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COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY STUDIES IN ENGLISH
AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
LEARNED SOCIETIES AND
ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
COLUMBIA
UNIVERSITY PRESS
SALES AGENTS
New Yor:
LEMCKE & BUECHNER
30-32 West 27TH STREET
LONDON :
HUMPHREY MILFORD
AMEN CorRNER, E.C.
TORONTO :
HUMPHREY MILFORD
25 RicHMOND STREET, W.
LEARNED SOCIETIES AND
ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
IN GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
BY
HARRISON ROSS STEEVES, Pu.D.
INSTRUCTOR IN ENGLISH IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
Pew Pork
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
1913
All rights reserved
+s
Copyright, 1913
By CoLtumsBia UNIVERSITY PRESS
Printed from type August, 1913
PRESS OF
THE NEW ERA PRINTING COMPANY
LANCASTER, PA.
ek This Monograph has been approved by the Depart-
ment of English and Comparative Interature in Columbia
University as a contribution to knowledge worthy of
publication.
A. H. THORNDIKE,
Secretary.
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PREFACE
The following chapters were written as a dissertation for
the doctorate in the Department of English, Columbia Uni-
versity. The work was originally planned as a bibliog-
raphy, with a brief introduction covering the substance of
the present volume; but with the growth of the introductory
material, it beeame apparent that this alone would be suffi-
cient to satisfy the special requirement. The volume is
therefore plainly limited in its scope, and more or less
arbitrarily planned and presented.
The writer is under obligation to Professor George Philip
Krapp, Professor William Peterfield Trent, and Professor
Harry Morgan Ayres, of the Department of English at
Columbia, all of whom have read the manuscript and given
him generous and valuable help. He owes much also to the
personal kindness of Mr. Frederic W. Erb, of the Columbia
Library, and Mr. C. W. Kennedy, of the British Museum,
and to the courtesy of the officials of the Library of Con-
gress and the libraries at Yale and Cornell.
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
Introduction ...... ype AM POR Oe Fe PIA 2 els 0 xiii
mee The Weldimtc at G2) so oar oe a cee 1
“II. The Elizabethan Assembly of the Antiquaries.. 5
Beetic LUG) meventcantia WEN LULY, «2700. sauce taiaiet 36
PV hes Bishteenti Mentary.| 2. accuse ho ce ereunetee 60
V. Nineteenth Century Book Clubs and General
ETL DLIShine?: SOGIEbleN ay, vito. + pa ecole a aie 98
Wie we hilological and Textesocieties. 2...020.. 2 sou 138
MileeeA merican Societies: and. Olubs\<.. ..). Ne een 204
ESOLOOTADIY Mowe vats vives atocuterer aie eee eee 218
APE OEY gis oe: 5, «or caper etek 3 tie eaeade ate) eet cea a ee 231
xi
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INTRODUCTION
It is certain that one of the most important features of
modern scholarship—as, indeed, of every progressive intel-
lectual interest of to-day—is organization. The force of
specialization in modern investigative methods, which is a
distinct outgrowth of collective effort, is of course too ap-
parent to require comment. Probably few of us, however,
who have mentally noted the general efficiency of the liter-
ary societies of to-day have stopped actually to measure the
quantity and quality of their contributions to criticism and
literary history. Originally devised to concentrate indi-
vidual interests in the common purposes of study, they be-
came eventually to a large extent the purveyors of patron-
age for scholarship, increasing its remuneration, moral as
well as material, and hence its efficiency; and in the last
half century they have created a public interest in the
products of conscientious research which has literally opened
the storehouse of literary antiquity. It does not seem too
much to say that the greater part of the scholarly accom-
plishments in the field of literature during the last century
was due to the activities of the learned societies. Scarcely
a noted student of that period could wholly separate his
success from that of the societies with which he was con-
nected. Such bodies have made generally accessible a
quantity and kind of material that could not under other
conditions have reached a supporting public in anything
like the same limited time. What is perhaps almost as
important in the end, co-operation in these societies has
given definition to method and conscience in scholarly
pursuits.
xili
Xiv INTRODUCTION
The society of to-day, however, is not the result of a day’s
growth. The reliable and monumental products of a mod-
ern text publication society owe much of their value to the
recognition of the hasty, erring, and at times unconscien-
tious scholarship of a mid-century specialists’ society; and
these societies in turn represented a generally marked ad-
vance in motive and accuracy of scholarship over the aristo-
cratic book clubs of the early part of the century. Before
all of these, of course, were the inevitable beginnings in
private meetings among small numbers of students, with no
defined scholarly policy, and no notion of general publi-
cation.
The beginnings of organized literary study, in fact, ante-
date any records of a self-styled literary society. It is not
necessary to assume that the development of the society idea
as applied to literary investigation has been constantly pro-
gressive and uninterrupted. As a matter of fact, there is
really no precedent or tradition for such established co-
operation before the beginning of the nineteenth century,
though there are some interesting and at times important
earlier instances of society activity, wholly isolated, which
represent the incentives of the first generally recognized
movements. The history of this important phase of nine-
teenth century scholarship has not been, so far, connectedly
presented. Hence the following volume, which will, it is
hoped, indicate with an approach to finality the historical
growth of these movements and their influences upon the
scholarship of their day and our own.
LEARNED SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH
LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
CHAPTER I
THE FIELD
Organized literary scholarship in England, like prac-
tically all phases of Renaissance intellectual activity, was a
relatively late development. Indefinite as the immediate
purposes of the academies of Renaissance Italy may at
times seem to us, there can be no question as to the substan-
tial value of such bodies in the development of current cul-
ture. In England, however, we find no traces of an ama-
teur literary organization until almost the last quarter of
the sixteenth century, at the moment when Italian acad-
emies were at the zenith of their popularity and effective-
ness; and even then such organizations neither invited nor
possessed public prominence. For this reason it is difficult
to trace a continuous tradition of this sort through our most
important literary period. The movement, exotic in itself,
and unsupported by the general humanistic enthusiasm
which gave life to the Italian academies, died almost in its
birth and left no important effects to succeeding ages. What
activity and interest we find in learned societies and acad-
emies, then, from the early seventeenth to the late eighteenth
century, can generally be considered a reflection of such
activities and interests in Continental Europe; and the uni-
form failure of all such projects throughout almost two
centuries can be attributed to a lack of responsible native
2 1
2 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
enthusiasm in such movements. The function of societies
of this kind during this period was in the main critical, and
aspired to profound effect upon the destinies of the ver-
nacular language and literature. For this reason the lack
of vitality in academy movements in England is probably
connected more or less directly with the practical failure of
the well defined classical critical traditions and the theories
of vernacular iwlustration then current on the Continent.
At any rate, the two facts may be regarded as co-incident
evidences of the popular temper of English literary scholar-
ship at the time. With the greater utility and the sharper
definition of purpose in the learned societies of the nine-
teenth century, England comes well to the front; but before
this time, we have only occasional and elusive traces of
interest in the society idea.
From the earliest period of their existence, the activity
of so-called learned societies in the cultivation of English
literary traditions, either creative or historical, is affected
by a diversity of conceptions as to the function, scope, and
methods of organized philological scholarship. These ac-
knowledged differences in attitude and in forms of activity
make it necessary to define the fields of interest of the many
English literary learned societies. Definition and division
on these grounds is not difficult, and is not necessarily arbi-
trary. In
spite of the great unreliability of Camden’s work as an
editor, however, we must concede to him, as to Parker,
credit for his pioneer labors. Camden’s interest in the
23 Anglica, Normannica, Hibernica, Cambrica, a veteribus scripta:
... plerique nune primum in lucem editi, ex bibliotheca Guilielmi
Camdeni, Francofurti, 1603.
24 Asser’s Life of King Alfred together with the Annals of Saint
Neots, edited by William Henry Stevenson, 1904, xxii.
25 For the history of the controversy as to the authenticity of this
passage see James Parker, The Early History of Oxford, 1885, 39-45,
and Asser’s Life of Alfred, ed. William Henry Stevenson, 1904,
Xxili—xxviili. Whether or not Camden was the actual author of the
passage—and there seems adequate reason to believe that it may
have been forged by ‘‘Long Henry’’ Savile (op. cit., and Dict. Nat.
Biog., L, 369-70)—there seems to be little doubt that Camden’s use
of the passage was purposely misleading, if not altogether dishonest.
14 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
society was obviously, and unlike Parker’s, purely anti-
quarian. Indeed, it might not be too much to assume that
the ardor and the engaging personality of Camden did
much to determine the trend of the tastes of the later mem-
bers, and hence to color the interests of the society as a
body.
William Lambarde’s connection with the society was due
very evidently to his association with Archbishop Parker.
He was one of the earliest accomplished scholars in Anglo-
Saxon, having studied the language with Laurence Nowell,
probably the pioneer in the field.2* His general contribu-
tions to linguistic scholarship are acknowledged to have
been great, though his labors of this kind are obscured by
the fact that they are usually incidental to a wider interest
in English antiquity. His antiquarian works were his
"Apxo.ovouia, published in 1568, a digest of Anglo-Saxon
laws, and his Perambulation of Kent, 1576, the first printed
county history.
Sir Robert Bruce Cotton joined the group in 1590, after
the range of its interests had been, we may assume, definitely
circumscribed. It has been suggested by Mr. Sidney Lee?’
that Cotton’s antiquarian interests may have been aroused
during his years at Westminster School, where Camden was
at that time master. Cotton’s importance to literary
scholarship rests chiefly in his formation of the remarkable
library which has for more than two centuries been in the
possession of the English nation. This library made him
practically indispensable to the historians and literary stu-
dents of his day, and it probably constituted the attraction
that toward the close of Elizabeth’s reign made his home
the meeting place of the society.28 His extraordinary gen-
26 Anthony 4 Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, edited by Philip Bliss,
1813-20, I, 426.
27 Dict. Nat. Biog., XII, 308.
28 Richard Carew, The Survey of Cornwall, 1723, xiii.
THE ELIZABETHAN SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES 15
erosity in putting his materials at the disposal of the scholars
of his day and his general interest in literary work are
seen in an illuminating series of letters from Verstegen,
Speed, Camden, Usher, Selden, and others.?® Cotton him-
self never produced a work which did justice to his unusual
erudition, though an exceptional breadth of intellectual
interest is seen in his concern for the occupations of his
friends. The Cottonian Library is today, as it was in his
own time, probably the most notable collection of original
materials for national and literary history collected by a
single individual.
John Stow, the annalist and publisher of Chaucer, and
Francis Thynne, Lancaster Herald, and son of William
Thynne, publisher of the first collected edition of Chaucer,
were also members of the society. Stow’s purely literary
scholarship was not particularly notable, as, rightly or
wrongly, he has taken the blame for introducing into his
1561 edition of Chaucer a quantity of non-Chaucerian
material that was, whether he intended it or not, accepted
by his contemporaries as really Chaucerian.*° Be the case
as it may, the edition is not now regarded as a remarkable
one; so we may not be niggardly if we refuse him credit
for anything beyond the mere labor of publication—which,
after all, is a tangible credit in itself. As an annalist and
historian, and incidentally to this, a continuator with
Francis Thynne of Holinshed’s Chromecles, his place in
literary history possesses some additional importance. For
our purposes, however, an item of interest possibly more
significant than any of these is a reflection of his predilec-
tions as an antiquarian student of literature found in a
29 Original Letters of eminent literary Men, 1843, 102-103, 107-
113, 123-145.
80 Prof. Skeat has discussed the questions relating to Stow’s edi-
tion of Chaucer in his Chaucerian and other Pieces, 1897, ix—xiv, and
in The Chaucer Canon, 1900, 117-126.
16 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
contemporary record. In 1568, complaint was made to
the Eeclesiastical Commission that ‘‘John Stow, tailor, the
same that was the laborious collector of the Historical
Antiquities of London and England,’’ was, under pretence
of gathering materials for his labors, assembling a collec-
tion of papistical writings. Accordingly descent was made,
under Bishop Grindal’s direction, upon Stow’s house, and
a memorandum was prepared of the books found in his
possession which might justly merit suspicion. The omis-
sions from the inventory, however, are of considerably
greater interest than the inventory itself, for a significant
section is lumped in the phrase ‘‘a great sort of foolish
fabulous books of old print, as of Sir Degory Tryamour,
&e. a great parcel also of old written English chronicles.’’+
In other words, Stow was very evidently a Bannatyne, a
Collins, a Percy, or a Sir Walter Scott of his own century.
This is a point of interest that centers in him personally a
responsibility generally assumed by our nineteenth century
societies—the conservation of antiquarian and popular
literature. Another indication of his importance as a
collector and student of pure literature is his own, let us
suppose, true, assertion that he owned most of the manu-
seripts of Lydgate the list of which he gave Speght for his
1598 edition of Chaucer.*?
Francis Thynne was, at least potentially, and for his day,
a really great Chaucerian scholar. He apparently in-
herited his love for Chaucer from his father. What makes
him specially interesting to us in this connection is his
31 John Strype, Life and Acts of Edmund Grindal, 1821, 184-185,
516-519.
32 Eleanor Prescott Hammond, Chaucer, a bibliographical Manual,
1908; 124. Miss Hammond quotes the heading of Stow’s list: ‘‘A
Catalogue of translations and Poeticall deuises . . . done by John
Lidgate monke of Bury, whereof some are extant in Print, the residue
in the custody of him that first caused this Siege of Thebes to be
added to these works of G. Chaucer.’’
THE ELIZABETHAN SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES 17
eritical essay occasioned by the faults of Speght’s issue of
Chaucer in 1598,** an edition, apparently, which antici-
pated one which Thynne himself was projecting, probably
largely from the twenty-five odd Chaucerian manuscripts
which he says his father had left him.** His displeasure
seems also to have touched Stow at this time,*> probably
because Stow had given Speght material aid in the prepa-
ration of this new edition. Thynne’s criticisms of Speght’s
edition, sour though they may be, are in the main apposite;
and, as Furnivall pointed out,** in only four important
instances in the essay can we find errors of magnitude
either of fact or inference. Indeed, Thynne’s historical,
genealogical, and heraldic information is applied with at
times surprising acuteness to the careless assumptions in
Speght’s biographical and interpretative material. At the
end of this work Thynne announces that he himself con-
templates a new edition of Chaucer,*”? to be worked over,
we may be sure, with the same impartial critical sense that
he displays in condemning the spurious attributions that
are found in the editions published by his father.** The
Animaduersions do, in fact, show convincing editorial apti-
tude on Thynne’s part; and we must agree with Furnivall
that if Thynne had actually carried out his intention, much
of the necessary research on the poet in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries might have been saved his subsequent
editors. Speght, apparently under conviction, appears to
have taken Thynne’s corrections kindly, and was evidently
33 Francis Thynne, Animaduersions vppon the Annotacions and Cor-
rections of some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucers workes.
Edited by G. H. Kingsley. Revis’d edition by F. J. Furniwvall. Early
English Text Society [and Chaucer Society], 186[7]5.
34 Op. cit., 11-12.
35 Tbid., ciii.
36 Ibid., cii.
st Ibid., 75.
38 Tbid., 69.
3
18 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
inclined to solicit Thynne to undertake the edition he had
had in prospect; but with the demand for a second edition,
Speght appropriated Thynne’s criticisms, and actually
enlisted his personal assistance, producing a greatly im-
proved edition in 1602.°°
Sir Henry Spelman joined the Antiquaries in 1593, at
about the beginning of what seems to have been their
period of greatest activity and regularity. It seems, how-
ever, that he was not specially active in the society at this
time, aS no communication from him to the society is
referred to by Hearne. Spelman himself recorded the
discontinuance of the meetings of the society during this
period,*® but there can be no reasonable question as to the
activity of the organization at this time, since Richard
Carew apparently believed it to be in existence in 1605,*
and the bulk of Hearne’s Discourses covers the years 1599
to 1604. Certainly Spelman can not have been in touch
with the society during the years when he considered its
meetings in abeyance. The society did, however, cease its
meetings about the year 1604; and the first and last appeal
for its reorganization was made, it appears, by Spelman
himself in 1614.42 Spelman’s interest in Anglo-Saxon
studies led him to found the first university lectureship in
this branch, which was established at Cambridge in 1639,
after correspondence with Abraham Wheelocke, who be-
came the first incumbent of the office.t® The lectureship
lapsed, it is generally assumed, because of the sequestra-
tion of the Spelman estates during the Revolution, but not
until William Somner had secured its stipend, after Whee-
39 The Workes of ovr ancient and learned English Poet, Geffrey
Chaveer, newly printed, London, 1602, (‘‘To the readers’’).
40 Spelman, op. cit., 69.
41 Original Letters of eminent literary Men, 1843; 98.
42 Spelman, op. cit., 69.
43 Original Letters of eminent literary Men, 154-157, 161.
THE ELIZABETHAN SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES 19
locke’s death in 1653, to complete the publication of his
Anglo-Saxon dictionary. Spelman’s position as the most
conspicuous patron of Anglo-Saxon scholarship in his cen-
tury is noteworthy, and he was himself a very industrious
and acute student in his favorite field.
