CORNER IN 
 
 popular President of the Wesleyan 
 Methodist Conference. The Milton 
 is a fourth edition of " Paradise 
 Regain' d, a Poem in four books, to 
 which is added Samson Agonistes and 
 poems upon several occasions com- 
 pos'd at several times. The author 
 John Milton. London, Printed for 
 Jacob Tonson, within Gray's-Inn Gate 
 next Gray's-Inn Lane, 1705." It is a 
 beautifully clean copy, and has in- 
 serted one of the rare portraits of the 
 author. What makes it, however, to 
 be prized is the autograph of Leigh 
 Hunt upon its title-page. I love to 
 think that this volume shared with 
 Hunt his prison-life, which he tells 
 us was not entirely devoid of bright- 
 ness and poetry. How familiar has 
 become his description of the room 
 he converted into a charming study : 
 " I papered the walls with a trellis of 
 roses ; I had the ceiling coloured 
 with clouds and sky ; the barred
 
 A BOOK-LOVER'S STUDY. 159 
 
 \vindows were screened with Venetian 
 blinds ; and when my book-cases 
 were set up, with their busts and 
 flowers, and a pianoforte made its 
 appearance, perhaps there was not a 
 handsomer room on that side the 
 water. I took a pleasure, when a 
 stranger knocked at the door, to see 
 him come in and stare about him. 
 The surprise on issuing from the 
 borough,, and passing through the 
 avenues of a jail was dramatic. 
 Charles Lamb declared there was no 
 other such room except in a fairy- 
 tale." For this Milton I gave 
 eighteenpence.
 
 GENIUS AND CRITICISM. 
 
 To a thoughtful reader the perusal 
 of contemporary complaining criti- 
 cism is a source of great amusement ; 
 and this feeling is heightened by the 
 consideration of how critics come by 
 their rules, and deepened into a half- 
 sadness by the recollection of the 
 disastrous effects of some of their ill- 
 timed endeavours. 
 
 How do critics come by their rules ? 
 A genius is born of an age. With 
 powerful individuality he speaks of 
 the workings of his soul, and his 
 relation to the men and women sur- 
 rounding him. Men admire what he 
 has done, and the manner in which 
 it has been done ; and then comfort-
 
 GENIUS AND CRITICISM. 161 
 
 ably feed their vanity by supposing 
 that in the light shed from the fire of 
 this one soul they are able to read 
 clearly, and without possibility of 
 mistake, all pertaining to genius, 
 even to the mode of its expression. 
 These apparent discoveries they then 
 cast into the mould of their own 
 minds, and turn them out, a com- 
 plete set of rules, by which the com- 
 position of the future is to be judged. 
 They constitute themselves princes 
 and judges, and pass sentence ac- 
 cordingly in all the plenitude of their 
 self-imposed arrogance. Another 
 voice comes ; another genius is born. 
 But the critics are puzzled. The 
 voice has not the compass and modu- 
 lation of its predecessor ; and in 
 endeavouring to understand it the 
 law-makers flounder about and get 
 entangled in the nets of their own 
 ignorant bewilderment. The only 
 way out of their difficulty, they think, 
 
 ii
 
 162 QENIUS AND CRITICISM. 
 
 is by denying the divinity of the 
 voice, and this they do with little or 
 no compunction. Luscious, mellow 
 pears are pleasant enough to the 
 palate ; but what fools we should be 
 were we to despise the grape and the 
 melon on account of their dis- 
 similarity to the pear. What would 
 be thought of a botanist who, when 
 a new plant was placed in his hands 
 for examination, should declare it to 
 be an artificial composition, a pseudo 
 thing, however natural its character, 
 because he, on reference to the 
 Linnsean classification, and running 
 over the families, orders, and sub- 
 divisions, had been unable to find any 
 account of it ? In the Dark Ages, 
 what ludicrously vain attempts were 
 made to find in Ptolemy's system of 
 geography all modern localities ! A 
 town, hill, or river was hardly con- 
 sidered to have a certain position, 
 unless it appeared in that topo-
 
 GENIUS AND CRITICISM. 163 
 
 grapher's olden charts. And not 
 very far remote from this period is 
 an age in which it was argued that 
 Saturn and Uranus could not be pos- 
 sessed of so many satellites as the 
 telescope ascribed to them, because 
 men could not bring their minds to 
 grant the possibility of the secondary 
 planets excelling the primary in 
 number. 
 
 What a deal of nonsense is uttered 
 in the present day under cover of 
 the " eternal laws " that govern com- 
 position. It seems to us as if, some- 
 time in the past, the critics held a 
 convention at which they cut out and 
 manufactured a garment into which 
 poets were to be slipped for trial : if 
 they fitted the garment, and the gar- 
 ment fitted them, they were to have 
 their credentials, not otherwise. 
 Dryden did very well, and so did 
 Pope, and Byron and Scott, and a 
 number of others. One now and 
 
 II 2
 
 164 GENIUS AND CRITICISM. 
 
 then caused a little trouble to the 
 august examiners, but they generally 
 managed to get him in ultimately. 
 At length a strange candidate ap- 
 peared. His rugged genius scattered 
 the beauties of invention to right and 
 
 left of him. 
 