Two other scholars of importance, we are told by Thomas
Smith, and by no other authority on the subject, may be
included in the catalogue of the society’s members: John
Selden, and William 1’Isle of Wilbraham.** Selden’s vast
learning was directed twice to the furtherance of early
English studies: in his publication of EHadmer’s Historia
Novorum in 1628, and in his collaboration in the editorial
work upon Sir Roger Twysden’s Historiae Anglicanae
Scriptores X in 1653. For our purposes it is also worth
noting that the historical illustrations to Drayton’s
Polyolbion were from Selden’s hand. His edition of
Eadmer, though satisfactory, has been superseded for the
reason that the Cottonian manuscript from which Selden
printed the work is clearly not its latest authoritative
recension.*® His considerable share in Twysden’s Scrip-
tores includes a eritical preface, ‘‘Ad lectorem, Ioannes
Seldenus, de scriptoribus hisce nune primum editis,’’
(i-xlviii), and probably general services recognized in
Twysden’s preface to the reader. Again in Selden too we
find an interesting anticipation of the work of the collector
of popular literature; for in his library, which reflects,
throughout, extraordinary refinement of scholarly taste,
we find a single curious volume of typical medieval popular
44 Thomas Smith, op. cit., 455-6, ‘‘ De caeteris sociis, praecipue post
annum hujus seculi quintum, admissis, nondum constat; licet de
Gulielmo Lisle, Henrico Spelmanno, & Joanne Seldeno non dubitan-
dum videtur; nee de aliis hariolari libet.’’ It must be remembered
that Selden could have been only twenty years old when the society
discontinued its meetings in 1604,
46 Kadmert Historia Novorum in Anglia, Edited by Martin Rule,
1884; xiv.
20 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
literature, including ‘‘ Richard Cuer de Lyon, Syr Bevis of
Hampton, Syr Degore, Syr Tryamoure,’’ and kindred
titles.*7
William 1|’Isle, a scholar recluse of acknowledged attain-
ments in his day, did little that appealed to the public eye.
His acquaintance, however, embraced the most conspicuous
students of his time, both English and foreign. He re-
printed, in the second edition of his Treatise on the Old
and New Testament, 1623, the pre-Norman materials used
by Parker in his Testimonie of Antiquitie. L’Isle contem-
plated an issue of Aelfric’s scriptural translations and an
Anglo-Saxon Psalter, but died in 1637, before his projects
were realized.*§
Other members of the society of less immediate interest
to the literary antiquary were Richard Carew of Anthony,
the Cornish glossarist, Sir John Davies, the poet, and
William Hakewill, executor of the will of Sir Thomas
Bodley.
The weighty influence of the members of this society
upon the development of Anglo-Saxon scholarship is no-
where more aptly illustrated than in the direct and in-
direct connection of its members with early Anglo-Saxon
lexicography. The date of the earliest efforts to compile a
general vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon is obscured by the fact
that none of the early dictionaries were published. There
can be no doubt that the first, now preserved in the
Bodleian Library, was by Laurence Nowell. This diction-
ary came into the hands of Lambarde, and it is plain, from
a fore-word that Lambarde attached to it, that he contem-
plated publishing it. The note outlines an introductory
chapter on the history of the English language, to be illus-
47 William Dunn Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, Oxford,
A. D. 1598-A. D. 1867, 1868; 86-87. Was this volume in Stow’s
possession? See ante, 14.
48H. F. Heath, in Dict. Nat. Biog., XXXIII, 345.
THE ELIZABETHAN SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES 21
trated by references from the period of the pre-Norman
laws and the Saxon Chronicle down to Gower and Chaucer,
‘“by the which, and such like it maye appeare, how, and by
what steppes our language is fallen from the old Inglishe,
and drawen nearer to the Frenche. This may well be light-
ened by shorte examples from theise bookes, and is meet to
be discovered when this Dictionarie shall be emprinted.’’°
The note is signed by Lambarde, with the date, 1570. It
may be significant that this date is six years before the
death of Nowell; the fact that the lexicon was in Lam-
barde’s hands before Nowell’s death may lend color to a
possible assumption, supported by the known intimate
association of Nowell and Lambarde in their studies, that
Lambarde himself had some share in the compilation.
Curiously enough, Hearne assigns the dictionary to Lam-
barde, not to Nowell,®° but it seems clear that this is an
error due to his misunderstanding of the title of the
manuscript (Dictionarium Saxonico-Anglicum Laurentii
Noelli & ab Auctore Guil. Lambardo dono datum.), and the
note by Lambarde. Lambarde did, however, compile a
glossary for his “Apxavovopia.
Joscelyn, Strype records, was ‘‘earnestly excited’’ by
Archbishop Parker ‘‘to digest his collections into a Lexicon
for the public; which he accordingly intended to do, but
was by death prevented.’*1 A manuscript copy of this
dictionary in the Cottonian Library is entered by Wanley®?
as ‘‘Codex chartaceus in Quarto per Joannem Josselinum &
Joannem Parkerum D[octoris] Matth[aei] fil[ius] (ut
videtur) scriptus. ’’
49 Humphrey Wanley, Antiquae literaturae septentrionalis Liber
alter, 1705; 102.
50 Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, edited by C. E.
Doble, III, 216-217 (1888).
51Strype, Life and Acts of Matthew Parker, II, 514 (1821).
52 Wanley, op. cit., 239.
say SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
Parker’s lively interest in the publication of an Anglo-
Saxon dictionary, however, was quite eclipsed by the much
more active enthusiasm of Sir Henry Spelman, the moving
spirit of the society in its waning years. Spelman’s persist-
ent interest in securing a dictionary of the old tongue was
roused by his difficulties with the language in a projected
work upon the foundations of English law. His interest
in archaeological lexicography was, to be sure, grounded in
his legal and historical studies, but was none the less
effective for philological purposes. His biographer, William
Carr,®* says: ‘‘His glossary gives him a title to the name of
inaugurator of philological science in England.’’ This
glossary’* was begun at an early date. The first volume was
published in 1626, and work upon the second volume was in
progress until the closing years of Spelman’s life; but this
volume did not appear until 1664, twenty-three years after
his death, when it was seen through the press by Sir William
Dugdale.
As strongly as Spelman’s publication of this work sup-
ports Mr. Carr’s characterization of his importance in the
field of English philology, his close connection with the
publication of the first printed dictionary of Anglo-Saxon
gives him a more special note. Johannes de Laet of Ley-
den, who was at that time engaged upon an Anglo-Saxon
dictionary, addressed Sir Henry in 1638 upon that sub-
ject.°> But Sir Henry, who was ‘‘not willing that it should
be done by a stranger,’’ replied to de Laet that he himself
would endeavor to secure the compilation of a dictionary
of old English, and ‘‘desired his conjectanea and associa-
tion in the business.’’ At the moment he was in corre-
spondence with Abraham Wheelocke, soon to be the incum-
53 Dict. Nat. Biog., LIII, 331.
54 Archaelogus in Modum Glosarti ad Rem Antiquam Posteriorem,
2 v., 1626-1664.
55 Original Letters of eminent literary Men, 154.
THE ELIZABETHAN SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES 23
bent of the Spelman lectureship; he urged Wheelocke to
assist in the publication of the dictionary.°® Wheelocke
undertook the lexicon, probably as one of the obligations
of his academic office; but again, in all probability, the
author was ‘‘by death prevented.’’ His fragment is entered
by Wanley®’ as ‘‘Lexicon Saxonico-Latinum, maxima ex
parte ex Bedae Historiae Ecclesiasticae versione Saxonica.’’
In the meantime, de Laet, probably discouraged by his
own lack of facilities for the prosecution of his work, com-
mended the completion of it to Sir Simonds d’Ewes, who
in 1649 was importuned by Sir William Dugdale®® to secure
the assistance of William Somner in his work. As a matter
of fact, a letter from d’Ewes to John Selden dated Febru-
ary 1648/9, and quoted in Hickes’s Thesaurus,®® seems to
show that at this time d’Ewes’s dictionary must have been
completed, as he refers to it as covering two volumes
(‘‘duobus comprehenso tomis’’), in which form it is pre-
served now among the Harleian manuscripts.°° In any
event, whether d’Ewes might have profited by Somner’s
help or not, he did not ask it. Incidentally, it is worth
while noting that Dugdale’s advice to the Baronet is so
vague that it may be interpreted as referring to the publica-
tion, and not to the compilation of the dictionary, which in
the end never went to press.
It is to the credit of Sir Simonds’s usually jealous temper
that at about this time he himself offered assistance in
Somner’s labor upon a lexicon. Somner was indebted to
him at least for a copy of Joscelyn’s dictionary,” the loan
56 Op. cit., 154-155.
57 Wanley, op. cit., 303.
58 Original Letters of eminent literary Men, 175.
59 Linguarum vet[erum] septentrionalium Thesaurus, Auctore
Georgio Hickesio, I, xliii (1705).
60 Rev. Augustus Jessopp, in Dict. Nat. Biog., XIV, 453.
61 William Somner, Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum, Oxonii,
1659 (Preface: Ad Lectorem).
24 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
antedating, naturally enough, d’Ewes’s death in 1650. A
fortunate circumstance enabled Somner to proceed with the
publication of his lexicon, the first to appear in print. The
Spelman lectureship, which was vacated by the death of
Wheelocke in 1653, was so disposed that the stipend of the
lecture (ten pounds annually) was, on the advice of Arch-
bishop Usher, separated from the impropriate living and
assigned to Somner for the publication of his work.®? This
appeared in 1659 under the title Dictionarium Saxonico-
Latino-Anglicum.
There are extant references to other Anglo-Saxon vocab-
ularies of this period, notably those of William 1’Isle,®* Sir
William Dugdale,** Richard James (Sir Robert Cotton’s
librarian),®° and William Camden.** Glossaries appeared
also in various works on antiquity and in reprinted texts.
The most noteworthy of the latter group is Somner’s glos-
sary to Twysden’s Scriptores, 1652. All these, however, are
generally regarded as lacking the historical interest that
belongs to the others.
This brief resumé of the early history of Anglo-Saxon
lexicography seems sufficient to show that at least ten
dictionaries, in the main complete, had beén compiled in
the period prior to Somner’s publication, probably half of
which are of really high importance. Of these ten, three
were produced by members of the society—Camden, Spel-
man, and 1|’Isle, and four of the remainder by scholars
dependent upon members of the society for patronage or
financial aid—Joscelyn, James, Wheelocke, and Somner.
A final, though casual, contemporary testimony to the
62 White Kennett, A Life of Mr. Somner, 75-78. (Prefixed to
Somner’s A Treatise of Gavelkind, 2d ed., 1726.)
63 Original Letters of eminent literary Men, 152.
64 Wanley, op. cit., 104.
65 Op. cit., 101.
66 Op. cit., 246.
THE ELIZABETHAN SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES 25
strong impress of the society upon the philological history
of the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries is
found in Graevius’s reference to the great Anglo-Saxon
scholars from Leland to Langbaine.** He enumerates four-
teen students of this period, barring Junius, five of whom,
Parker, Lambarde, Camden, Selden and Spelman, were
members of the society, and six others associated by inti-
macy, relationship, or patronage with those members:
Joscelyn, Nowell, Foxe, Sir John Spelman, Wheelocke, and
Somner. A concrete modern testimony to the predominant
importance of Parker and Spelman in our field is given
by Professor Wilcker:
Bisher [1605] war der Hauptgonner und Beforderer dieser
Studien Erzbischof Parker. Als dieser gestorben war, so dauerte
es lingere Zeit, bis sich wieder ein Mann fand, der, nicht nur durch
seine Kenntnisse, sondern auch durch seine Geldmittel imstande
war, diese Bestrebungen gehorig zu unterstiitzen. Der Mittel-
punkt der nun folgenden angelsiachsischen Studien waren die
Spelman’s, Vater und Sohn.*§
I believe that my outlines of the literary engagements of
these men—who constituted certainly the most conspicuous
part of the Assembly—justify definite conclusions as to the
scholarly importance of the society as a body. Archbishop
Parker’s publications, most of them still recent at the
founding of the club, and some of them as yet unpublished,
were monumental in their importance to Anglo-Saxon and
Anglo-Latin literary scholarship. His tastes, which must
certainly have given color to the proceedings of the society
in its early years, were preeminently those of the literary
antiquary. One can find scarcely a trace of interest on his
part in historical remains other than manuscripts. He was
67 Francisci Junii, Etymologicum Anglicanum Praemittuntur Vita
Auctoris [Auctore Johanne Georgio Graevio], (1743).
68 Richard Wilcker, Grundriss zur Geschichte der angelsdchsischen
Litteratur, 1885; 10.
26 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
in all probability not to be entertained by discussions on
‘‘The antiquity and forms of tenures,’’ and ‘‘The antiquity
of the name of ‘Barones’ in England,’’ discourses which
even Francis Thynne, with his more widely trained anti-
quarian predilections, found in 1591 to be ‘‘tedious and
course.’’®® At any rate, we can not avoid thinking that
the Archbishop’s interests must have affected the occupa-
tions of the society during the first few years of its exist-
ence; though it is wholly probable that if his presence and
influence did stimulate interest in literary questions during
the three years before his death, in 1575, this interest may
have subsided greatly when the tastes of the newer (and in
the main less gifted) members showed themselves to be
more peculiarly antiquarian. Camden, probably the most
generally known of all the members of the organization,
was likewise a noteworthy publisher of literary materials
and an influential student of the old English tongue, though
his work took character mainly from his devotion to his-
torical studies. Lambarde, |’Isle, and Richard Carew were
all of them important early students of the language. Sir
Robert Cotton is immortal in what is probably the most
valuable manuscript collection of old English literary mate-
rials. John Stow was a notable student of historical litera-
ture, and an editor, though a very faulty one, of Chaucer.
Francis Thynne, the son of the most reputable early editor
of Chaucer, contemplated publishing the first edition of the
poet which should attempt to deal seriously with spurious
and doubtful attributions, and was prevented only by the
anticipation of a part of his labor by Speght. Selden’s
scholarly intelligence, the soundest of his age, was devoted
at least occasionally to our early historical literature. Henry
Spelman, as the latest member of conspicuous note, con-
tinued the tradition of Anglo-Saxon scholarship through a
69 Thynne, op. cit., xcili—xciv.
THE ELIZABETHAN SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES 27
period of intellectual dearth and founded the first univer-
sity chair for Anglo-Saxon studies.
Here, then, are the most brilliant and influential mem-
bers of the group. That we can survey their names, con-
template the vitality and the supreme utility of their inter-
est in our old literature, and conceive that this society had
no objective literary occupation, seems impossible. This
body of scholars, united primarily for the purpose of anti-
quarian study, were incidentally so closely occupied with
the importance of literature and literary investigation as a
reflection of the life of the past that their proceedings as a
society could not have been without effect upon their indi-
vidual knowledge and judgment in the field of literature,
and for this reason, part, at least, of the revival of interest
in Anglo-Saxon literary antiquity, and much of the impetus
of its continuance, was due directly to the fact of their
organization. Here in all probability, then, we find the
first instance in England of a society serving to an impor-
tant degree the purposes of philological scholarship.
Materials for the history of the society are scant, elusive,
and at times contradictory; but the following points seem
clear. Spelman is authority for the date of foundation,
1572 or thereabouts. In the introduction to his Discourse
on the Law Terms in Bishop Gibson’s collected edition of
his works,’° he refers to the first meetings of the society as
‘‘about forty-two years since.’’ The date of this discourse
is generally accepted as 1614.7 There is nothing to indi-
cate the nature of the society’s activities in its earlier years,
however, Hearne’s account recording no discussions prior to
the year 1590. In 1589 the Antiquaries submitted a peti-
tion for incorporation, on terms that would legalize their
organization and extend their influence, one of the principal
70 Op. cit. [Part b], 69-70. The introductory note, ‘‘The Occasion
of this Discourse,’’ is not printed in the separate edition of 1684.
71 Hearne, Collection of Curious Discourses, II, 331.
28 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
desiderata of establishment being the securing of facilities
for the formation and maintenance of a permanent library.
The petition was signed by Sir Robert Cotton, James Ley,
and Sir John Doddridge.** Smith assigns the petition to
the closing years of the sixteenth century (‘‘seculo superiore
exeunte’’),’* and intimates that the proposal was suspended
in the Queen’s judgment until her death. It is clear from
an extant notice of meeting addressed to Stow, and pub-
lished by Hearne,’* that the gatherings in the later years of
the society’s activity were more or less formal, at least in
the introduction of subjects for discussion. Spelman’s
statement that the society was dormant for about twenty
years from 1594 to 1614 is not reconcilable with the fact
that nearly all the recorded discussions of the members are
dated within that period.” It is apparent, however, that
shortly after James’s accession the society fell under polit-
ical suspicion, in spite of Sir Robert Cotton’s efforts to
interest the monarch in the society itself or in its plan for
incorporation.”* Gough gives definitely as the date of the
society’s suspension 1604 or the early part of 1605.77 The
final effort to resuscitate the society was made in 1614, when
Cotton, Camden, Davies, Spelman, and others met to reor-
ganize, taking care ‘‘not to meddle with matters of state or
religion.’’ They appointed a meeting one week later, for
which Spelman prepared his Law Terms discourse. But,
as Spelman relates, ‘‘Before our next Meeting, we had
notice that his Majesty took a little Mislike of our Society ;
not being inform’d, that we had resolv’d to decline all
72 Ewald Fliigel, Die dlteste englische Akademie; Anglia, XXXII,
261-268 (1909).
73 Thomas Smith, Vita Roberti Cottoni, 453-4.
74 Op. cit., I, xv—xvii.
75 Ante, 18.
76 Thomas Smith, op. cit., 454.
77 Op. cit., Xvi.
THE ELIZABETHAN SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES 29
Matters of State. Yet hereupon we forbare to meet
again.’’*S The effort, about 1616, to organize a body for
somewhat similar purposes, urged in part by some of the
members of the old society,’® forms a new chapter in the
history of society movements, and is, incidentally, of rather
less interest to us because the purposes of the new ‘‘acad-
emy’’ were to be more miscellaneous and its literary con-
nections less sharply defined.
Hearne names thirty-seven members of the society.®°
These are: Arthur Agarde, Lancelot Andrews, Bishop of
Winchester, Robert Beale, Henry Bouchier, a Mr. Bowyer,
Richard Broughton, William Camden, Richard Carew, a
Mr. Cliffe, William Compton, Earl of Northampton, Walter
Cope, Sir Robert Cotton, Sir John Davies, Sir William
Dethick, Sir John Doddridge, [Thomas] Doyley, Sampson
Erdeswicke, William Fleetwood, William Hakewill, Abra-
ham Hartwell, Michael Heneage, Joseph Holland, William
Lambarde, Sir Thomas Lake, Sir Francis Leigh, Sir James
Ley, Arnold Oldisworth (not Michael Oldisworth, as Hearne
gives the name, for Michael was born in 1591, only thirteen
years before the paper assigned to him was read) ,8 William
Patten, [Sir John]|*? Savile, Sir Henry Spelman, John
Stow, James Strangeman, Thomas Talbot, Francis Thynne,
Sir James Whitelock, Thomas Wiseman, and Robert Wes-
ton. Hearne does not, however, name Archbishop Parker,
the organizer of the society,*® or Archbishop Whitgift, a
78 Spelman, op. cit., 70.
79 Joseph Hunter, An account of the scheme for erecting a Royal
Academy in England, in the reign of King James the First ; Archae-
ologia, XXXII, 132-149 (1847). Post, 36-39.
80 Op. cit., II, 421-449.
81 Sidney Lee, Dict. Nat. Biog., XLIIT, 113.
82 A. F. Pollard, Dict. Nat. Biog., L, 372. Hearne was right in his
belief that this Savile was neither Sir Henry, Thomas, nor ‘‘ Long
Henry.’’
83 Gough, op. cit., Archaeologia, I, v.
30 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
later president,®** though Whitgift’s title may refer to his
patronage of the society rather than to his connection with
it as an active officer. Hearne also omits from his list
Francis Tate, at one time secretary of the society,® though
he prints a number of discourses by Tate at the meetings of
the club. Thomas Smith alone, as I have indicated,*® names
William 1’Isle and John Selden. Two modern biographers
have included in the membership the historian John Speed,**
but upon grounds of evidence, I presume, that have not
fallen under my observation. The roll as variously recorded,
then, by writers whom there is every reason to credit, gives
forty-three members. The very numbers of the society may
account for the fact that none of its historians has given a
list that corresponds exactly with any other.
But the further we go, the more interestingly this ques-
tion of membership develops. It is, of course, difficult to
distinguish the list of members of the society for any specific
narrow period of its activity ; but some approximations seem
possible, and these in turn bring up again the question
whether the roll which we have so far is in itself complete.
Of the thirty-seven members whose names are agreed upon
by Hearne and Gough, the identity or the biographical
records of nine are too indefinite to allow us to form any
conclusion whatsoever as to the period of their connection
with the society. Of those remaining, six—Camden, Fleet-
wood,** Dethick,*® Doyley and Lambarde, who were respec-
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid.
86 See ante, 19.
87 A. F. Pollard, in Dict. Nat. Biog., LIII, 318, and Sidney Lee, in
Dict. Nat. Biog., XII, 308-309.
88 Hearne, op. cit., II, 434, says that Fleetwood was admitted a
member after he became recorder of London; this was in 1571, so
-Fleetwood’s membership must have dated from about the time of
organization.
89 Ibid., II, 431.
THE ELIZABETHAN SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES 31
tively the steward and the literary agent of Parker, and
Robert Weston, if he was the Robert Weston, Chancellor of
Ireland, who died in 1573—were in all likelihood members
_ of the society in Parker’s time. Five others—Carew, Cot-
ton, Spelman, Hartwell and Andrews—we know joined the
society after 1588; and six—Doddridge, Tate, Lake, Davies,
Whitelock and Hakewill—whose birth dates range from
1555 to 1574, were too young at the date of foundation to
have been members of the society then or shortly after.
The remaining eleven may or may not have joined in the
early period, and the fact that scholarly or official distine-
tion came to many of them in later years warrants the
assumption that not all were members in the years imme-
diately following the society’s organization. To recount, only
six from these lists can be named with reasonable certainty as
charter members; eleven were certainly not members during
the first years; and about the remaining twenty we can draw
no really accurate conclusions. Since, then, this listis made
up in large part of later members of the society, the ques-
tion naturally arises whether it includes all of the early
members, say from 1572 to 1588. On this point, we must
remember that Hearne, following Smith, does not give the
name of Parker, that his interest is for the day in which
Cotton, Carew, and Spelman were among the influential
members, and that he records no activity of the society
prior to 1589. Now the ultimate source of Hearne’s infor-
mation on the history of the society is the Cottonian manu-
seript from which Smith secured his material; and this,
according to Gough,°*° is the record of the society’s activities
subsequent to 1591. Gough supports the evidence of this
manuseript on questions pertaining to the history of the
society by reference to manuscript materials left by Francis
Tate, secretary of the society during the later period, and
90 Op. cit., Archaeologia, I, vi.
Fe SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
to an Ashmolean manuscript which he mentions only casu-
ally. Tate was not a member of the early society, for he
was only twelve years old when it was founded; for this
reason, his list of members, especially if it had any direct con- —
nection with his secretarial duties, would probably include
only his later associates in the body. There is nothing in
the facts connected with the sources of Hearne’s informa-
tion, and Gough’s, then, to make it appear that their cata-
logues comprehend the membership of the society for the
entire period of its existence from 1572 to 1604, even though
Gough, apparently from hasty inference, assumes this to be
the case.*?
There is, on the other hand, seeming evidence that these
two lists do not cover the membership of the society during
its first years. In another and later manuscript quoted by
Gough, and attributed to a Mr. West,®? which Gough uses
for the historical data for his account of Edmund Bolton’s
project of 1616-7, but which he makes no effort to compare
with the first mentioned manuscripts on points touching the
history of the earlier society, we find a list of members of.
the old society which differs remarkably from that of
Hearne. Here we have thirteen members named, with a
broadly inclusive ‘‘ete.,’’ only six of whom Hearne gives in
his total of thirty-six—Lambert (Lambarde), Erdeswicke,
Heneage, Thynne, Talbot, and Stow. The remaining seven
of this list are ‘‘the late Earls of Shrewsbury and North-
ampton (not William Compton, who was made Earl of
Northampton in 1618 and died in 1629, but probably Henry
Howard, second son of the Earl of Surrey), Sir Gilbert
91 Ibid., vi.
92 Ibid., xv. This manuscript forms the basis of Oldys’s brief
sketch of the society in his Life of Sir Walter Ralegh, prefixed to his
edition of Ralegh’s History of the World, 1736 (1, exxx—cxxxi, note).
Oldys accepts the list of members which this manuscript gives ap-
parently without a question as to its authenticity.
THE ELIZABETHAN SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES 33
Dethick (the father of Sir William Dethick, whom Hearne
names as a member), ‘‘ Valence, Esq.,’’ Sir Henry Fan-
shawe, ‘‘Benefield, Esq.,’’ and T. Holland (not Joseph
Holland, a member identified by Hearne). There are some
considerations which throw doubt upon the authenticity of
this list; notably the fact that errors in identification are
suggested by the occurrence of an Earl of Northampton, a
Dethick, and a Holland, where Hearne has given other indi-
viduals of these names. Again we must bear in mind the
fact that the Cottonian records and the Tate list are prob-
ably contemporary with the society itself, while any manu-
seript connected with the Bolton project must be subse-
quent to the final dissolution of the society. But there does
remain the significant fact that this list was certainly made
while the memory of the old society was still fresh, and that
the discrepancies between this list and Hearne’s catalogue
are sufficiently marked to demand careful consideration.
As to the apparently important differences between the two
sets of names, there is no reason why two Earls of North-
ampton and two Dethicks, father and son, might not have
been members of the society ; and the T. Holland for Joseph
Holland loses some of its condemnatory force when we re-
member that Hearne himself is liable to errors in identifi-
cation, since he certainly mistook Arnold Oldisworth for
Michael Oldisworth.°**
As to the chronological relationships of these various
lists, all of the names in the West manuscript that Hearne
identifies with the membership of the society are of the older
generation of members, and none are named whom we know
to have joined the society at a later date. The two other
names on the West list that we can identify with practical
certainty are those of Gilbert Dethick and Sir Henry Fan-
shawe, men of sufficient age to make it appear that they
93 See ante, 29.
4
34 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
might have been members—if at all—during the early years.
These facts seem to indicate that, granting the West manu-
script whatever authority we may care to attach to it, we
must regard it as referring to the early period of the old
society’s history; the Hearne list, which stands as the type
of contemporary catalogues, seems to refer to the member-
ship of the later years of the society’s activity.
Surprises in the West manuscript, however, do not cease
with the differences between this list of thirteen members
and Hearne’s list of thirty-six; for Gough, continuing his
excerpts from the manuscript, says:°* ‘‘To the deceased
members the manuscript adds Sir Philip Sidney, Fitz Alan,
last Earl of Arundel of that name,’’ continuing with an
enumeration of ‘‘members,’’ to use his own term, which
includes some of the most distinguished names of the period,
among them Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Sackville Earl of
Dorset, William Cecil Lord Burghley, the Herberts Earls of
Pembroke, and Sir Henry Savile. So the question as to the
authenticity of this manuscript becomes one of more moment
than as affecting simply the question of the period covered
by contemporary lists of members. If the West Manu-
seript is not vulnerable—and the lack of support from
actually contemporary evidence must cause us to pause on
this point—the society is vastly more significant from every
aspect, literary, social, and political, than merely as a quiet
gathering of serious scholars. Its influence, if Sidney,
Sackville, Raleigh, and Cecil were actually members, must
have been far greater than we have any reason to believe
from extant historical accounts. With these names possibly
associated with the history of the society, it acquires a specu-
lative interest of a much broader kind—but still frankly,
and possibly dangerously, speculative.
The antiquity and the uniqueness of the position of this
society, and the tenuousness of historical facts concerning
94 Op. cit., Archaeologia, I., xix—xxi.
THE ELIZABETHAN SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES 35
it, have probably justified an inquiry into its existence and
the province of its occupations that is plainly out of propor-
tion to its intrinsic historical value. The very isolation of
the body, and the fact that its motives and interests are
obscure, have been temptations to inquiry and surmise
that have probably yielded some tangible results, even
though these results are built upon probabilities rather
than facts.
The general inferences as to the scholarly importance of
the society may be briefly summarized. The dominating
personality of its earlier days was in all probability Arch-
bishop Parker, whose interest in antiquity was satisfied
wholly, as far as we can discern, by literary studies. After
his death, Lambarde, Camden, Stow, and their associates
remained to preserve the society’s traditions, but presum-
ably with a transferal of their interests to the more typically
archaeological. With the advent of Cotton and Spelman,
and the beginning of probably the most active period in the
history of the society, the researches of the members, as
judged from their published work, drew more heavily upon
the literature of antiquity, recognizing its importance for
the study of the past, and thus aroused a greatly extended
interest in the general field of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-
Norman literature. This interest developed a series of
textual publications and linguistic works which were not
always the direct products of these antiquaries, but for
which the scholarship and erudition of these members were
the sustaining forces. It is impossible to prove that the
society held a single literary meeting; but its personnel and
the individual literary activities of its members make it
difficult to believe that their antiquarian occupations barred
all collective interest in the materials of literature. In any
event, measuring the importance of the organization in this
field, we must concede it as a body an eminent place in the
traditions of English literary scholarship.
CHAPTER III
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
The decease of the society which Parker, Camden, and
Spelman had served over an intermittent period of forty-
two years marks the decline of amateur literary organiza-
tion in England for almost a century. The next effort to
stimulate collective interest in literary and antiquarian
studies, which immediately followed Spelman’s final attempt
to revive the old society, had in view a pompous honorary
foundation under royal patronage; and with the failure of
this scheme, organization for the ends of literary scholar-
ship languished until the establishment of the present So-
ciety of Antiquaries in the early eighteenth century.
Throughout the seventeenth century, then, over a period
which covers the Anglo-Saxon revival of post-revolutionary
days, and the still more important renascence of interest in
the literature of English antiquity that was supported by
the labors of Kennett, Gibson, Benson, Hickes, and Wanley,
we find no record of formal or informal alliance on the part
of literary scholars, though the age was rather remarkable
for the good will and freedom from intellectual jealousy
that prevailed among them. A few efforts which echo
more or less clearly the ideas of Parker and Spelman are
worthy, however, of remembrance, even if they serve only
to demonstrate the lack of continuity in the society tra-
dition.
The project of Edmund Bolton, historian and critic, to
secure the favor of James I for a scheme intended to serve
to some extent the general aims of the old society was first
36
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 37
presented in 1616 or 1617.1. Bolton’s plan was to found an
order of scholarship, with complex organization and elabo-
rate pageantry, including decorations and special armorial
bearings for the members, and gravely formal stated meet-
ings. His proposal was urged specially through the agency
of the Duke of Buckingham, whose influence at the court of
James was then all-powerful. No action upon the plan was
taken for some years, however, although the conception of
such an august assembly flattered the monarchical vanity of
the King to the point that ‘‘it finally pleased him... to
enlarge the institution [in posse] itself with more grants
and faculties than were desired.’’? The final plan, which
was developed with the aid of numerous suggestions from
James himself, outlined ‘‘The Academy Royal of King
James’’ as an aristocratic foundation, the two ranking
classes of which were to be composed of supernumerary
court brilliants, and the third class of ‘‘ Essentials, upon
whom the weight of the work was to lie,’’ who were to be
gentlemen ‘‘either living in the light of things, or without
any title of profession or art of life for lucre.’’* The prin-
cipal public functions of the order were to be the superin-
tendence of efficient translations of foreign secular works,
and the issuance of authentic material for the history of the
nation.* Its province was therefore more or less directly
critical, though concerned more with questions of material
and taste than with those of scholarship.
The list of ‘‘ Essentials’’ includes many names of literary
or scholarly eminence, with a generous adulteration of minor
poets and personal friends of the projector. But important
1 Joseph Hunter, An account of the scheme for erecting a Royal
Academy in England, in the Reign of King James the First;
Archaeologia, XXXII, 132-149, 1847; 136.
2 Ibid., 140.
3 Ibid.
4 Tbid., 141.
38 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
men were really sufficiently numerous and sufficiently rep-
resentative to have made the foundation potentially great.
On Bolton’s list of prospective members are found: Sir
William Alexander, Earl of Sterling, Sir Robert Aytoun,
Sir John Beaumont, Edmund Bolton, George Chapman, Sir
Robert Cotton, Sir Kenelm Digby, Sir Dudley Digges,
Michael Drayton, Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones, Endymion
Porter, John Selden, Sir Henry Spelman, Sir Henry Wot-
ton, and Patrick Young.®
It is clear from the stated objects and the personnel of
Bolton’s proposed order that it was to serve the cultural
purposes of an academy, and principally, to stand as the
censor of national taste. Bolton succeeded in exciting the
King’s interest in the idea until it appeared that all the
society lacked of establishment was his public sanction; for
James’s final consultation with Bolton in 1624°® seemed to
settle all the incidental questions as to the form and scope
of organization. But the King’s procrastination was in the
end fatal to the scheme, for he died in the following year,
leaving the projectors to press anew with Charles their
appeal for royal sanction. In a markedly less cultured
court than that of James it is not surprising that the plan
eventually failed; in fact it is recorded that Charles was
prejudiced against the scheme before he came to the throne,
for when Bolton was endeavoring to secure the aid of James
in the project, Charles was heard to express his opinion
that it was ‘‘too good for the times.’”*
Charles’s criticism of the proposed academy may not
have been wholly inapposite. His notion of ‘‘too good’’
implies, we may assume, too pretentious rather than too —
ideal. The form suggested for the body was certainly of a
sort to hamper rather than to aid the development of the
5 Ibid., 142-147.
6 Ibid., 140.
7 Ibid., 147-148.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 39
literary resources of England of that day; and the ponder-
ousness of the machinery of organization was without doubt
too much for the ill-defined purposes it might have served.
Charles’s decision on this point is possibly more praise-
worthy than his father’s indecision—indeed, James’s de-
layed favor may have been due to a practical distrust of
what his pride induced him to foster, at least in appearance.
It is interesting to consider, as we look back upon the idea,
what effect the actual existence of the Academy Royal of
King James might have had upon a growing classical influ-
ence in English literature, and indeed upon the whole
course of national literature from that time on. But the
point is scarcely relevant.