 " He could not ope 
 His mouth but out there flew a trope." 
 
 His presence peopled the earth and 
 air with warm living creations. In 
 Spring-time the green buds leaped into 
 existence ; the arrow quivered with 
 anxiety to leave the bowstring, to 
 cleave with lightning-speed the am- 
 bient air. "But he has no method," 
 said the critics. " Where is the 
 smoothness and regularity as of a 
 well-ordered garden that we must 
 have? Let us try the garment." 
 And so they turned and twisted the 
 poet, and turned and twisted the 
 garment, but there was no such thing 
 as a fit. Some proposed stretching
 
 GENIUS AND CRITICISM. 165 
 
 the garment as ladies stretch their 
 gloves ; to this others dissented, 
 fearing the stitchings were not strong 
 enough. One spoke of the ex- 
 pediency of taking out the lining ; 
 but he got laughed at for his pains. 
 At length, after numerous shiftings 
 and shufflings, they gave up the case 
 as altogether bad ; they could make 
 no poet out of the candidate, what- 
 ever else he might be, and so they 
 left him accordingly. We have heard 
 of the duckling that got pecked at, 
 and spitefully used, because in the 
 sequel it proved to be a swan. 
 
 Our remarks have been exempli- 
 fied of late years by the treatment 
 Walt Whitman has received from 
 the hands of some of his critics. 
 They think of his ruggedness, and 
 contrast it with the smoothness and 
 liquidity of Pope, the pathos of Mrs. 
 Hemans, the lyric perfection of 
 Burns, and the cloying sweetness and
 
 166 GENIUS AND CRITICISM. 
 
 fancy of Moore. They cluster round 
 his poems like a lot of landscape- 
 gardeners at the foot of one of our 
 hills, who put their heads together 
 and decide that it would look very 
 much better were it not for this 
 jutting crag, or that out-of-the-way 
 peak. Had they but been acting- 
 creators at the shaping of the world, 
 they are sure they would have made 
 a far better hill than that one. Per- 
 haps they would also have made 
 every grain of sand alike, and trimmed 
 off the odd edges of the clouds : who 
 can tell ? The vanity of man a 
 forked radish with a head fantastically 
 carved, as Carlyle calls him is past 
 finding out. 
 
 Let it, however, be understood 
 here that we do not advocate a bold 
 disregard, on the part of an author, 
 of all limitations of form in literary 
 productions, for the mere sake of 
 being considered above such trifles.
 
 GENIUS AND CRITICISM. 167 
 
 An impatience with set forms is not 
 always a sign of genius ; and limita- 
 tions should not be dispensed with if 
 they afford room enough for indi- 
 viduality to assert itself. We have 
 no need to " build more stately 
 mansions " until the old ones have 
 proved too small and cramped for our 
 use. 
 
 But are style and matter separable 
 in our most characteristic literature ? 
 or is the former but the natural out- 
 come of the latter ? Pope says, 
 
 " The sound must seem an echo to the sense," 
 
 and we have numerous instances in 
 our literature of how completely this 
 echoing has been brought about with 
 happy results. It is impossible to 
 imagine the " Song of the Shirt " 
 and " The Raven " in other forms 
 than those in which they exist, and 
 in which the sound so perfectly 
 echoes to the sense.
 
 1 68 GENIUS AND CRITICISM. 
 
 Any work destined for immortality 
 must, in a manner, be original, and 
 the outcome of some particular ex- 
 perience of its author. Verses were 
 first composed to be chanted to the 
 wild dances of our ancestors, and 
 apparently satisfied their limited re- 
 quirements in this direction. Some 
 of the most beautiful and liquid 
 poems of Moore were composed as 
 the poet walked about the lawn be- 
 hind his little cottage at Sloperton ; 
 and Charles Lamb used to declare 
 that Milton's " Paradise " smelt of 
 the candlelight. We have nothing 
 particular to advance against songs 
 for the heated, crowded atmosphere 
 of the drawing-room, or against 
 sentimental poems to be wept over 
 in secret by aesthetic and woe-be- 
 gone maidens, and by languishing 
 milky-watery young men ; but we 
 must claim indulgence, and in most 
 cases admiring appreciation for
 
 GENIUS AND CRITICISM. 169 
 
 poems, however rough-hewn, that 
 will swing with music to the robust 
 stride across purply uplands in the 
 first fresh breeze of the morning, and 
 to the health-giving climb up the 
 sides of rugged hills. 
 