The projected Academy of King James was typical of a
tendency in the critical program of the time that was more
far-reaching in its effects than even Bolton himself was in
all probability capable of recognizing. It is of course un-
necessary to point out that if Bolton’s scheme had been
successfully established, an English academy, instead of the
later French Academy, would have been the first national
project of the kind to gain the authority of royal favor. It
is worth while inquiring, however, whether the failure of
this resplendent plan was merely an accident of fate—
moving here in the guise of royal caprice—or whether the
conditions of the times, political as well as intellectual, were
right for such an establishment and could endow it with any
prospect of continued usefulness. We must remember that
if Bolton’s effort was only an effort, it was at any rate well
defined, serious, and dignified. The fact that so complete
and promising a plan was a failure carries us into a con-
sideration of the history of other attempts of a similar
kind throughout the seventeenth century.
Up to the time of Bolton’s plan the proposals for and
activity in the formation of learned societies and academies
40 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
had been wholly dilettante in character—and if prototypes
of the academy idea in these earlier years need be sought,
they may be found in the amateur status, and largely
amateurish work, of the earlier Italian academies. We may
recall that it was with precisely their spirit that Chapelain
and his friends first held their private meetings in 1629,
and that the larger importance of their body did not begin
until political exigencies resulted in the establishment of
the Académie Francaise by Richelieu in 1635.5 Then its
participation, with the panoply of authority, in a nation-
wide controversy upon literary taste gave it a serious dig-
nity and a critical finality which no body of the sort had
ever before possessed. One of the obvious results of the
transference of the machinery of French pseudo-classicism
to England in the seventeenth century is found in reiterated
proposals, from many of the leading English men of letters
of the day, for the founding of an English academy of
letters which should have the same weight of critical —
authority as the French Academy. Projects for such an™
academy were offered by Sprat, Dryden, Defoe, Addison,
and Swift, and more casual recommendations were made
by James Howell, Milton, the Earl of Roscommon, Pope,
and Prior;®? but these were without exception ineffective,
although the idea was urged at intervals until the middle
of the eighteenth century, when it was laid at rest, probably
largely through the opposition of Dr. Johnson. In the
absence of a special foundation for the improvement of the
8D. Maclaren Robertson, A History of the French Academy,
[1910], 3-28. :
9Mr. B. 8S. Monroe’s article, An English Academy (Modern
Philology, VIII, 107-122, 1910), treats in a thorough way the his-
tory of the various proposals for an English academy of letters dur-
ing the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Dr. J. E. Spingarn’s
Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century contains a compact but
useful note on the subject; II, 337-8.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 41
language, however, the Royal Society undertook, four years
after its establishment in 1660, at least to acknowledge the
want of an English academy by the appointment of a
‘‘Committee for Improving the English Tongue.’’?® No
record is extant of definite results attained by this commit-
tee, although it is certain that they held some formal
meetings."
That the existence and relative effectiveness of the French
Academy failed to bring about the establishment of such an
institution in England, especially in an age so strongly
under the dominance of French critical ideas, seems matter
for real wonder. The reasons which Matthew Arnold sug-
gests for the existence of the French Academy and the
absence of a similar body in England—briefly, that the
characteristic of the English mind is individual energy, of
the French, openness and intellectual flexibility’?—account
probably for the readiness of the English to dispense with
a check upon intellectual freedom. But these reasons are
not properly historical reasons; they explain a condition,
rather than trace the origins of an historical fact. It is
probably correct to say, in a general way, that the greater
intellectual democracy of the English could not submit to
such a tyranny of trained taste; but a more real reason for
the failure of the academy idea in England is probably to
be found in the intellectual conditions which determined
the particular nature of scholarly comity throughout this
century, and which gave birth to the Royal Society itself.
The Royal Society is as truly a coefficient of English
intellectual interests in this period as the Académie Fran-
10 Thomas Birch, History of the Royal Society of London, 1756-7;
I, 499-500, IT, 7.
11 Memoirs of John Evelyn, edited by William Bray, 1827; IV,
144-9,
12 Matthew Arnold, The literary Influence of Academies; In Essays
in Criticism, 1895; 42-79.
42 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
eaise is for France. Although at the first glance these two
societies may seem to voice the same scholarly aims, no
intellectual incentives could be more radically divergent
than those which gave life to the two. The Academy owed
its existence, under a nearly absolute political tyranny, to
a demand for authority in matters of taste; the Royal So-
ciety responded to the growing outcry against everything
savoring of scholastic authority, and stood as-the expressed
champion of the experimental philosophy of Bacon.
The tangible debt of the Royal Society to the ‘‘New
Philosophy’’ of Bacon finds loyal expression in Cowley’s
Ode to the Royal Society.> Sprat states the debt more
conservatively, but no less positively, in his History ;* and
it has in fact been admitted from the earliest years of the
Society’s existence that the initial impulse to organization
for the purposes of experimental science is to be found in
the philosophical writings of Bacon, particularly in the
Novum Organum and the New Atlantis.
But although the Royal Society was chartered for the
‘improvement of Natural Knowledge,’’** its. membership
was by no means restricted to men of science. One of the
intellectual ideals of the age was that of a universal pros-
pect of knowledge, an ideal greatly expanded through the
large results of experimental skepticism. The philosophical
systems of Bacon and Descartes were, in their attitudes
toward the field of knowledge, encyclopaedic; and the edu-
cational system of Comenius, which had great effect upon
13 First published in Sprat’s History of the Royal Society of
London, 1667.
14 Op. cit., 35-36.
15 Charles Richard Weld, A History of the Royal Society, 1848; I,
57-64.
16 [bid., I, 126. The word ‘‘natural,’’ it has been pointed out,
was used as an antonym for supernatural, and implied for this reason
the realm of knowledge that might be subjected to concrete tests.
The word comprehends therefore the sense of experimental.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 43
English thought at that time—largely through the influence
of his friend Samuel Hartlib,'* conceived the great scholarly
desideratum of the age to be the establishment of a method
of democratic interchange between the disciples of the
various branches of learning. This new conception of intel-
lectual comity probably determined to a large extent the
miscellaneous complexion of the early membership of the
Royal Society. Another point of significance in this con-
nection is that the experimental philosophy of the seven-
teenth century had as comprehensive an effect upon all the
provinees of intellectual interest in its day as the publica-
tion of the evolutionary theory had in the middle of the
nineteenth century. It is not surprising, therefore, that
along with philosophers, churchmen, and architects, the
men of letters of the day were drawn into the Royal Society
_ and into the special circle of interests which it represented.
Although the intellectual motives of the French Academy
and of the Royal Society were in their essence not merely
unrelated, but actually opposed, there was no sense of this
in the minds of those who urged the foundation of an
academy under the impression that it would further in the
realm of language and literature the methods of the Royal
Society in the field of science. We may recall that Sprat
and Dryden, for example, supported the idea of an academy
of language, whose purposes could be only a prior, arbi-
trary, and restrictive, in the belief that these purposes com-
plied with the investigative methods of the Royal Society.
The fact of importance here is that historical scholarship
17H, Dircks, A biographical Memoir of Samuel Hartlib, London,
14-21, 42-43. Will S. Monroe, Comenius and the Beginnings of
educational Reform, 1900; 51-57. Comenius’s relationship to de-
fined movements of scholarly organization in Germany is discussed at
length in Ludwig Keller’s Comenius und die Akademien der Natur-
philosophen des 17. Jahrhunderts; Monatshefte der Comenius-Gesell-
schaft, IV, 1-28, 69-96, 133-84 (1895).
44 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
in literature suffered both from the distraction of the age
with new avocational studies, and from the occupation of
the critics of the time, in emulation of the French Academy,
with constructive literary theories, at the expense of objec-
tive interest in the older literary field. This exploitation
of the synthetic, as opposed to the historical, method seems
significant of the spirit of the times; and it may be that the
failure of an already awakened interest in the ancient and
medieval literary history of the land may have been corol-
lary to the general downfall of authority and tradition in
the wider realm of philosophy. That scholarly interest in
the older literature was waning throughout the greater part
of this century seems to be wholly evident. Probably the
typical attitude toward philological scholarship in this day
is found in Sprat, who, while his scorn of early English
literature’® prevented his regarding it as fairly within the
general philological domain, congratulates the scholars of
his time on having exhausted the possibilities of philolog-
ical study, and having before them, therefore, a clear field
for experimental philosophy.*®
So marked and important a change in the scholarly out-
look between the day of Parker and the day of Sprat may be
traced to a number of causes. Without doubt the decline
of nationalism since the age of Elizabeth and the political
and religious turmoil of the mid-century must have had a
perceptibly deterrent effect upon the popular interest in
literature ;?° and this must eventually have affected the
special interests of scholars. But a more potent reason for
18 Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society of London, 1667;
21, 42.
19 [bid., 24-25.
20 In the commendatory verses to William Somner’s Dictionarium
Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum .. . 1649, signed Johannes de Bosco, the
discouraging outlook of literary and antiquarian scholarship during
the period of the Civil War and the Commonwealth is pointed out.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 45
the decline of the older literature from popular taste was
the recession of the ancient matter and ideals of literature
from ‘the domain of vital contemporary interest, co-incident
with a fecundity of novel and accomplished literary pro-
duction throughout the Elizabethan period that completely
filled the place of the popular literary product from Chaucer
to Skelton.** The literary resources of the nation were
probably multiplied many times in the fifty years following
Parker’s editorial activities. This fact alone was sufficient
for the time being to kill the interest in literary antiquity
which Parker had endeavored to foster.
We are of course familiar with the way in which the
splendid literary consciousness of the Elizabethan age was
transmuted into the exaggerated self-confidence of Augus-
tan England. Whatever the forces that induced this revul-
sion in literary taste, the dominant aim of the day was to
develop a classicism derived from the Continent and sup-
ported by arbitrary canons of taste. It seems characteristic
of the history of all efforts at intensive cultivation of the
21A significant illustration of the abrupt decline in the general
appreciation of middle English literature with the opening of the
new century may be found in the relative frequency of reprints of
Chaucer’s works before and after the year 1602. Between the date
of publication of William Thynne’s first collected edition of Chaucer
in 1532 and of the reprint of Speght’s edition in 1602, a period of
seventy years, six assumedly complete editions were printed. Only
two more were produced down to the year 1721, when Urry brought
out his new edition. More significant still are the dates of publica-
tion of the Canterbury Tales, which may obviously be taken as a
more effective criterion of purely popular interest in Chaucerian
literature. From Caxton’s first edition of the Canterbury Tales in
1477-8 to Speght’s collected edition of 1602 eleven issues were
brought forth in one hundred and twenty-five years; from this date
to 1775-8, when Tyrwhitt edited the Canterbury Tales alone, only
three additional issues appeared in one hundred and seventy-six
years—an average of one issue every eleven years during the first
period, and of one in every forty-four years during the second.
46 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
vernacular that they imply a general lack of respect for the
ancient vernacular literature; for the very belief in the
future of the vulgar tongue carries with it a disrespect for
its past. In addition to this, classical propaganda had
always had little to do with antiquated vernacular litera-
ture, if for no other reason than that native literature
in the making had never been considered part of a
respectable cultural program. In any event, the classical
tendency of the criticism of the time seems to supply another
reason for the absence of interest in the older English liter-
ature. In England at least the condemnation of the older
literature—and the classical perfectionists of the end of the
century saw barbarism in the literary product of no more
remote a period than the age of Elizabeth—was generally
uncritical and generally prejudiced, but almost always ill
informed. This lack of historical perspective assigned the
supposed deficiencies of the Chaucerian period to barbaric
unfamiliarity with critical principles and a lack of common
knowledge of the language. But with the characteristic
blindness of a priori theory, the seventeenth century failed
to see its own overpowering critical incapacity in its ignor-
ance of linguistic evolution and middle English prosody.
The final word of the age on this point is found in the
Preface 'to Dryden’s Fables; here we see an otherwise per-
ceptive and generous piece of criticism marred by a wholly
unbhistorical view of the subject.22 Whatever the merits
22 Tt is interesting to observe in the trend of critical opinion upon
Chaucer’s work throughout this century an effective criterion of the
value of the assumedly historical criticism of the time on medieval
English literature. Dr. J. E. Spingarn’s Critical Essays of the
seventeenth Century, 3 v., Oxford, 1908-9, presents a series of critical
allusions which seem typical of the period.
Ben Jonson decries the use of Chaucer and Gower by students of
untrained taste, ‘‘lest falling too much in love with Antiquity, and
not apprehending the weight, they grow rough and barren in language
onely’’ (I, 34). Edmund Bolton ‘‘cannot advise the allowance of’’
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 47
or faults of this age of criticism may have been, we must
remember that here for once criticism did prescribe the lit-
erary taste of the day. So with the force of effective con-
temporary criticism arraigned against it, it is not surpris-
ing that interest in old and middle English literature in the
day of Dryden was probably at its very lowest point of
decline.
These largely correlated facts have been grouped without
a pretence to finality. It would be absurd to insist that any
given set of facts bear precisely the relations one to another
that have been assigned to them here. After all, such facts
ean scarcely be explicitly classed as anything more than
common evidences of a simple and natural reaction in liter-
ary feeling. But as to the part which scholarship plays in
this reaction, it seems reasonably clear that it was affected
by two causes which affected the popular appreciation of
ancient English literature at the time: the weakening of
English national culture, and the ever increasing remote-
Spenser’s poems, ‘‘as for practick English, no more than I can do
Jeff. Chaucer, Lydgate, Pierce Ploughman, or Laureat Skelton’’ (I,
109); Bolton’s stricture upon the old literature is to be qualified,
however, by the fact that he is dealing with the question of English
for the historical writers of his own day. Peacham has an admir-
able word of praise for Chaucer, and seems to distinguish his capaci-
ties from those of Gower and Lydgate in a really efficient way (I,
132-3). Drayton’s Epistle to Reynolds has a commendation rather
labored in figure, but with a deprecation of the insufficiency of
Chaucer’s language for poetic expression (I, 135-6). Sprat’s atti-
tude of general scorn for medieval English has been referred to
already, but it is worth noting specifically that he regards Chaucer’s
poetry as the only literature of its time worth reading twice (II,
113); but Sprat’s praise of Chaucer has distinct limitation, for in an
earlier passage of the History of the Royal Society (21) he com-
mends the schoolmen ‘‘as we are wont to do Chaucer; we would con-
fess, that they are admirable in comparison of the ignorance of their
own Age.’’? Rymer voices the characteristic sentiment of the latter
end of the century: ‘‘ But from our Language proceed to our Writers,
48 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
ness of the old literature from the field of immediate pop-
ular interests; and by two causes which touched it more
specifically : the eclipse of other intellectual pursuits in the
ascendancy of natural science, and the absorption of liter-
ary scholars in the critical abstractions of the day, both as
to language and as to literature. It is not surprising, there-
fore, that with so little in the national spirit and in the
scholarly occupations of the time to vitalize an interest in
the literary productions of a period then wholly out of
vogue, there should have been no organized group of
scholars to continue the traditions established by Parker
and Spelman.
Throughout so barren a period as this was for the pro-
ductive student of the literature of English antiquity, the
few who were still concerned with the subject, and for
whom more remunerative occupations could afford the
necessary leisure, were supporting a languishing study
through textual editing and lexicography, and, quite as im-
and with the freedom of this Author, examine how unhappy the
greatest English Poets have been through their ignorance or negli-
gence of these fundamental Rules and Laws of Aristotle. I shall
leave the Author of the Romance of the Rose (whom Sir Richard
Baker makes an Englishman) for the French to boast of, because he
writ in their Language. Nor shall I speak of Chaucer, in whose time
our Language, I presume, was not capable of any Heroick Char-
acter’? (Li ci6z),
Dryden treats Chaucer with more spontaneous judgment than most
of the critics of his day; in fact his Preface to the Fables, 1700, is
in many respects a monument of originality and critical honesty.
Yet he shares in the prejudice and the lack of perspective of his
time. He attempts expressly to confute Speght’s judgment that
apparent deficiencies in rhythm were to be explained by differences
in the older pronunciation (Works, Ed. Scott and Saintsbury, XI,
224-5) and fatuously assumes that Chaucer ‘‘must first be polished,
ere he shines.’’ An echo of the narrowness of classical consistency
is heard in his: ‘‘I deny not likewise, that, living in our early days
of poetry, he writes not always of a piece; but sometimes mingles
trivial things with those of greater moment’’ (ibid., 232).
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 49
portantly, through the medium of more properly anti-
quarian investigation. It might be broadly said, in fact,
that philological science in the latter half of the seventeenth
century was advanced more by incidental than by direct
contributions; and this continued to be measurably true
until the vogue of medieval literature was restored in the
middle of the eighteenth century as an incident of the
Romantic Reaction. The actual critical and scholarly activ-
ity of the age was, in fact, broad to an unprecedented
degree; but its deficiencies for the purposes of non-
utilitarian culture lay in the fact that its incentives and
ends were almost exclusively theological.?? But although
churchmen and antiquaries still seemed to possess the
greater part of the current interest in Anglo-Saxon studies,
the most important and masterful work in the field was
accomplished by a foreigner, and a scholar of the most dis-
interested and devoted type, Franciscus Junius. It was
Junius, in fact, whose residence at Oxford during the clos-
ing years of his life enlisted the scholarly labors of some of
the most important students of his day, notably Marshall,
Nicolson, and Hickes. His great importance in the history
of Anglo-Saxon scholarship is not measured merely by the
value of his publications, his transcriptions, and his lexi-
cography, but by the effect of his teaching and his per-
sonality upon the scholarly productions of the half-century
and more following his death.** This group of Oxford
scholars, united by their proximity and in a common aim,
though without any pretence of formal organization, main-
23 See Prof. Foster Watson’s chapter on Scholars and Scholarship,
1600-60, in the Cambridge History of English Literature, VII, 304-
324, 1911.