 To blame a work, is tantamount 
 to a declaration on the part of the 
 critic that he, personally, stands on 
 a greater elevation, and sees further 
 into, and knows more about the sub- 
 ject under consideration, than his 
 author does. This undoubtedly ac- 
 counts for the quantity of fiddling, 
 complaining criticism with which 
 many of our so-called critical journals 
 abound. The critic fears to be 
 thought beneath his author, and so 
 doles out a limited number of praises 
 and an unlimited quantity of slur. 
 He usually is as little fitted to deal 
 with the task he sets himself as a 
 manikin is to growl about the anatomy 
 of a star, setting forth at the same
 
 170 GENIUS AND CRITICISM. 
 
 time his own thoughts as to how it 
 should be formed. An American 
 poet writes : " A friend of mine once 
 devoted a great deal of time to a very 
 careful and thorough article upon a 
 
 poet He afterwards showed 
 
 me the critical notices it drew forth, 
 and those which treated the subject 
 with the coolest possible air of know- 
 ledge were written by men who knew 
 nothing whatever about it." In 
 these hypercritical days we want 
 more hero-worship, a greater rever- 
 ence for genius, and a more just and 
 delicate appreciation of individual 
 worth. Instead of this, some would 
 have us believe that all men are much 
 of a sameness ; that the old days in 
 which the gods lived on earth are 
 for ever gone ; that the cry of genius 
 is but a stuttering excuse for pecu- 
 liarity ; and that men, instead of 
 being free-born individuals, person- 
 ally accountable to a higher law
 
 GENIUS AND CRITICISM. 171 
 
 than narrow critical philosophy ever 
 dreamed of, are but " turkeys driven 
 with a stick and red clout to the 
 market." 
 
 What if the work of genius is some- 
 times peculiar ? We owe a greater 
 debt to eccentricity than at first ap- 
 pears. Every new turn of thought, 
 every extraordinary discovery in 
 science, every deep realization of 
 some religious truth, has been called 
 eccentricity; in some cases a harder 
 word than this has been used. 
 
 Too often, alas ! our system-keepers 
 have been obstacle-makers. Plutarch 
 says that when Cicero, as a young 
 man, visited the oracle at Delphi, the 
 advice given him was to make his 
 own genius, not the opinions of 
 others, the guide of his life. And yet 
 it seems the fate of all originality of 
 thinking to be immediately opposed. 
 "The botanical system of Linnaeus 
 was at one time the object of ridicule
 
 172 GENIUS AND CRITICISM. 
 
 for all Stockholm. Copernicus so 
 much dreaded the prejudice of man- 
 kind against his treatise on The Re- 
 volutions of the Heavenly Bodies, that 
 he detained it in his closet for thirty 
 years together. When Kepler pub- 
 lished his first rational work on 
 comets, it was condemned, even by 
 the learned, as a wild dream. Bacon 
 was misunderstood at home in his 
 own day ; it was long after his death 
 before English writers ventured to 
 quote him as an authority. Montes- 
 quieu gave his Esprit des Loix to be 
 read by that man in France whom 
 he conceived to be the best judge, 
 and in return received the most mor- 
 tifying remarks."* 
 
 If Shakespeare had unduly con- 
 sidered the critics, we should pro- 
 bably be without those fantastic 
 medleys (?) of his, which are at pre- 
 sent justly considered some of the 
 
 * D'Israeli's Literary Character.
 
 GENIUS AND CRITICISM. 173 
 
 glories of our literature. A great 
 foreign writer, criticizing these pro- 
 ductions, asks concerning Shake- 
 speare : " Is he not powerful enough 
 to follow laws of his own?" and then, 
 like the Irishman, answers his own 
 question : " He is ; and the poetry 
 of Shakespeare finds an outlet in the 
 highest grade of unreasoningand crea- 
 tive imagination. Despising ordinary 
 logic, it creates therefrom another ; 
 it unites facts and ideas in a new 
 order, apparently absurd, at bottom 
 legitimate ; it lays open the land of 
 dreams, and its dreams deceive us 
 like the truth." Sir Joshua Reynolds, 
 in one of his admirable Discourses on 
 Painting, defends this same idea of 
 genius being a law to itself. He 
 says : " The rules by which men of 
 extraordinary parts, and such as are 
 called men of genius, work, are . . . 
 of such a nice texture as not easily to 
 admit being expressed in words. . . .
 
 174 GENIUS AND CRITICISM. 
 
 Unsubstantial, however, as these 
 rules may seem, and difficult as it 
 may be to convey them in writing, 
 they are still seen and felt in the 
 mind of the artist ; and he works 
 from them with as much certainty as 
 if they were embodied, as I may say, 
 upon paper." If William Blake had 
 not obeyed this law of his own, and 
 pursued a wild, strange path, his 
 peculiar individuality would have 
 been smothered, and the masterly 
 essay of Swinburne unwritten. If 
 Wiertz had not followed a similar 
 course, the gallery of paintings which 
 is now one of the curiosities of 
 Brussels would be unknown. If 
 Wagner, the musician, had not, by 
 sheer force of genius and will, pushed 
 forward his way in spite of the per- 
 sistent opposition he experienced at 
 every step of his progress, the proba- 
 bility is that his name would be 
 unknown, and the musical world
 
 GENIUS AND CRITICISM. 175 
 
 destitute of the compositions about 
 which so many of his admirers rave. 
 We hail with gladness the few 
 faint indications we have of a better 
 state of affairs in the criticism of the 
 future. In the prospectus issued 
 some short while ago by the pro- 
 jectors of a new monthly magazine, 
 they declared their conviction that 
 "the best and most difficult function 
 of the critic is the discovery of merits 
 rather than of defects ;" and pro- 
 mised " that while we shall praise 
 nothing that is not good for the sake 
 of being pleasant, we shall never be 
 tempted into injustice for the mere 
 sake of being smart." Another jour- 
 nal professes to have for its only 
 enemies " unjust, corrupt, and cruel 
 men, pretenders, upstarts, snobs, and 
 humbugs." We reckon it also a 
 promising sign that some high-class 
 reviews have a rule that their critical 
 notices be signed by the writers. By
 
 i ;6 GENIUS AND CRITICISM. 
 
 far too many " stabs in the dark " 
 are inflicted under cover of editorial 
 nobody-ness. To a restless out-of- 
 work looking for a life-mission, we 
 respectfully offer the suggestion that 
 he should immediately set about 
 finding one of these literary nobodies, 
 thereby solving for us the question 
 whether it has a body to chastise or 
 a soul to save. 
 
 Who was the first author ? and 
 who the first critic ? Emerson, look- 
 ing for a moment at man through 
 Darwin's spectacles says : " They 
 combed his mane, they pared his 
 nails, cut off his tail, set him on end, 
 sent him to school, and made him 
 pay taxes, before he could begin to 
 write his sad story." We have al- 
 ways spoken rapturously of Emer- 
 son's wisdom ; and here, in the lines 
 we have just quoted, we have further 
 proof of it, for does he not make 
 sadness immediately dependent on
 
 GENIUS AND CRITICISM. 177 
 
 the payment of taxes ? If the secret 
 of popularity lies in the ability to 
 appeal touchingly to some universal 
 experience, surely by this single refer- 
 ence to the all-absorbing tax question 
 Emerson has made for himself a fame 
 which cannot die. Lamb declares that 
 the want of candles accounts for the 
 seriousness of the elder poetry. " It 
 has a sombre cast, derived from the 
 tradition of those unlantern'd nights. 
 Jokes came in with the candle. . . . 
 This is our peculiar and household 
 planet. Wanting it, what savage 
 unsocial nights must our ancestors 
 have spent, wintering in caves and 
 unillumined fastnesses ! They must 
 have lain about and grumbled at one 
 another in the dark. What repartees 
 could have passed, when you must 
 have felt about for a smile, and 
 handled a neighbour's cheek to be 
 sure that he understood it ?" No 
 doubt crabbed and complaining 
 
 12
 
 178 GENIUS AND CRITICISM. 
 
 critics existed in those days. In 
 imagination we see and hear it all. 
 Some disagreeable old stick has pro- 
 bably eaten an enormous dinner, and 
 sits in a stupid snoozy state, in the 
 darkest and warmest corner of the 
 candleless cave. A joke is born of 
 the active brain of one of the 
 younger portion of the community, 
 and launched out into the darkness. 
 Anxious for the success of his venture, 
 the jokist, settling down all-fours, 
 creeps about the cave handling the 
 faces of his companions. At last the 
 snoozy old gourmand is reached. 
 Rousing up, he shouts out angrily : 
 
 " What made you scrawl my 
 face?" To which the traveller in 
 search of smiles answers meekly : 
 
 " Only to see if my joke had got 
 over this way that's all, indeed." 
 
 Then, with a warm ejaculation on 
 his tongue, the interrupted sleeper 
 returns to his snooze, while the
 
 GENIUS AND CRITICISM. 179 
 
 youthful wit sinks into silence, deter- 
 mined to the lowest depths of his 
 determination not to risk another 
 joke till the future comes bright with 
 its candlelight. 
 