24 The weight of Junius’s influence upon the philological scholar-
ship of the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century appears
in Wiilker’s list of Anglo-Saxon publications for this period.
Grundriss zur Geschichte der angelsdchsischen Literatur, 1885, 19-23.
5
50 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
tained a continued and increasing productivity until well
into the new century, when the revival of antiquarian re-
search, with the establishment of the Society of Antiquaries,
provided a more tangible and more efficient foundation for
scholarly development.
Meawhile the tendency toward concentration on the part’
of scholars and dilettanti marks the slow but effective
growth of the idea of the learned society. Organization
was probably less generally evident in England than on the
Continent,”> but a number of segregated instances mark the
history of the movement. Projects and actual organiza-
tions for pedagogic, political, scientific, and merely social
aims are found in every decade of the century; but none
ean be strictly identified—barring the Royal Society and
one or two others of similar but less conspicuous purposes—
as in the main parallel to the modern conception of special
society activities.
The educational feature of Bolton’s proposal for an acad-+
emy was embodied in later pedagogical projects designed to
serve the ends of a modern cultural training—usually for
‘‘gentlemen’s sons.’’ The most notable scheme of this kind
was Sir Francis Kynaston’s Musaeum Minervae, which
was licensed by Charles I in 16357° and continued in exist-
ence until 1642. Balthasar Gerbier’s academy was estab-
lished in 1649 to continue the purposes of the Museum
Minervae, but it was dissolved in 1651.27 These foundations
are of interest only as private projects of more liberal and
utilitarian educational aims than the universities; they bear
no relation to societies organized for the furtherance of
scholarly interests. Comenius’s pedagogical projects did,
however, include a plan, incidental to his pansophic pro-
25 Gothofredi Vockerodt, Hzercitationes Academicae, Gothae, 1704,
15-124 passim.
26 Dict. Nat. Biog., XX XI, 355-6.
27 Dict. Nat. Biog., XXI, 227-229.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 51
gram, which contemplated a ‘‘universal college’’; and
apparently this plan seemed for a time in 1642 to be on the
eve of accomplishment in England itself, through the inter-
est of Parliament in Comenius’s educational theories.?®
This proposal, though suggested as a purely educational
measure, is a very significant reflection of the expansion of
the ideal of scholarly comity.
It has been noted*® that the methods and organization of
experimental science in the sixteenth century were antici-
pated, or rather definitely outlined, in the ‘‘Salomon’s
House’’ of Bacon’s New Atlantis.2° Bacon’s plan—if so
cursory and highly imaginative a picture may be called a
plan—compassed not merely a fellowship of scientific
scholars, but also ‘‘Novices and Apprentices, that the Suc-
cession of the former Employed Men does not faile’’;*? in
this provision we see the long prevalent inclination to com-
bine the investigative with the pedagogic aim. Whether
Thomas Bushell’s declared intention of instituting a society
upon the lines suggested by Bacon was an intention in good
faith seems to be open to question.®* Closely similar proj-
ects were offered, however, by Hartlib, Evelyn, and Cowley
before the formal organization of the Royal Society. Hart-
lib’s projected ‘‘ Macaria’’** was probably the first of the
unproductive efforts to put into effect the scheme of a
philosophical society on the lines of ‘‘Salomon’s House.”’
Hartlib cherished his plan patiently for twenty years, and
28 Will S. Monroe, Comenius and the Beginnings of educational
Reform, 1900; 53-56.
29 Ante, 42.
30 Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis, Edited by G. C. Moore Smith,
1900; 34-46.
81 Ibid., 45.
82 Ibid., xxviii—xxix.
33 Samuel Hartlib, A Description of the famous Kingdom of
Macaria. In a Dialogue between a Schollar and a Traveller; Lon-
don, 1641.
52 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
seems to have actually instituted a society, called at first
Macaria, and afterwards Antilia, in the hope that he would
eventually secure the aid that might make his schemes
capable of realization.*+ It is interesting to note in this
connection that Hartlib was in communication with the
members of the Oxford Philosophical Society, and with
some of the important early members of the Royal Society
itself, including Boyle, Evelyn, and Wren.*®> His advocacy
of the idea of a philosophical foundation upon these lines
was, however, too general and too visionary to enable us
to regard him as an important factor in a development
which was after all inherent in the intellectual quality of
his generation. The chief importance of his ideas touching
investigative science lay in his wholesome efforts to extend
the experimental method to the domain of useful popular
knowledge. Hartlib’s name has incidental connection with
Sir William Petty’s Advice of W. P. to Mr. Samuel Harthb,
for the Advancement of some particular Parts of Learning,
1648.°° In the way of preface to the exposition of his plan
for a more utilitarian education for children and youths,
Petty points out the necessity of assimilating and systema-
tizing the knowledge derived from experiment-and observa-
tion.
Evelyn’s proposal is outlined in a letter written in 1659
to Robert Boyle;?* he contemplates the foundation of a
scholarly community on a reservation adapted to the pur-
poses of experiment in the fields of what are called to-day
pure and natural sciences. The foundation was to be en-
34 H, Direks, A biographical Memoir of Samuel Hartlib, London,
n. d.; 15-19, 44-45. There are numerous allusions to Macaria
throughout Hartlib’s early correspondence with Dr. John Worthing-
ton, in The Diary and Correspondence of Dr. John Worthington,
Chetham Society, v. I, 1847. -
35 Dircks, op. cit., 17-21. C. R. Weld, op. cit., I, 30-41.
86 Reprinted in the Harleian Miscellany, 1808-11; VI, 143-158.
37 Robert Boyle, Works, 1772, VI, 288-91.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 53
dowed under rather strict disciplinary regulations, and to
provide accommodation for six scholars. Evelyn himself
undertook to fill three of the scholars’ cells, and to contribute
to the carrying out of the project almost a third of its
initial costs, which he estimated at £1600. Cowley’s plan,
published in 1661 as A Proposition for the Advancement of
Experimental Philosophy,*® was very much more pretenti-
ous than Evelyn’s. The proposal followed Bacon’s con-
ception of a philosophical college by embodying a pedagog-
ical as well as an investigative purpose. Cowley’s proposi-
tion is worked out with elaborate detail, and calls for an
annual income of £4000 for the support of ‘‘ Twenty Philos-
ophers or Professors,’’ ‘‘Sixteen young Scholars, Servants
of the Professors,’’ and a veritable army of assistants and
menials. There are noteworthy echoes of the details of
Salomon’s House, as for instance, ‘‘a Gallery to walk in,
adorned with the Pictures or Statues of all the Inventors
of any thing useful to Humane Life,’’ ‘‘a very high Tower
for observation of Celestial Bodies,’’ and ‘‘very deep Vaults
made under ground, for Experiments most proper to such
places.’’ An interesting feature is provision for a public
school for two hundred boys, to be trained from youth in the
methods of experimental investigation.
But the faults of the various schemes which aimed to
make scholars either recluses or pedagogues were probably
too self-evident to carry any of these plans further than the
point of careful elaboration. In addition, a more natural
development in the direction of organized and collective
research had been in progress since 1645, when the informal
meetings of a group of experimental philosophers laid the
foundations of what the future was to name the Royal
Society.*® This group became divided about 1648, by reason
88 Abraham Cowley, Essays, Plays and sundry Verses, Edited by
A. R. Waller, 1906; 243-258.
39 Weld, op. cit., I, 30-40.
54 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
of the removal of some of the leading members, into Bishop
Wilkins’s so-called Philosophical Society of Oxford, and a
continuation in London, in which Boyle was active, of the
former society, which seems to have borne the name of the
‘‘Invisible College.’’ Either, or rather both, of these
societies may be regarded as parent of the Royal Society,
the existence of which is generally dated from the revival
of the scientific meetings at the time of the Restoration, and
which was chartered by Charles IT in 1662. In view of the
immediate popularity and scientific success of the Royal
Society in its chosen field, it is matter of real wonder, that,
as we have seen, its example met with no emulative inter-
est in any other field of research for a period of almost
fifty years after its organization. In fact, the only new
society for experimental philosophy founded before the end
of the century was the Philosophical Society of Ireland (the
predecessor of the Royal Irish Academy), established upon
the model of the Royal Society by Sir William Petty in
1683.*°
Before leaving this period in the growth and application
of learned society functions, it remains to review cursorily
a few literary, political, and antiquarian gatherings which,’
because of the direction of their purposes or the literary
importance of their members, deserve at least a passing note
of recognition.
The earliest of these of which we have record is the well-
known assemblage of churchmen and philosophers which
met at Falkland’s estate at Great Tew, about 1633.41 Most
40 Edmond Fitzmaurice, Life of Sir William Petty, 1895; 253.
41 Lady Theresa Lewis’s picture of this coterie (Lives of the
Friends and Contemporaries of Lord Chancellor Clarendon, 1852, I,
9-11) is at once the most vivid and the most agreeable. She takes
her material from both Clarendon and Wood, the latter of whom is
probably indebted, as in many other instances, to Aubrey. See also
J. A. R. Marriot’s Life and Times of Lucius Cary, Viscount Falk-
land, 1907, 79-122.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 55
of the members of this group held academic positions at
Oxford, which was within convenient travelling distance.
Among the most important of these were Charles Gataker,
William Chillingworth, and George Sandys, the poet. This
body of men has been referred to as anticipating the society
activities of a later period ;*? but the fragmentary records
of the gathering seem to show that they were held together
solely by the community of their interests and occupations.
The note of their unity seems to have been absolute freedom
from collective responsibilities; and it is, indeed, not too
much to say that intellectual solidarity in this case was
maintained by a spiritual, rather than by a scholarly,
earnestness, to which formal organization would have been
only baneful.
About 1651 was established another body whose bond of
union was as intangible and unutilitarian as that of Falk-
land’s friends, but in this instance as much a sentimental as
a spiritual bond. This was the so-called Society of Friend-
ship of Katherine Philips.** It possesses a special interest
for the student of literature in the fact that it was in re-
sponse to The Matchless Orinda’s request to compose a
defence of the idealized friendship which was the cause and
the end of their association that Jeremy Taylor, who was
one of the number, wrote his Discourse of the Nature and
Offices of Friendship, dedicated to Mrs. Philips. Here
again, then, we find an organization of only the most casual
literary importance.
Investigative or critical purposes, however, are apparently
suggested in two intrinsically important records of the year
1659. Aubrey** and Pepys*® have both left notes upon the
42 Foster Watson, in Cambridge History of English Literature,
VII, 305, 1911.
43 Edmund Gosse, Jeremy Taylor, 1904; 138-140.
44 John Aubrey, Brief Lives, edited by Andrew Clark, 1898; I,
289-291.
45 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, edited by Henry B. Wheatley,
1893-9; I, 14 n., 20, 59.
56 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
‘*Rota,’’ or ‘‘Club of Commonwealth Men,’’ which, meeting
first as a coffee-house gathering, attained eventually to
recognition as a society. Aubrey records the manner of
their meeting, and their purpose—to discuss questions of
government as projected in Harrington’s Oceana, and espe-
cially in the light of the current Parliamentary abuses.
This club, of which the memorable Cyriack Skinner was
chairman, and which was sustained by sufficient enthusiasm
to support nightly meetings, was only short-lived, dissolving
within a few months after its formation, ‘‘upon the un-
expected turne upon generall Monke’s comeing in.’’ The
other meeting recorded for this year is that of the ‘‘ Anti-
quaries’ feast,’’ referred to in a memorandum in Ashmole’s
diary, July 2, 1659. Richard Gough, without a trace of
justification, interprets this entry as evidence that the
Society of Antiquaries which had dissolved in 1614 had
‘‘remained as it were in abeyance.’’*® But Joseph Hunter
suggests more convincingly that the Antiquaries of 1659
‘‘ean have been only a small private club.’’*?
A reminiscence, in name at least, of Harrington’s Rota is
found in a pamphlet published in 1673, an attack upon
Dryden’s Conquest of Granada, under the title The Censure
of the Rota on Mr. Driden’s Conquest of Granada, which
purports to be a record of the criticisms of the play
gathered from the discussions of the ‘‘ Athenian Virtuosi.”’
The pamphlet opened a controversy in which three other
publications appeared,*® and which was noticed briefly by
Dryden in his preface to The Assignation.*® The names
‘‘Rota’’ and ‘‘ Athenian Virtuosi’’ which appear in this
46 Op. cit., Archaeologia, I, xxii, 1777.
47 Op. cit., Archaeologia, XXXII, 148, 1847.
48 Robert W. Lowe, Bibliographical Account of English theatrical
Literature, 1888; 102.
49 John Dryden, Works, edited by Scott and Saintsbury, 18 v.,
1882-93; IV, 376.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 57
controversy are clearly intended to convey the idea that
the criticism of the first pamphlet was backed by something
like collective opinion; but all contemporary references to
the dispute seem to accept it as a quarrel of individuals.
This inference is supported by the fact that the author of
the first pamphlet—all four were issued anonymously—is
known to have been Richard Leigh. It is, then, very doubt-
ful whether the Athenian Virtuosi can be considered
seriously as a bona-fide society.°°
The Athenian Society, which has sometimes been con-
fused with the Athenian Virtuosi, was founded by John
Dunton, the London publisher, in 1691. Although the
History of the Athenian Society, published in the year of
organization, invites comparison of the aims of this society
with those of the Royal Society, the real purpose of founda-
tion was to publish a periodical, which soon became popular
and which lived for the rather unusual period of six years—
the Athenian Gazette, afterwards called the Athenian Mer-
cury. All the evidence shows this society to have been a
wholly private project of Dunton’s, established for his
purposes as printer and publisher and administered solely
by him. His fellow-members, who were during the period
of the Gazette’s existence only three in number, acted
simply in the capacity of associate editors for Dunton’s
publishing schemes. The name of the society continued in
Dunton’s possession and use after the discontinuation of
the Gazette, certainly down to the year 1710. There is, we
see, then, no valid ground for considering the Athenian
Society at all comparable in its purposes or methods to the
class of society with which we are dealing.®?
Daniel Defoe records for us the interesting fact that, at —
50 This subject I have discussed at considerable length in my
article The Athenian Virtuosi and the Athenian Society; Modern
Language Review, VII, 358-371, 1912.
51 [bid., 363-371.
58 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
some time prior to the publication of his Essay on Projects,
in 1698, he was a member of a ‘‘literary society,’’ which
concerned itself at least in part with the familiar plan for
the improving of the tongue.®? Whether Defoe meant by
literary society a society devoted to the study of belles-
lettres from any point of view is very much to be doubted ;
for this narrower definition of literature is in our language
one of relatively recent acceptance. Until well into the
nineteenth century, as a matter of fact, this term “‘literary
society’’ was applied to any investigative society which en-
couraged so-called literary exercises, such as the reading of
papers, or general publication.**
Evidence of the rapid popularization of the society idea
in England during the closing years of this century and the
first years of the eighteenth is seen in the wide expansion of
local religious societies, such as the noted Society for the
Propagation of Christian Knowledge.**
We have seen, then, that the history of experimental”
science in England during the seventeenth century is in the
main the history of the opening of the continuous tradition
of learned society activities in England. The Royal Society
was the first permanent foundation of the learned society
type, and the seriousness and effectiveness of its scholarly
labors set the example for organization of a similar sort in
other fields of study, although the force of example was
slow to assert itself during the hundred years following the
Royal Society’s incorporation. In spite, therefore, of the
52 Daniel Defoe, Earlier Life and Chief Earlier Works. Ed. Henry
Morley, 1889, 124-5.
53 On the history of the emergence of the modern sense of the
word ‘‘literary,’’? see Ewald Fligel’s Bacon’s Historia Literaria,
Anglia, XXI, 259-288, 1899.
54 Edward Chamberlayne, Angliae Notitiae or the present State of
England. Continued by his son, John Chamberlayne, 21st ed., 1704,
331-336.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 59
general recognition, by the end of the seventeenth century,
of the usefulness of organization in the interests of scholar-
ship, we can sum up the slow progress of the idea into gen-
eral application in the opening words of Defoe’s chapter on
Academies :°°> ‘‘We have in England fewer of these than
in any part of the world, at least where learning is in so
much esteem.”’
55 Daniel Defoe, op. cit., 524.
CHAPTER IV
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
We have seen that during the seventeenth century there
was no impetus to collective engagement in historical
scholarship in literature. In England, in fact, there was no
effective collaboration even for the etymological study of
the vernacular, which had first assumed importance in the
discussions of Parker’s Society, and which, on the Conti-
nent, had constituted part of the labor of the French Acad-
emy, and practically the chief scholarly interest of the
Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft.2 There was throughout the
century, however, a wholly natural tendency for anti-
quarian scholars to seek association or at least to carry on
correspondence with men of their own inclinations. Thus
in the early part of the centtry there was a more or less
frequent interchange of ideas and measures of assistance
between Cotton, Usher, Spelman, Camden, Casaubon, and
their contemporaries ;* and in the mid-century, as we have
seen, between Spelman, Dugdale, Wheelocke and D’Ewes.*
But the very narrowness of the current interest in anti-
quarian studies, and especially in the literature of English
antiquity, made it almost inevitable that material advance
in these studies should be effected through a more regular
coordination among scholars than the century had as yet
produced. The needed incentive was supplied largely in
1 Ante, 7, 35.
21. W. Barthold, Geschichte der Fruchtbringenden Gesellschaft,
111, 242-7 (1848).