 We freely admit that many un- 
 solved and unsolvable questions 
 cluster around our subject such as, 
 for instance, How far genius receives 
 from the age what it gives back to the 
 age ? To what extent it is affected 
 by the pains and strivings amidst 
 which it is born and lives ? How far 
 criticism should follow in the wake 
 of creative genius, learning with hu- 
 mility the lessons it has to teach ? 
 and, In what particulars criticism 
 should take the lead, pointing out to 
 genius safe and sure ground upon 
 which to tread ? One point is, how- 
 ever, tolerably clear : criticism must 
 be old-fashioned and conservative to 
 but a limited extent, and must beware 
 of attempting to rein in the winged 
 
 12 2
 
 i So GENIUS AND CRITICISM. 
 
 steed ; rather it must follow on to 
 know more fully the whys and where- 
 fores of the untamable mystery. The 
 criticism that did its duty when the 
 voice of genius was rude and savage, 
 albeit natural ; when men lived out 
 face to face with nature, and were 
 mainly interested in the exploits of 
 their chiefs and the courage and 
 strength of their heroes, and sang 
 their praises in wild songs full of ex- 
 aggerated passion, is totally unfit to 
 cope with successive waves of civiliza- 
 tion and refinement. Criticism must 
 be progressive, moving ever on to a 
 wider sphere of extended sympathy. 
 It must take itslessons from the liberal 
 age of Chaucer, with its Canterbury 
 pilgrimages ; from Spenser, with his 
 ideal and allegory ; from Shakespeare, 
 with his recovery of the stores of 
 classical learning, and his honest 
 speech of the results of the freedom 
 and richness of thought produced by
 
 GENIUS AND CRITICISM. 181 
 
 the Reformation ; from the times of the 
 Spectator essayists, full of the refine- 
 ment of fashion, when men laid aside 
 passion as a thing dead and forgotten ; 
 from Hazlitt, who tells of the change 
 made in the world by the French 
 Revolution. And if his lessons have 
 been well learned, the critic, standing 
 here in this age of ours, in which re- 
 finement has reached a state hitherto 
 unknown, will see that just and 
 righteous criticism can only be the 
 result of his grafting upon his views 
 of the past a knowledge of the real 
 wants of the present, a sympathy with 
 the aims of its literary workers, and 
 a prophetic ken carrying him far on 
 into the future. " A true critic must 
 not only be a universal scholar, but 
 as clear-conscienced as a saint, and 
 as tenderly impressible as a woman. 
 After that he may be rigid as Minos." 
 But he needs yet another qualifica- 
 tion, or, shall we rather term it, a
 
 182 GENIUS AND CRITICISM. 
 
 practical deepening of this tender 
 impressibility. He must be keenly 
 alive to the presence of genius 
 wherever found ; and it sometimes 
 lies far down out of the way of 
 ordinary vision, hidden by foreign 
 and extraneous matter, for a man 
 can be at the same time human and 
 yet a genius, because the inspira- 
 tion which rules him in his greatness 
 comes and goes like a disease. 
 
 'Tis an ill wind that blows no one 
 any good. In an old poem called 
 The Mirror of Fools, written by a 
 Canterbury monk, we have the history 
 of an ass, Brunellus, who studied at 
 Paris, and entered in succession all 
 the monastic orders, but was con- 
 tent with none of them. He was 
 about to form a new order, when his 
 master caught him, and sent him 
 back to his old occupation. If critics 
 would but be satisfied to lead writers 
 of shallow imitations and humdrum
 
 GENIUS AND CRITICISM. 183 
 
 monotonous rubbish back into a legi- 
 timate channel of honest work say, 
 at the plough or at the carpenter's 
 bench they would earn for them- 
 selves the hearty praise of all sensible 
 men. An ass can but be an ass, and 
 there is no room for long ears in 
 literature.
 
 ON THE PURSUIT OF LITERA- 
 TURE IN ODD MOMENTS. 
 
 ONE of the blackest pages of history 
 is that on which we find inscribed 
 the lives of some of our literary men. 
 Too often, alas ! it has been the 
 case that, while the soul has been 
 lifted up in the contemplation of 
 some transcendent thought by which 
 other minds are to be made wealthy, 
 the body, barely and raggedly 
 covered, has wanted due nourish- 
 ment and care. Cervantes, the im- 
 mortal genius of Spain, is supposed 
 to have wanted bread ; and Camoens, 
 the solitary pride of Portugal, de- 
 prived of the necessaries of life, 
 perished in a hospital at Lisbon.
 
 PURSUIT OF LITERATURE. 185 
 
 It all seems so much like the old 
 Greek story of Prometheus, who 
 dispensed such great gifts to men, 
 yet could not free himself from the 
 chains which held him secure in 
 the Scythian desert. Insults from 
 purse-proud patrons have been not 
 the least of authors' troubles ; 
 Coleridge, in his gathering together 
 subscribers to the Watchman, was 
 reminded by one to whom he 
 applied that twelve shillings a year 
 was a large sum to be bestowed on 
 one person when there were so 
 many objects of charity. In the 
 face of such occurrences we do not 
 wonder that Charles Lamb wrote so 
 strongly to his friend Bernard 
 Barton, the Quaker poet, who con- 
 templated abandoning the desk and 
 trusting for bread to the issue of his 
 pen: "Throw yourself rather from 
 the steep Tarpeian rock slap-dash, 
 headlong upon pikes ... I have
 
 1 86 ON THE PURSUIT OF 
 
 known many authors want for bread, 
 some repining, all agreeing they had 
 rather have been tailors, weavers 
 what not ? than the things they 
 were. I have known some starved, 
 some go mad, one dear friend ' dying 
 in a workhouse.' Oh, you know r not 
 may you never know! the 
 miseries of subsisting by author- 
 ship !" An echo to this is given in 
 the advice proffered by Walter Scott 
 to one of his correspondents : 
 " Whatever pleasure you may find 
 in literature, beware of looking to it 
 as a profession ... If ever you 
 have to look to literature for an 
 absolute and necessary support, you 
 must be degraded by the necessity 
 of writing whether you feel inclined 
 or not, and, besides, must suffer all 
 the miseries of a precarious and 
 dependent existence." The profes- 
 sion of literature has been to many 
 what the Ceffyl-y-dwfr, or water-
 
 LITERATURE IN ODD MOMENTS. 187 
 
 horse, was believed by the Celts to 
 be, viz., an evil spirit who, in the 
 shape of a horse, would induce the 
 unwary stranger to mount him ; and 
 then, soaring into the clouds, or dash- 
 ing over river and mountain, would 
 suddenly melt into air or mist, pre- 
 cipitating the rider into destruction. 
 It is not in our province just now 
 to inquire how far the miseries of 
 literary life are due to failings 
 similar to those which Herodotus 
 tells us afflicted certain Thracians, 
 who considered idleness to be the 
 mark of a gentleman, but to dig the 
 ground as most disgraceful. Apart 
 from this consideration, the picture 
 drawn above is certainly not one to 
 be pleasantly contemplated by any 
 aspirant to future glory in literature, 
 and God knows there are many such 
 nowadays, when so much that is 
 utterly unreasonable and ridiculous 
 is written about the power of the
 
 1 88 ON THE PURSUIT OF 
 
 pen, the glory of literature, and the 
 superiority of a quill-driver over a 
 warrior. But there is grim consola- 
 tion and encouragement of a kind to 
 be obtained in spite of the fore- 
 going; and those who, under pres- 
 sure of circumstances, find them- 
 selves compelled to write, that they 
 may eat, should remember that full- 
 blown literary men are necessary 
 as pain and evil are necessary and 
 martyrs. A great number, how- 
 ever, who earn their bread in this 
 manner would be far happier follow- 
 ing the plough, and winning honours 
 at a ploughing match. 
 
 It is impossible to produce the 
 best work the mind is capable of 
 producing, under continued harass- 
 ing anxiety concerning pecuniary 
 ways and means. In authorship, 
 the one great advantage is never to 
 be compelled to furnish a publisher 
 with so much matter at so much per
 
 LITERATURE IN ODD MOMENTS. 189 
 
 sheet and to need the money. Tom 
 Moore could not work without a 
 retainer, and we doubt whether 
 Lalla Rookh would have been written 
 had it not been for an open offer in 
 the simplest form from the Long- 
 mans, merely stipulating that upon 
 Moore giving into their hands a 
 poem as long as Rokeby, he should 
 receive the sum of 3,000. At this 
 time, however, the poet was in receipt 
 .of 500 a year from the copyright 
 of his songs. It is in some respects 
 a pity that a poet cannot live upon 
 poetic food, having for his diet, 
 " fog, morning mist, and a slice of 
 the densest cloud within his reach, 
 sauced with moonshine, whenever 
 he could get it." 
 
 " Literature should depend for its 
 culture, not on the exclusive devo- 
 tion of time and energy, but rather 
 on hours and seasons snatched from 
 the pursuit of worldly interests by
 
 IQO ON THE PURSUIT OF 
 
 intelligent and earnest-hearted indi- 
 viduals." Independence should first 
 be sought by studying the branch of 
 industry which lies most within our 
 reach, and secondary to this, litera- 
 ture may honourably and happily be 
 pursued. When literature is the 
 sole business of life, it becomes a 
 drudgery : when we are able to 
 resort to it at certain times, it is a 
 charming relaxation. Ruskin says 
 it is only by labour that thought 
 can be made healthy, and only by 
 thought that labour can be made 
 happy, and the two cannot be 
 separated with impunity. Looking, 
 then, at literature as an enjoyable 
 occupation when the day's worry 
 and toil are over, we cannot fail to 
 notice its superiority over other 
 hobbies, and how completely it takes 
 a man out of himself and his 
 surroundings, giving to him truly 
 that change which is sweetest rest.
 
 LITERATURE IN ODD MOMENTS, 191 
 
 " The man who can spend his days 
 in a purely material atmosphere, and 
 sing at night, has genuine pluck in 
 him ;" and what Rogers, the banker- 
 poet, once said to Madame de Stae'l, 
 " I shall never forget the delight 
 with which on returning home (from 
 the bank) I used to read and write 
 during the evening," ought to be 
 enough to make any " green poet," 
 who wails about the cruel world and 
 the harsh realities of life, as opposed 
 to the beautiful realm of the ideal, 
 heartily ashamed of himself. 
 