3 Original Letters of eminent literary Men... 1848, 102-164;
Gulielmi Camden et illustrium Virorum ad G. Camdenum Epistolae,
1691, passim.
4 Ante, 22-3; also Ellis’s Original Letters, 153-161, 174-6.
60
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 61
the person of Junius, whose learning and personality con-
eentrated about himself much of the activity in Anglo-
Saxon studies during the latter half of the century.® Later,
among Gibson, Hickes, Tanner, Kennet, and Nicolson there
was occasional correspondence on scholarly questions, relat-
ing principally to Anglo-Saxon desiderata and publications
in preparation.® But the fact that all of these last named
students of Old English were important and busy church-
men, who were prevented by ecclesiastical responsibilities
from meeting one another at all regularly, removed the
possibility of formal action for the furtherance of literary
scholarship.
Anything in the nature of an effective organization for
such purposes was therefore suspended until the early
eighteenth century, when the Oxford group of Anglo-Saxon
scholars had partly spent their productive power. The
new impetus to the study of old English literature and
antiquities was given by a number of scholars practically
self-educated in the old vernacular, some of them scarcely
touched by the tradition of culture. Such were Humphrey
Wanley, Thomas Hearne, John Bagford, George Ballard,
William Elstob, and Elizabeth Elstob, the last a protégée of
Ballard’s, and one of the most truly erudite of the class of
learned ladies which Ballard made it his pleasure to defend.
Despite the educational disadvantages of these scholars,
their work was characterized by a fervor of interest and
activity which produced results quite as praiseworthy, and
in at least Wanley’s case, quite as monumental, as any pub-
‘lications in the previous history of English literary studies.
Barring Hearne, whose vanity, jealousy, and ill temper
prevented his working harmoniously with his fellows, most
5 Ante, 49, note.
6 Letters to and from William Nicolson, [edited by] John Nichols,
1809, passim; [‘‘Letters from the Bodleian’’], 1813, passim; Ellis’s
Original Letters, passim.
62 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
of these students were, like their predecessors, bound to-
gether by a useful common interest.
This general solidarity, however, was furthered at an
early period by an actual organization which for the moment
seemed to promise much for the immediate future of Anglo-
Saxon study, but which because of an entire diversion of its
interests to the field of monumental antiquities, such as
seems to have occurred at an early date in Parker’s society,’
failed to perfect a program for the resuscitation of literary
studies.
In 1707, we learn from notes made by Wanley himself,®
John Talman, artist-antiquary, and John Bagford, literary
antiquary and collector of the so-called ‘‘ Bagford Ballads,’’
agreed with Wanley to meet together for the discussion of
antiquarian subjects. These meetings were informal, and
increase in the numbers of the gathering was slow; but
within two months eight members were assembling with
more or less regularity. Among the first of the newer mem-
bers were the distinguished Peter Le Neve, subsequently
chosen as president of the society, and William Elstob, the
Anglo-Saxon scholar, both of whom were introduced by
Wanley. and Maurice Johnson, in a letter to Dr.
Andrew Ducarel, mentions other societies of the same
nature at Worcester, Wisbech, Lincoln, and Dublin.®
Stukeley himself notes two ‘‘vertuoso meetings’’ which he
established in London after the organization of the Society
of Antiquaries, and ‘‘meetings’’ also at Market Overton
and West Deeping.?” Many of these assemblies were in all
probability little more than small friendly gatherings of
amateurs; but the more important societies had very repu-
table intellectual standing and numerous membership, those
at Spalding and Peterborough including about one hundred
members each, and carrying some really distinguished
names on their rosters.
The Spalding society, which may be taken as the type of
all of these organizations, originated, like the Antiquaries
22 Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, VI, 5, 59.
23 Ibid., 4, 136-9. |
24 Ibid., 4-5.
25 Ibid., 4.
26 [bid., 144-5.
27 Stukeley’s Memoirs and Correspondence, I, 122-3.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 69
of London, in an informal club, meeting in this case at a
coffee-house, instead of a tavern, and subscribing to literary
periodicals, the first of which was the Tatler.® The society
recognized from its beginning a formal relation to the
Society of Antiquaries, giving itself the name of a ‘‘cell’’
to the London society, and maintaining with it an uninter-
rupted correspondence over a period of forty years. The
purposes of the Spalding society, however, were not exclu-
Sively antiquarian. Roger Gale wrote Maurice Johnson
in 1735, ‘‘ You have infinitely the advantage of our Anti-
quarian Society at London, which confines itself to that
study and knowledge onely, whereas you take in, and very
rightly too, the whole compasse of learning and philosophy,
and so comprehend at once the ends and institution of both
our London Societys.’’® Maurice Johnson wrote to Tim-
othy Neve in 1745/6, ‘‘We deal in all arts and sciences, and
exclude nothing from our conversation but politics, which
would throw us all into confusion and disorder.’’*° These
quotations convey the sense of the ‘‘Rules and Orders’’ of
the society, which were adopted in 1725.*+ The purposes
of this society, then, are to be taken as miscellaneous.
The society took a rather active, though possibly not
specially discriminating interest in contemporary literature.
Pope, Addison, and Bentley were among its honorary mem-
bers ;32 Gay was both a member and an occasional corre-
spondent ;** original poems were among the communica-
tions to the society throughout its existence, including
28 Nichols, op. cit., VI, 6.
29 Stukeley’s Memoirs and Correspondence, III, 129.
80 Nichols, op. cit., VI, 6-7.
31 Ibid., 29-32. 7
82 Ibid., VI, 106; William Moore, The Gentlemen’s Society at
Spalding (in Memoirs of the Archaeological Institute of Great Britain
and Ireland, Lincoln, July, 1848, 82-89 (1850)), 87.
33 Nichols, op. cit., 84-5.
70 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
manuscript poems by Prior and Pope,** and newly issued
pieces by Parnell, Swift, Arbuthnot, and Eusden, and
Gray’s Hlegy;** in addition, the society subseribed during
its early period not only to the Tatler, but to the most im-
portant of the literary periodicals of the day, including the
Guardian and the Lover,*® and later the Rambler.**
This degree and kind of interest in literature is, however,
what obviously might be expected of a ‘‘Gentlemen’s So-
ciety’? in any age. Whether the range of the society’s
interests may be assumed to have included the historical
study of literature is more to be doubted, if we consider
the personnel of the society and the spirit of the times.
That literary history received at least occasional attention,
however, seems to be indicated in a few scattered records
of the society. In 1725, for example, the society voted to
‘‘take in’’ the Bibliotheca Interaria and Memoirs of Lat-
erature.2® The ‘‘Gentlemen’s Library at Spaldwin’’ ap-
pears also in the list of subscribers to Junius’s Htymologi-
cum Anglicanum in 1748. That at least one member pos-
sessed a live interest in English literary history may be
seen in Beaupré Bell’s intention, expressed in- 1733/4, to
publish an edition of Chaucer, to which end he had at that
time collated a number of manuscripts.*® But such in-
stances as these can not be made to serve as evidence that
the society as a whole felt any collective responsibility for
the study of English literature. Barring, therefore, an
occasional proof of incidental or individual interest in this
field, it is probably safe to assume that, as Roger Gale
expressed it, ‘‘the whole compasse of learning and phi-
34 Ibid., 67-8.
35 Moore, op. cit., 84—5.
36 Nichols, op. cit., VI, 62.
87 Moore, op. cit., 88.
38 Nichols, op. cit., VI, 32.
39 Stukeley’s Memoirs and Correspondence, II, 22.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY wa
losophy’’ which the society chose as its province compre-
hended in reality no more than the special and restricted
‘fends and institutions’’ of the Society of Antiquaries and
the Royal Society.
What is apparently true of the Gentlemen’s Society of
Spalding is in all probability true of the Stamford, the
Peterborough, and the other local societies. Although they
may have possessed an occasional and casual interest in
literature as a branch of antiquarian study, their records
convey to us no intimation of a vital and consistent interest
in this field for its own sake.
Although an organization of no special importance to
literary studies, the Society of the Dilettanti must be men-
tioned in passing as the first of the book clubs, a class of
organizations which became very popular during the first
half of the nineteenth century, and which without doubt
was the most powerful single influence upon the growth of
collective scholarship during this later period. The Dilet-
tanti were, as their name may imply, a small group of
wealthy and aristocratic travellers who combined the ambi-
tion of transmitting to England the culture of classical
times with the solidly practical idea of dining well at more
or less frequent intervals. The members were not renowned
for scholarly attainments; but their position enabled them
to exercise a not unwise patronage of real workers in their
field. The Society was from the beginning small and ex-
elusive, and did not pretend to exist for philanthropic pur-
poses. It was founded in 1734 (possibly as early as 1732) ,*°
and accomplished little for the diffusion of the culture it
nominally supported within its own circle until almost thirty
years later. Then it undertook to contribute to the expense
of publication of Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens,
40 History of the Society of the Dilettantt, compiled by Lionel Cust,
and edited by Sidney Colvin, 1898; 4-5.
72 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
which appeared in 1762.4 The first work actually pub-
lished by the Society was its onan Antiquities, the first
volume of which was issued in 1769, and the fourth in 1882.
In the issue of Payne Knight’s Account of the Worship of
Priapus, 1786, which was not distributed beyond the actual
membership of the society except as signed presentation
copies,*” we find foreshadowed the much deprecated custom
of the printing clubs of the nineteenth century of placing
strict limits upon the circulation of their issues. In this first
instance, however, there were of course special reasons for
such a restriction which could not hold good for the books
of the Roxburghe Club and its successors. The subsequent
activities of the Dilettanti Society, which still continues in
existence, have no significance for our purposes; but the
importance of the society as the forerunner of all our
modern organizations of this well known type cannot be
disregarded.
In Scotland during the greater part of the eighteenth
century an interest in ‘societies on the part of cultivated
men, especially in the university towns, was one of the most
characteristic marks of the intellectual activity of the
period. We have seen*® that the Royal Society grew out of
a private gathering of experimental philosophers, that the
Society of Antiquaries was merely the more formal continu-
ation of private meetings in the Bear Tavern,** and that
the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society, with probably most of
the other local societies of its time, was begun in a similar
irregular fashion. In the main, however, it is impossible
to trace from the English coffee-house clubs, and other in-
formal gatherings which were so marked a feature of social
life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, any very
41 Ibid., 79-81.
42 Ibid., 122-3,
43 Ante, 53-4.
44 See also Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, VI, 147.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 73
general effect upon scholarly organization, much as we
should naturally be led to expect such an effect. The
notable exception seems to have been Johnson’s literary
elub, to which we shall return; but in considering even this
conspicuous instance, we must remember that this club
grew out of established literary associations, and that its
slight potential effect upon literary scholarship owed little
to the mere fact of its existence. It is apparently true,
then, that the few academic bodies which carried the whole
vitality of the learned society movement in England through
the eighteenth century had their origins in something
closely akin to club gatherings. But the special develop-
ment of English club life throughout this century had
seemingly no connection with the learned society movement,
since these clubs themselves were a divergent growth, and
their character was in all cases almost purely social and not
seriously intellectual. It would be impossible to assume,
for example, that the frequenters of Button’s or Will’s re-
garded their casual meetings as anything but pure relaxa-
tion. In Seotland, however, the case was quite different;
for here we find the social—even convivial—gatherings of
the time developing into associations for the discussion, or
more properly for the actual study, of the most profound
subjects, and with an intellectual conscience that would
have done credit to the Royal Society. Indeed, a compari-
son of the whole body of members of some of the mid-cen-
tury Scottish societies, small and private as they were, with
the larger and more widely important Royal and Anti-
quarian Societies of London would force us to admit that in
actual intellectual impressiveness the Scotsmen were by no
means the inferiors.
The first of these clubs of which we have record was the
Rankenian Club at Edinburgh, named from its place of
74 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
meeting, and dating from about 1716.4° Dugald Stewart
tells us that this club, which was composed in part of stu-
dents at the University, corresponded with Bishop Berkeley
on various questions connected with his idealistic philo-
sophical views.*® This society continued a more or less
regular existence down to the year 1774.
A society for classical studies was established in Hdin-
burgh within two years of the first stated meetings of the
Rankenian Club. Thomas Ruddiman was one of the
founders of this body, and the distinguished Lord Kames
became a member at an early date.**7 This society, although
nominally given over to deliberations on classical subjects,
in all probability had a more general literary program, in-
cluding the aim of improvement in composition and speak-
ing, which seems to have been a common object among all
such societies in Scotland during this period.
The most important, and, with its descendants, the most
permanent, of these organizations, however, originated in
Edinburgh in 1731 as a strictly medical society ; and as such
it published in its earliest years five volumes of transactions.
In 1739, at the suggestion of Professor Maclaurin, one of its
secretaries, the plan of the society was enlarged to include
philosophical and literary subjects—‘‘literary’’ compre-
hending, as it almost invariably did throughout the eight-
eenth century, every interest without the domains of theol-
ogy, philosophy, and science.*® With its new fields of
activity the society became known as the Philosophical
Society of Edinburgh. Judging from the three volumes of
45 Alexander Fraser Tytler, Memoirs of Henry Home of Kames,
2d ed., 1814; I, 243, III, 75-7.
46 Dugald Stewart, Collected Works, 1854-8; I, 350-1.
47 George Chalmers, Life of Thomas Ruddiman, 1794; 83-4.
48 For the entire early history of this society see the anonymous
History of the Society in Transactions of the Royal Society of Edin-
burgh, I, 3-22, 1788.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 75
Essays and Observations*® which were issued by the society
in 1754, 1756, and 1771, the interests of the body were still
predominantly in the sphere of medical science; but a few
of the essays deal with physical subjects. There is no really
literary paper in the three volumes. That the literary side
of the society’s program was not merely nominal, however,
may be seen in the fact that Sir John Clerk of -Penecuik
read before the society in 1742 ‘‘ An Inquiry into the An-
cient Languages of Great Britain.’”®° This paper possesses
of course a special interest as an early society communica-
tion preserved for us in toto. The only paper definitely
attempting to cover the historical position of the English
language which was before this time prepared for a learned
society and is still preserved even in abstract, was Edward
Lhwyd’s ‘‘Observations on Ancient Languages,’’ read be-
fore the Royal Society in 1698.5' As between the two
papers there is perhaps little to choose. Lhwyd’s appears
from its abstract to have been meagre, trivial, and un-
scholarly. Clerk’s deserves genuine commendation for its
relative freedom from the a priori judgments and supersti-
tious prejudices of former writers in regard to the anti-
quity and linguistic relationships of the English tongue.*?
But on the score of general merits it must be said that Clerk
was radically and blindly wrong in his interpretation of
clear historical evidence. Considering what Junius and a
dozen native scholars such as Camden and Hickes had
49 Hssays and Observations, read before a Society in Edinburgh,
3 v., 1754-71.
50 Memoirs of Sir John Clerk of Penecuk, edited by John M. Gray,
1892; 165. The entire paper was communicated by Clerk to Roger
Gale in the same year, and is reprinted in Stukeley’s Memoirs and
Correspondence, I, 339-357.
51 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society abridged, 1809;
IV, 300-1.
52 On this point see Lhwyd’s Observations, and Letters to and from
William Nicolson, 79-80, 114.
76 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
accomplished in ‘‘placing’’ the English tongue with refer-
ence to related linguistic stocks, it is remarkable that such
ineptitude as is exhibited in the ill-informed and erratic
productions of Lhwyd and Clerk should be the only docu-
ments left to us to represent the quality of the interest of
the learned bodies of the day in their own vernacular.
Nothing can serve as clearer evidence of the general in-
difference of the men of learning of that time to anything
like a fundamental study of English philology.
The existence of the Edinburgh Philosophical Society
was interrupted during and after the rebellion of 1745.
When the society was revived in 1752 David Hume became
one of its two secretaries.°? After the publication of the
first two volumes of the Essays and Observations, the society
seems to have dropped again into desuetude; but under the
presidency of Lord Kames it enjoyed a period of prosperity
until 1782. In this year a project was offered by Principal
Robertson to reorganize the society upon the more public
and useful academy plan. Accordingly the Royal Society
of Edinburgh was incorporated by royal charter in the
following year, and the members of the Philosophical
Society were entered as members of the new institution.**
The charter of the new society defines its purposes as ex-
tending not merely to the theoretical and useful sciences,
but to archaeology, philology, and literature.°> For the
furtherance of this plan the organization was divided into
two classes, the Physical, and the Literary, and it is interest-
ing to note that in the early years of the society the literary
members outnumbered those of the other class.56 Among
the members of the Literary Class were Kames, Hume,
53 Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, I, 6.
54 Ibid., 10.
55 Ibid., 8.
56 [James David] Forbes, Opening Address, 1862; in Proceedings
of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, V, 10 (1866).