 We cannot well imagine a greater 
 pleasure than to sit of a winter's 
 evening by a cosy fireside deep in 
 the pages of some favourite author. 
 At such a season Ossian cannot fail 
 to throw his spell around us ; and 
 the raging of the storm without and 
 the rattle of the casement are but so 
 many wild, weird choruses to his 
 songs. Or on a summer's evening
 
 192 ON THE PURSUIT OF 
 
 to lie lazily beside some babbling 
 mountain-brook, letting the music 
 of the wandering wind in the pines 
 overhead mingle with the sweet 
 voices that come to the soul from 
 some healthy country-loving writer. 
 In such a mood Thomson's Seasons 
 becomes a veritable handbook, as- 
 sisting us to the understanding of 
 some of Dame Nature's secrets ; 
 Thoreau and his Walden hut are 
 also fit subjects for contemplation 
 at such a time. And then as the 
 sun goes down in the west, causing 
 the shadows to creep over the 
 distant hills, and stretching im- 
 mense bands of purple and gold 
 across the horizon, thoughts that 
 help to draw the mind into unison 
 with nature are treasures of untold 
 value. Or perchance, out of harmony 
 with ourselves and the world, we go 
 out musing into the fields ; no star 
 of hope shines for us ; if the stars
 
 LITERATURE IN ODD MOMENTS. 193 
 
 really peep out, they are but poor 
 commonplace things studding the 
 sky as tin-tacks driven into blue 
 baize ; and all nature's sounds are 
 discordant and jarring. But a great 
 and solemn thought, long ago gathered 
 from some author, is carried to our 
 weary minds by some invisible power, 
 and lo ! the air swims with life ; the 
 sky is the front of heaven, and the 
 stars are fiery shapes ; a beauty and 
 a grandeur as of a new revelation 
 wrap us round and about, and all of 
 the present and the future is en- 
 circled in the golden glory of hope. 
 
 We must not fail, however, to warn 
 our readers of the dangers attendant 
 on out-of-doors pursuit of literature. 
 It is said that, in a certain year when 
 the Nile did not rise to its usual 
 height, and a famine was apprehended 
 in Egypt, a poet, Abu Jaafar by 
 name, sat by the river-side examin- 
 ing a piece of poetry by the rules of 
 
 13
 
 194 ON THE PURSUIT OF 
 
 his art. Some one passing by, not 
 understanding him, imagined he was 
 uttering a charm to hinder the rise 
 of the river, and pushed him into 
 the water, out of which he failed to 
 find his way ; and if he had, his 
 poetry would surely have been left 
 behind : the very notion of a man 
 in a dripping condition being a 
 poet is simply ridiculous. Nature 
 does so delight to topple over our 
 pretensions, and to help us to find 
 our true level ; if we set ourselves 
 up one day, the next she will most 
 decidedly pinch our noses blue with 
 the cold, or give us the face-ache, 
 and then laugh at us and ask (quite 
 meekly, of course), " Where is your 
 poetry now ?" 
 
 A great treasure is the possession 
 of well-lined bookshelves, filling the 
 nooks and vacant corners of our 
 rooms. And books, after all, are 
 not mere quires of printed paper,
 
 LITERATURE IN ODD MOMENTS. 195 
 
 held together in the clasp of covers ; 
 they strike the lover of literature 
 rather as the souls of great men, 
 dead and living, earnestly waiting to 
 give up the choicest parts of their 
 choice lives to all who will but have 
 them. " Through the portals of 
 literature we are ushered into the 
 presence of the great men of all 
 ages ; and all who have mastered 
 the mystery of the English alphabet 
 have no need to go seeking friend- 
 ships among feeble ordinary men. 
 They have Homer, Plato, Shake- 
 speare, and Milton for their friends 
 friends who unbosom their long- 
 ings and satisfactions, their inmost 
 hopes and their darkest fears, and 
 who never bore with their forced 
 companionship, and are only garru- 
 lous when desired." Old Doctor 
 Sheridan once wrote to his friend 
 Dean Swift, then in London on a 
 visit : 
 
 132
 
 196 ON THE PURSUIT OF 
 
 " While you converse with lords and dukes, 
 I have their betters here my books : 
 Fixed in an elbow-chair at ease 
 I choose companions as I please. 
 I'd rather have one single shelf 
 Than all my friends, except yourself; 
 For after all that can be said 
 Our best acquaintance are the dead." 
 
 Emerson, in one of his addresses to 
 the students of Howard University, 
 said, " The great masters of thought, 
 the Platos not only those that we 
 call sacred writers, but those that 
 we call profane have acted on the 
 mind with more energy than any 
 companions. I think that every re- 
 markable person whom you meet 
 will testify to something like that, 
 that the fast-opening mind has found 
 more inspiration in his book than in 
 his friend." 
 
 Reading is necessary to the daily 
 progression that should inevitably 
 attend every human being. We are 
 so inclined to content ourselves with 
 what is commonest, and the spirit
 
 LITERATURE IN ODD MOMENTS. 197 
 
 and the senses so easily grow dead 
 to the impressions of the beautiful 
 and perfect, that everyone should 
 study to nourish in his mind the 
 faculty of feeling these things. " To 
 this end," says Goethe, " one ought 
 every day at least to hear a little 
 song, read a good poem, see a fine 
 picture, and, if it were possible, to 
 speak a few reasonable words." Pliny 
 the Younger affirmed that he never 
 read a book so bad, but he drew 
 some profit from it. 
 
 A great deal of time spent in 
 laborious reading is not at all neces- 
 sary in order that every inquiring 
 mind should get a tolerable know- 
 ledge of the best works in literature. 
 In the evenings of one week spent 
 by the winter fireside, and by the 
 help of an English translation of 
 Homer (a good prose literal transla- 
 tion is the best), the beauties of the 
 Iliad can be unfolded. In like manner
 
 198 ON THE PURSUIT OF 
 
 other great authors can be persuaded 
 to give out their words of wisdom. 
 The qualifications needed to be car- 
 ried to the work are simply a desire 
 to know and a power to say " I will 
 know." 
 
 Then there are the seasons in 
 which we are weak enough to take 
 pen in hand to spoil the clean face 
 of a sheet of foolscap by setting 
 down thoughts which cannot live. 
 A certain momentary hope and 
 happiness are born of such an 
 exercise. Full of the cheery glow 
 of self-deception, we scribble and 
 scribble until the paper is covered, 
 or the pen fails, or a loose brick 
 tumbles down the chimney, or the 
 cat gets in for an evening dance with 
 the crockery ; either of which oc- 
 currences is sufficient to place an 
 effectual barrier in front of literary 
 ambition for the time being. And 
 then, if in our sane moments the
 
 LITERATURE IN ODD MOMENTS. 199 
 
 lines we have penned appear vapid 
 and unhealthy, or we fail to get 
 sympathy from some dearest friend 
 to whom we have shown, under cover 
 of strictest secrecy, the ambitious 
 result of that great flood of question- 
 able inspiration, we can still remem- 
 ber for our solitary satisfaction and 
 comfort that all great literature has 
 had fearful odds to contend against, 
 and that in our particular case, 
 
 " Though the rhyme be ragged, 
 Tattered and gagged, 
 Rudely rain-beaten, 
 Rusty, moth-eaten, 
 Yf ye take welle therewithe, 
 It hath in it some pithe." 
 
 (Ah, what a source of untold happi- 
 ness is thorough self-deception, and 
 how miserable we should all be if to 
 us were granted free, full answers to 
 Burns' petition : 
 
 " O wad some" power the giftie gie us 
 To see oursels as others see us !") 
 
 Then if, after all, in healthy disgust 
 we cram our manuscript into the
 
 200 ON THE PURSUIT OF 
 
 flames, the effect of our writing lives 
 with us for good ; we have been 
 heaping up strength for some future 
 endeavour, which, perchance, with 
 increased knowledge and artistic- 
 power, together with various learn- 
 ings and unlearnings, may have its 
 desired effect. Nothing in this world 
 is lost ; and perhaps it is really 
 no disadvantage to a candidate for 
 entrance into the world of literature 
 that the door be several times 
 slammed in his face as a preliminary. 
 Literature is also a true friend in 
 distress; a friend indeed in cases of 
 need. " As the ivy which has long 
 twined its graceful foliage about the 
 oak,and been lifted by it into sunshine, 
 will, when the hardy plant is rifted 
 by the thunderbolt, cling round it 
 with its caressing tendrils, and bind 
 up its shattered boughs, so is it 
 beautifully ordained that ' literature,' 
 which is the mere dependant and
 
 LITERATURE IN ODD MOMENTS. 201 
 
 ornament of man in his happier days, 
 should be his stay and solace when 
 smitten with sudden calamity, wind- 
 ing itself into the rugged recesses of 
 his nature, tenderly supporting the 
 drooping head, and binding up the 
 broken heart." Coleridge's testimony 
 is on record : " Under the pressure 
 of long and painful disease, poetry 
 has been to me its own exceeding 
 great reward ; it has soothed my 
 afflictions, it has multiplied and re- 
 fined my enjoyments, it has given 
 me the habit of wishing to discover 
 the good and the beautiful in all 
 that meets and surrounds me." The 
 ability to lose one's self at will in 
 the world of imaginative creation 
 has saved many a lover of literature 
 from hours of unnecessary care and 
 sorrow, enabling him to ignore diffi- 
 culties under which he would other- 
 wise have been crushed. 
 
 Elliot Stock, Paternoster Roiu, London.