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 77
Tytler, Beattie, Reid, Burke, and Adam Smith.5? There
seems to have been a deliberate intention on the part of the
society to ‘‘feature’’ the literary department; for no
society had as yet appropriated literature as its field of
scholarship. But the plans of the organizers met with rela-
tively little success. The papers of the Literary Class
printed in the first volume of the society’s Transactions
comprise articles on history, political science, and Greek
philology, eight in all. The literary articles in the second
volume were seven in number, covering in all but one title
subjects from comparative philology, and Greek, Latin,
German, and English literature. In the third and fourth
volumes, however, which represented the activities of the
society from 1789 to 1797, there were in the literary class
three and two papers respectively, only one of the five
touching the field of literature in our modern sense. The
literary papers were no longer printed under a separate
caption in the volumes following the fourth, although
philological papers were printed at the rate of one a volume
from the fifth to the tenth volume, ending in 1830. The
Literary Class of the society continued a nominal existence
for some years after its papers ceased to be separately
printed; but towards the end of the eighteenth century its
meetings became very infrequent, the time formerly devoted
to them soon being given over more and more to scientific
communications. The minute-book of the Literary Class
closed in the year 1808.5 From time to time, however,
literary papers were read at the regular meetings of the
society, but without being separated from the scientific
papers. The election of Sir Walter Scott to the presidency
in 1820 must be regarded as an effort to revive the literary
communications in the society; but Scott, although he con-
scientiously presided at the meetings, contributed no
87 Ibid., 11.
58 Ibid., 12.
78 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
papers, and evidently was unable to rescusitate the flag-
ging interests of the literary members. The Literary Class
of the society was therefore finally abolished in 1827.°°
Principal Forbes has taken pains to point out that the
failure of what is for us the more important division of the:
society was not due to the encroachments of scientific
research, but to the cessation of the literary communica-
tions. Whether this is to be explained by indifference on
the part of the members of the Literary Class, or by their
recognition that the scientific studies of the day provided
a better ground for investigation than philology in its
then existing state, in any event it is to be noted that
an experiment in a new field which was at least temporarily
successful met its final failure in a period when literary
societies generally in England, and even in Scotland, were
beginning to achieve their distinguished successes.
Notwithstanding the eventual frustration of the literary
plans of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, we must concede
it the honor of having been the first publishing society of
Great Britain to have furthered consistently over a period
of some years an interest in philological studies. -That this
interest was restricted in the main to classical philology
may be explained in part by the fact that the literary
members were recruited largely from the faculty of Edin-
burgh University, and partly by the fact that nothing like
a broad interest in the antiquity of English and Scottish
literature was possible to any but collectors or special stu-
dents of literature before the period of general republica-
tion of literary materials which began with the opening of
the nineteenth century.
In 1780, two years before it was proposed that the Edin-
burgh Philosophical Society should be absorbed into the
Royal Society of Edinburgh, David Steuart Erskine, Earl
59 Ibid., 12.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 79
of Buchan, had taken steps toward the formation of an
antiquarian society in the same city.®°° This society was
established at the end of the year as the Society of the
Antiquaries of Scotland.*t When the organization peti-
tioned two years later for a royal charter, it encountered
the opposition of the University and of the Curators of the
Advocates’ Library.** The objection of the University is
probably to be explained by the fact that at this very
moment the Philosophical Society, which represented
generally the Faculty of the University, had petitioned
the Lord Advocate to be included in the projected Royal
Society of Edinburgh,® although the nominal ground of
complaint was that there was not room in Scotland for
two societies of this kind. Events seem to prove that this
widespread objection to the foundation of another aca-
demic body in the northern capital was well grounded; for
the history of the Scottish Antiquaries during the last
decade of the eighteenth century and the first twenty years
of the nineteenth was one of painful indolence and constant
pecuniary embarrassment. Indeed, the society was twice
within this period on the border of dissolution.** The
original members of the Antiquaries of Scotland included,
in addition to the Earl of Buchan, William Smellie, Kames,
60 For correspondence with George Paton relative to the establish-
ment of this society see Letters from Thomas Percy and Others to
George Paton, 1830, 169-74.
61 William Smellie, An historical Account of the Society of the Anti-
quaries of Scotland, in Transactions of the Society of the Antiquaries
of Scotland, I, iii-xxxiii, 1792.
62 Robert Kerr, Memoirs of William Smellie, 1811; II, 35-44.
63 Tbid., 37.
64 Samuel Hibbert and David Laing, Account of the progress of
the Society of the Antiquaries of Scotland, from 1784 to 1830; in
Archaeologia Scotica, III, app., v-xxxi, 1831; and David Laing,
Anniversary address on the state of the Society of Antiquaries of
Scotland, from 1831 to 1860; in Archaeologia Scotica, V, 1-36, 1890.
80 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
Tytler, Blair, Boswell, and George Paton. The charter of
the society®> does not name literature as one of the prov-
inces of its activity, but it empowers the incorporated body
to collect books and manuscripts. The intense patriotism
of the Scotsmen of this period, however, made it inevitable
that their language and literature should constitute at least
an occasional subject for investigation or discussion. and
ridiculed the collection of black letter books: and literary
rarities as a characteristic silliness of the antiquarian
enthusiast.°° The scholarly importance of the Literary
94 Boswell’s Life of Johnson, edited by George Birkbeck Hill, 1887,
III, 276-7. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, edited by Henry B.
Wheatley, 1886, I, 14.
95 Boswell’s Life of Johnson, II, 136 n.
96 In the Rambler, No. 177. Vivaculus, bored by his solitary
lucubrations, entreats one of his ‘‘academical acquaintances ’’ to in-
troduce him to ‘‘some of the little societies of literature which are
formed in taverns and coffee-houses.’’ ‘‘The eldest and most vener-
able of this society was Hirsutus, who, after the first civilities of my
reception, found means to introduce the mention of his favourite
studies. He informed me that... he had very carefully amassed all
the English books that were printed in the black character. ... He
had long since completed his Caxton, had three sheets of Treveris
unknown to the antiquaries, and wanted to a perfect Pynson but two
volumes, of which one was promised him as a legacy by its present
possessor, and the other he was resolved to buy, at whatever price,
when Quisquilius’s library should be sold. MHirsutus had no other
reason for the valuing or slighting a book, than that it was printed
in the Roman or the Gothic letter, nor any ideas but such as his
favourite volumes had supplied; when he was serious he expatiated
on the narratives of ‘Johan de Trevisa,’ and when he was merry,
regaled us with a quotation from the ‘Shippe of Foles.’ ... Can-
tilenus turned all his thoughts upon old ballads, for he considered
them as the genuine records of the national taste. He offered to show
me a copy of ‘The Children in the Wood,’ which he firmly believed
to be of the first edition, and, by the help of which the text might be
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 89
Club lies in its inclusion of a group of accomplished stu-
dents whose interests in literary antiquity shamed John-
son’s prejudice and belied Warburton’s fatuous dictum
that ‘‘antiquarianism is to true letters what specious
funguses are to the oak.’’®** Among these members of the
Club were of course Garrick, who was an industrious ballad
collector,®*® Perey, Thomas and Joseph Warton, the former
the writer of the first distinguished history of English
poetry, Steevens and Malone, giants in the history of
Shaksperean criticism and biography, and later Dr.
Farmer, acknowledged as one of the greatest scholarly
figures of the day, although not a frequent combatant in
the public lists of criticism of the time.®*® We know that
in the cases of Malone, Perey, and the Wartons, the friend-
freed from several corruptions, if this age of barbarity had any
claim to such favours from him.’’ Johnson’s judgment of the oc-
cupations and characters of antiquaries may be gathered from another
paragraph: ‘‘ Every one of these virtuosos looked on all his associates
as wretches of depraved taste and narrow notions. Their conversa-
tion was, therefore, fretful and waspish, their behaviour brutal, their
merriment bluntly sarcastick, and their seriousness gloomy and sus-
picious. They were totally ignorant of all that passes, or has lately
passed, in the world; unable to discuss any question of religious,
political or military knowledge; equally strangers to science and
politer learning, and without any wish to improve their minds, or any
other pleasure than that of displaying rarities, of which they would
not suffer others to make the proper use’’ (The Works of Samuel
Johnson, Oxford, 1825, III, 329-33). In a letter to Boswell relative
to a previous disagreement with Percy, Johnson says: ‘‘Percy’s at-
tention to poetry has given grace and splendour to his studies of
antiquity. A mere antiquarian is a rugged being’’ (Boswell’s Life
of Johnson, III, 278).
97 Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript, edited by John W. Hales and
Frederick J. Furnivall, 1867; I, xxxviii—ix.
98 Percy’s Reliques, edited by Henry B. Wheatley, I, 14.
99 The names of all but Farmer are given in Boswell’s list of 1792
(Boswell’s Life of Johnson, I, 477-9); Farmer was admitted to the
Club in 1795 (Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, II, 639).
=n
90 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
ships established in the Club were perpetuated in a valua-
ble correspondence, largely upon literary questions ;*°° and
we may safely assume from the mere presence of so impos-
ing a group of scholars in the Club that its meetings, par-
ticularly in the later years, provided frequent occasion for
discussion of the topics of uppermost interest to them.
With the close of the century, however, the Literary Club
began to sink into an aristocratic decadence, an offence to
the memory of its greatest member, and of course an abso-
lute check upon essentially literary activities, from any
point of view whatsoever.’
Apparently most of these pioneers were also members of
Issac Reed’s Unincreasable Club, a ‘‘dining club,’’ as
Nichols calls it, with some scholarly pretensions;’°? and
Farmer, with Reynolds and Boswell, was a member of the
EKumélian Club, founded by Dr. John Ash;?° but there can
be little doubt that in both of these clubs, as with most
contemporary organizations, serious questions were not
permitted to intrude upon conviviality.
Much more important is the fact that Perey, Thomas
Warton, Malone, Farmer, Steevens, Tyrwhitt, and Reed
were all members of the Society of Antiquaries during
the last quarter of this century ;?°* and it is of incidental
interest that Ritson and Samuel Ireland were both black-
100 Sir James Prior, Life of Edmond Malone, 1850, 117-9, 122-3,
282, 284-5, 321-2.
101 John Timbs, Club Life of London, 1866; I, 213-5.
102 [John Nichols], Biographical Memoirs of the late Isaac Reed,
Esq.; Gentleman’s Magazine, UXXVII, 80-2, 1807.
103 Nichols’s Literary Anecdotes, II, 638; and William Munk, Roll
of the Royal College of Physicians of London, 1878, II, 379.
104 Richard Gough, List of Members of the Society of Antiquaries,
1798. Tyrwhitt’s name is not given in Gough’s List; but he is said
by Nichols (Literary Anecdotes, III, 147), to have been a member
of the society.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 91
balled by the Society in 1789.1° The Antiquaries had at
this time awakened to a more active existence than before
the middle of the century; and between 1770 and 1800
their principal communications were collected in the first
thirteen volumes of Archaeologia. None of the papers
delivered during this period were from members of our
group, however, if we except a single indirect communica-
tion by letter from Bishop Perey upon an archaeological
topie.t°® So evidently the membership of these students of
literature was due to their interest in antiquities in the
more general sense; indeed, Perey, Warton, Tyrwhitt and
Malone were antiquarians of the traditional stamp, as well
as literary scholars. But the publications of the Society of
Antiquaries for this period are not without interest to the
student of literature. During these thirty years there
were published in Archaeologia a number of articles of
interest upon English, French, Gaelic and Cornish philol-
ogy, and a few records of Anglo-Saxon inscriptions. Most
of these papers, however, exhibit a curious rather than a
scholarly interest in such studies. The most important of
these articles was a series of lengthy dissertations by
William Drake, partly controversial in their nature, upon
the history of the English language; these demonstrate
with some effectiveness the relation of the Teutonic linguis-
tie stock to the modern tongue.’*? Other items of some
importance were Samuel Pegge’s amicable Observations on
Dr. Percy’s account of minstrels among the Saxons,'°® and
translations of four really learned papers communicated
between 1794 and 1797 by the Abbé de la Rue upon Wace,
105 Edward William Brabrook, On the Fellows of the Society of
Antiquaries of London who have held the Office of Director; Archae-
ologia, LXII, 70 (1910).
106 Archaeologia, VII, 158-9, 1785.
107 Archaeologia, V, 306-17, 379-89, IX, 332-61.
108 [bid., II, 100-6, 1773.
92 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
Marie de France, and the Anglo-Norman poets of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries.‘ It must be admitted,
therefore, that the Society of Antiquaries accomplished
during this period something of genuine importance in this
province, even though the rarity of communications on
literary subjects, and the apparent apathy among the noted
literary scholars in the society to the exhibition of their
special interests here, forbids our assuming that the society
as a whole possessed more than a casual and half-indulgent
approval of literary investigation as part of their learned
business.
Two other permanent societies dating from the late
eighteenth century, one in Manchester, and one in Dublin,
displayed in the first years of their existence a disposition
to foster literary scholarship. Their activity was neither
more nor less effective than that of their older and more
important contemporaries. The first of these, the Literary
and Philosophical Society of Manchester, had its begin-
nings, as did almost all of the learned societies established
before the nineteenth century, in a club of ‘‘inhabitants
of the town, who were inspired with a taste for Literature
and Philosophy.’’4#° This society, founded in 1781, was
the first so-called provincial publishing society in Eng-
land; for the powerful learned societies in London and
Edinburgh were then, and have always continued to be,
really national in their influence. The Manchester society
was by its membership and environment destined to de-
velop naturally into a scientific society; indeed its early
leaning to scientific study may be seen in its first catalogue
of honorary members, which included Erasmus Darwin
and Priestley, residents of Manchester, and Delaval,
109 Ibid., XII, 50-79, 297-326, XIII, 36-67, 230-50.
110 Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Man-
chester, I, vii, 1785. R. Angus Smith, A Centenary of Science in
Manchester, 1883, 22-4.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 93
Franklin, Lavoisier, Volta, and Wedgewood.** Despite
this rather unpromising outlook for literary study, a few
papers of this nature appear in the first series of the
Society’s Memoirs; the only two published before 1800,
however, were papers by a local physician, Dr. John Fer-
rier, on Massinger and Sterne."?* With the opening of the
next century this society became more strictly scientific,
probably in part because of the expanding importance of
the city as an industrial centre. In time, therefore, literary
communications were dropped entirely from the society’s
meetings.
The Royal Irish Academy, which possesses a scope and
importance comparable to that of the metropolitan socie-
ties in England and Scotland, was organized in 1782, and
chartered in 1785, the names of Percy and Malone appear-
ing on the list of constituent members.14*? The Academy
seems to trace its descent more or less directly from a
Physico-Historical Society, founded in 1740, and an anti-
quarian group known as the Dublin Society which flour-
ished from 1772 to 1774. The immediate origin of the
society, however, was apparently in the kind of essay club
which was the first form of early societies generally.1*+
The Royal Irish Academy was chartered for inquiry in
science, polite literature, and antiquities; and the publica-
tions of the Academy, therefore, were divided under these
heads.1> The literary section of the Transactions, how-
111 Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Man-
chester, I, xviii—xix.
112 [bid., III, 123-58, and IV, 45-85. Notes on the quality of
these two articles are 40nd in Smith’s Centenary of Science in
Manchester, 177-9.
113 Charter and Statutes of the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin,
1786, 4.
114 Robert Burrowes, Preface to Transactions of the Royal Irish
Academy, I, xiii-xv, 1787.
115 Charter and Statutes, 5.
94 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
ever, included at first papers on a variety of subjects.
Those of the more strictly literary type published before
1800 comprise a number of essays in aesthetic criticism of
the drama, and academic disquisitions upon classical litera-
ture. It is simply classing the Academy’s publications
with the bulk of similar productions of the time to say
that the critical contributions to the literary section in
these years possess very little value to the scholar of the
present. In the nineteenth century the Academy aban-
doned English literature and fittingly turned its atten-
tion to the remains of Irish literature; and in this field it
has accomplished much of the very highest scholarly
importance.
Probably the most extensive and the most solid contribu-
tion on the part of any society of this period to a scholar-
ship that had now beyond doubt become assured of its
strength was the investigation conducted by the Highland
Society of Scotland—an organization for wholly miscel-
laneous purposes—into the authenticity of the Ossian
Poems. After Dr. Johnson’s fulmination against Mac-
pherson, interest in the question had subsided, although the
adherents to the belief that the poems were wholly or
largely genuine had by no means abandoned their convic-
tions. The investigations of the committee of the High-
land Society were begun in 1797. Eight years elapsed
before the publication of their report,1!® which represented
an extended inquiry into the remains of Gaelic poetry
generally, and considerable research in the special ques-
tions connected with Macpherson’s publication. The con-
clusions of the committee” recited that Macpherson’s so-
called translations are probably not to be taken as literal
116 Henry Mackenzie, Report of the Committee of the Highland
Society of Scotland, appointed to inquire into the Nature and Authen-
ticity of the poems of Ossian, Edinburgh, 1805.
117 Tbid., 151-5.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 95
renderings of actual ancient remains, although they may
have been derived in part from the disjecta membra of old
Gaelic poetry. With regard to Macpherson’s use of his
materials the committee was ‘‘inclined to believe that he
was in use to supply chasms, and to give connection, by
inserting passages which he did not find, and to add what
he conceived to be dignity and delicacy to the original
composition, by striking out passages, by softening inci-
dents, by refining the language, in short by changing what
he considered as too simple or too rude for a modern ear,
and elevating what in his opinion was below the standard
of good poetry.’’?8 Beyond these conclusions a century
of occasional research in the subject has scarcely carried us.
The action of the Highland Society in settling, as far as
settlement was possible, a literary dispute so vexed, and at
the same time so closely indicative of the state of literary
scholarship at this time, brings us to a consideration of
the special conditions and problems with which scholar-
ship found itself dealing during the last forty years of
the seventeenth century.
The gradual growth of a general appreciation of old
literature had been in progress since the early years of the
century.17® The development of this appreciation, which
may be taken as one of the most significant marks of the
romantic reaction, had been very slow, however, except
possibly in Seotland, where a literary consciousness arose
which found itself possessed of no literary reminiscence
approaching in richness that of England’s yesterday, but
which resolved to make much of what it did possess—an
118 [bid., 152.
119 See Sir Walter Scott’s Introductory remarks on popular poetry,
in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, edited by T. F. Henderson,
I, 1-54, 1902; also John W. Hales’s The revival of ballad poetry in
the eighteenth century; in Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript, edited
by John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall, II, v-xxxi, 1867.
96 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
ancient literature of rugged vitality and naturalness, but
largely wanting in delicacy and polish. The spread of
this new literary taste in England was furthered remark-
ably during the decade following 1760, partly through the
rapid weakening of the classical tradition, but more par-
ticularly through the publication of three collections of
ostensibly ancient poetry, Macpherson’s Ossian in 1760,
Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765, and
Chatterton’s Rowley Poems from 1764 to 1770. What
seemed to create the extraordinary vogue of these collec-
tions, where the publication of actual poetical remains up
to this time had passed without enthusiasm, was the adap-
tation of all three to a poetical taste which, however much
it might be attracted by vigor and simplicity, was repelled
by a lack of refinement and finish. Far from being actual
monuments of antiquity, the Ossian poems were, if not
really forged, at least highly modernized; Percy’s Reliques
were generously and systematically refined; and the Rowley
Poems were soon recognized as fabrications.
The result was that no sooner had a body of assumedly
ancient poetry captured the liking of the reading public
than scholars began to demonstrate that it was really not
ancient poetry at all; for if it were not actually modern in
composition, its adaptation to popular taste had been at
the expense of some of its most characteristic virtues.
Macpherson met a very torrent of criticism in England
generally; Percy suffered at the violent hands of Ritson
and his fellows, and Chatterton was shortly exposed by
Gray, Warton, and Tyrwhitt.12° The very prevalence of
120 Prof. Skeat (The Poetical Works of Thomas Chatterton, with
an Essay on the Rowley Poems by Walter W. Skeat, Il, ix) says:
“‘Tt is not too much to say that Tyrwhitt is the only writer among
those that have hitherto handled the subject who had a real critical
knowledge of the language of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
and who, in fact, had on that account a real claim to be heard.’’
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 97
uncritical emendation or downright dishonesty on the part
of editors and publishers, magnified later by the inventions
of Pinkerton and the spectacular Shakspere forgeries of
Ireland, established at once the supreme importance of a
well grounded critical scholarship in dealing with old
literary materials. The generation of students who built
up the new critical tradition found it no longer necessary,
therefore, to adopt an apologetic manner before the reading
public, but found instead a public which had gradually
but certainly formed its taste in a school of new literary
doctrines. The literary scholars of the age had something
that their predecessors had never possessed—not merely a
field to work in, but a general public interest to appeal to.
The way was prepared, therefore, for a degree of pro-
ductive activity which could have met with no response
fifty years earlier. The eighteenth century closed when
the claims of literary scholarship no longer needed asser-
tion, and the new century opened upon an entirely new
prospect.
Meanwhile the usefulness of the learned society had ~
become entirely established in diverse fields of intellectual
occupation; and although there was not yet in existence a
society devoted exclusively or even largely to the study of
English literature, a number of thriving organizations had
exhibited a more or less stable interest in the subject.
(0/6)
CHAPTER V
NINETEENTH CENTURY BOOK CLUBS AND GENERAL
PUBLISHING SOCIETIES
Hitherto the occasional activity of societies in the field
of literary study had been confined to ineffectual appre-
cilative criticism and more or less valuable attempts at
literary history. To be sure, the reprinting of old litera-
ture was going on with increasing rapidity, and was calling
forth from time to time a kind of critical response even on
the part of the learned societies themselves. But with the
bulk of the important literature of the Anglo-Saxon and
the middle English periods still unavailable, and with the
societies engaged in no effort to continue or to systematize
the reproduction of the actual materials for literary study,
_ it is very much to be questioned whether their importance
in this field would have expanded commensurately with the
expansion of literary scholarship unless an outside force
had placed the club function in a new light. This force was
the wave of book-collecting enthusiasm which was one of
the indirect results of the revival of interest in things
medieval.
This wave of bibliomania was at its height during the
first few years of the nineteenth century. Buyers of books
had come to see that there were fewer Caxtons than there
were collectors desirous of possessing them, and that Shaks-
pere quartos were becoming so rare that a mere scholar
could no longer afford to stack his shelves with them, as
Malone had done in the previous century. The famous
collection of the Duke of Roxburghe, which was sold at
auction in 1812, brought in £23,000, although Dibdin esti-
mated its cost to have been not over a fourth of that
98
NINETEENTH CENTURY BOOK CLUBS 99
amount.* On the other hand, the collection of Richard
Heber, which was gathered during these early years, and
which Dibdin estimated to have cost between £100,000 and
£150,000,? was sold between 1834 and 1836 for a total of
only £67,000.
While the growth of preposterously artificial values for
rare books could not be regarded as encouraging directly an
interest in the contents of these books, such an enthusiasm
could scareely fail to awaken the interest of the public,
already captivated by the charms of romantic literature, to
a knowledge of the existence of the manuscript and printed
materials of an older literature of unimagined extent
and value.
Bibliomania had, then, as all collecting hobbies must
have, an appreciable effect upon popular sentiment; but
having prepared the field for the great projects of publish-
ing societies throughout the entire nineteenth century, it
possesses for us a more direct importance. Indeed, it is
not too much to say that to the bibliophiles alone must be
given credit for having established the first generally suc-
cessful scheme for the systematic publication of original
documents; and the example which they set in the domain
of literary study was followed in the publication first of
historical and biographical materials and local records, and
later of the materials for the history of the useful sciences,
typography, architecture, music, ecclesiology, and a score
of special studies. The effect of their work, in fact, was
not limited to the societies which sprang up about them,
but it is also to be clearly seen in the great government
undertakings, such as the Rolls Series, and in a host of
private projects organized upon the same plan, illustrated,
for example, in the publications of Carew Hazlitt and
Dr. Grosart.
1Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Reminiscences of a literary life, 1836,
I, 366-7.
2 Ibid.
100 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
The general importance of all of these early book clubs,
however, was greatly restricted by the conditions of their
organization. They were without exception exclusive in
their membership, and they limited the issues of their
publications in many cases to the exact numbers upon their
rolls. In no instance were club publications very far in
excess of the actual number of members to be accommo-
dated, for it was understood that the book clubs were not
attempting to supply books for the public. This policy met
with much unfavorable comment generally, some of it
voiced in the periodicals of the day. The Roxburghe
Club, pioneer of these organizations, was the greatest
source of offence in this respect; of the publications pre-
sented to the club during the first fifteen years of its
existence, almost all were limited to between thirty and
forty copies, while the membership during this period was
seldom much over thirty. Even the Roxburghe Club,
however, displayed a slightly more considerate spirit when
it later resolved to issue copies of its publications to the
most important British libraries, and increased consider-
ably the number of copies—which have never in any event
exceeded one hundred—issued at the direction of the club
itself, and not presented to it by incoming members.
The story of the founding and early existence of the
Roxburghe Club is told by Dibdin, with what he himself
might have called ‘‘truly bibliomaniacal enthusiasm,’’ in his
3See the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1813, 211-12, 338-41, 544,
The writer of the first protest says: ‘‘Selfishness must be the most
appropriate term whereby to designate the proceedings of a body of
men, who have determined annually to print or reprint some valu-
able or scarce work, but to confine the number of copies to be printed
to the number of their club, ... That they have a right, or, in other
words, that it is lawful for them to do so, cannot be disputed; but
it is doubtless selfish, and by no means becoming men who have
any pretensions to literature; and is so far from tending to diffuse
knowledge, that it can serve only to confine and repress it’? (211-12).
NINETEENTH CENTURY BOOK CLUBS 101
Bibliographical Decameron and his Reminiscences.* A less
temperate account, but one which does superb justice to
the gustatory side of the club’s gatherings, is found in the
annals which Joseph Haslewood set down for his personal
delectation, but which were purchased at the sale of his
library after his death and published with ungenerous
comment upon the personality of the writer in the London
Athenaeum during January, 1834.5 Haslewood’s reminis-
ceneces are too slight and too personal to supply us with
anything more than suggestions of the society’s history;
but from Dibdin’s narrative, we may by scanning many
solid pages of meaningless literary gossip and irrelevant
foot-notes, interspersed generously with shrill Italic and
thundering ROMAN, gather the following definite facts.
On the night of the seventeenth of June, 1812, following
the afternoon on which at the sale of the Duke of Rox-
burghe’s books the ephemerally famous Valdarfer Boccaccio
was knocked down to the Marquis of Blandford for up-
wards of two thousand pounds,® eighteen properly self-
styled bibliomaniacs met at the St. Albans Tavern to discuss
what was to that time the most celebrated event recorded in
the history of bookhunting.* Dibdin himself claimed the
honor of having fathered the plan, although his fellow-
clubman, George Isted, was apparently inclined to dispute
with him this title to fame. Earl Spencer, the unsuccess-
ful competitor in the bidding for the Boccaccio, presided
at this festive meeting, and continued as president of the
elub which grew from it until his death in 1834. The first
4Thomas Frognall Dibdin, The Bibliographical Decameron, 1817,
ITI, 69-75. Reminiscences of a Literary Life, 1836, I, 367-470.
5 These articles were collected and republished, with some apology
for Haslewood, and some miscellaneous Roxburghiana, in Roxburghe
Revels and other relative Papers, 1837.
6 See Dibdin’s Bibliographical Decameron, III, 48-69.
7 Ibid., 69.
8 Ibid., 71.
102 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
meeting was attended by eighteen bibliophiles; within its
first two years, however, the number of members of the
Roxburghe Club was increased to thirty-one. The club
prided itself upon exclusiveness, but an exclusiveness
which belonged to the nature of its hobby, rather than to
aristocratic preferences. In fact the organization consisted
of two pretty distinct classes of members, between whom
there was without question a very real social gulf; and it
was, in fact, this social mixture in the early membership
which later laid the club open to the rather unprincipled
attack of the Athenaeum. The club, then, was composed of
social lions and gentlemen of wealth on the one hand, such
as Spencer and Gower, and on the other hand, of humbler
bibliophiles, some of whom actually lived largely by the
commissions of their wealthier associates. The most con-
spicuous of the latter class were Haslewood, the protegé
of Sir Egerton Brydges, and Dibdin himself, who had
executed at the Roxburghe sale extensive purchases for
Sir Mark Masterman Sykes.® At the first anniversary
meeting of the club the Duke of Devonshire and the Mar-
quis of Blandford were among the six new members
admitted ;*° and at the third anniversary meeting James
Boswell the younger became a member.
The publishing plans of the Roxburghe Club were com-
prised at first in a resolution for ‘‘each member, in turn,
according to the order of his name in the alphabet, to fur-
nish the Society with a reprint of some rare old tract, or
composition—chiefly of poetry.’’4+ The letter of this rule,
9 Reminiscences, I, 373.
10 There is a point of casual interest in the fact that the social
discrimination of the Marquis of Blandford, who, as the purchaser
of the Valdarfer Boccaccio, might have been regarded as the most
‘fout and out’’ bibliophile in the club, was so far from being carried
away by bibliomania that at least during the fourteen years follow-
ing his admission into the sacred circle he was present at none of the
anniversary dinners of the Roxburghers. (Roxburghe Revels, 45.)
11 Bibliographical Decameron, III, 72.
NINETEENTH CENTURY BOOK CLUBS 1038
and the tastes of the members, brought it about that the
publications of the club came to include particularly an-
cient literature, rather than history or antiquities. The
first book presented was Surrey’s Certaine Bokes of Vir-
giles Aenaeis, turned into English Meter, which was dis-
tributed at the second anniversary, in 1814, by William
Bolland. The gifts to the club were very numerous in the
first few years of its existence, presumably because most of
the members hastened to fulfill an obligation which was
met at continually greater intervals when the membership
was renewed merely by the filling of occasional vacancies.
In any event, during the sixteen years from the foundation
of the club to the issue of the first book at the joint ex-
pense of the members, in 1828, the clubmen had been the
recipients of forty-five volumes, three of which had been
presented by non-members. These first publications were
confined practically to distribution among the members.
The issue of between thirty and fifty copies of such
works was certainly not sufficient to be said to effect any
very tangible service to English scholarship, especially
when the majority of the club were probably collectors
rather than readers, and when the reprints were as a rule
brought out because of the rarity or singularity of the
original, and not because of its intrinsic literary qualities.
Indeed, it must probably be admitted that John Hill Bur-
ton was substantially correct when he declared that the
Roxburghe Club scheme was, from the standpoint of the
members, one of purely personal advantage.? It was
inevitable that under these conditions much of the output
of the club should be relatively worthless, for most of the
members were wanting in the ability, the wherewithal, or
the inclination to produce really important literary works
for gratuitous distribution. The publications of this
12 John Hill Burton, The Book-Hunter, New York, 1883, 230-1.
104 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
period were, therefore, frequently far from valuable, and
often lacking in scholarly significance.
The club, however, recognized by 1826 the deficiencies of
its original plan; for it was resolved at the anniversary -
dinner in that year that a work of real literary magnitude
should be printed at the joint expense of the members of
the club.2 It was decided in the following year that the
manuscript of Havelock the Dane, which had been recently
unearthed in the Bodleian by Frederic Madden, should
be edited by him for the club. This was the first occasion
on which the club resorted to outside aid in the prepara-
tion of its publications. Madden’s remuneration for the
work was to be one hundred pounds, and the copies were
to be two for each member, instead of being confined, as
the gift books had been, to the actual number of members.**
The Havelock was by far the most noteworthy Roxburghe
book that had yet been produced; and the success of this
trial was followed up by the club in the subsequent em-
ployment of some of the most gifted scholars of their day
to oversee important publications. Among these later
editors were Madden again, Joseph Stephenson, Sir Henry
Ellis, Collier, Thomas Wright, Furnivall, Aldis Wright,
Gollanez, and Bond.
The selection of Madden, an outsider, to edit a Rox-
burghe book, seemed to be a thorn in the side of Hasle-
wood, who had hitherto done a substantial amount of edi-
torial work upon the publications of the club members; it
may be that he even thought that he detected an injury in
the failure of the club to choose him for the important
position. His chronicle of the Roxburghe doings records
his opinion of the event: ‘‘A MS. not discovered by a
Member of the Club, was selected and an excerpt obtained,
18 Roxburghe Revels, 47-8.
14 Tbid., 51.
NINETEENTH CENTURY BOOK CLUBS 105
not furnished by the industry, or under the inspection of
any one Member; nor edited by a Member—but in fact
after much pro and con, it was made a complete hireling
‘concern.’’** Whether Haslewood was moved to these ob-
servations by pique at his position, or by real disappoint-
ment at what he regarded as a reflection upon the literary
taste and scholarship of the members as a body, may be left
to conjecture. The writer of the Athenaeum attack,7®
however, attributes Haslewood’s feeling to pure jealousy:
‘From his non-appointment, proceeded his disappoint-
ment. He gave vent to his vexation in the paragraphs we
have cited, and he, moreover, stirred up a man, a little abler
than himself (where could he find an inferior?), to put
togéther some hasty ‘remarks’ upon Sir F. Madden’s Glos-
sary to Havelock the Dane, which remarks, in some respects,
seemed a happy imitation of Haslewood.’’”7 The attack
referred to was S. W. Singer’s Remarks on the Glossary
to the ancient metrical Romance of Havelock the Dane, in
a Letter to Francis Douce, to which Madden himself replied
in the following year with a vigorous and thoroughly
convincing defence.1®
The election, in 1823, of Sir Walter Scott, who repre-
sented the ‘‘author of Waverley,’’ may be regarded as
anything but a condescension on the part of the club.
15 Roxburghe Revels, 50.
16 Ante, 101.
17 Roxburghe Revels, 52.
18 Hxamination of the ‘*‘Remarks on the Glossary to the ancient
Metrical Romance of Havelock the Dane, in a Letter to Francis Douce,
by S. W. Singer,’’ London, 1829. Accompanying the copy of
Singer’s Remarks which was presented to Thomas Grenville, and
which is bound in with the Grenville copy of Madden’s Havelock
in the British Museum, is a letter from Singer to Grenville stating
that he had prepared a rejoinder for Madden’s Examination of the
Remarks, but had withheld its publication to avoid a literary con-
troversy, and also because of ‘‘ Mr. Madden’s then afflicted state. ’’
106 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
The ‘‘Wizard of the North’’ could scarcely gain by
association with a body which vaunted what was generally
regarded as an unnecessary and undesirable exclusiveness.
But what the club had to gain by the possession of so
popular a writer, so keen an antiquary, and so gifted a
scholar, was a very measurable something. Sir Walter
graciously accepted the election, although he attended
only one of the club dinners, in 1828, when he presented
his book, Proceedings in the Court-Martial held upon John,
Master of Sinclair, for the Murder of Ensign Schaw and
Captain Schaw, 17th October, 1708. Dibdin, the nature of
whose literary and historical taste could scarcely enable
him to discern interest in this kind of document, classes
Sir Walter’s gift as ‘‘among the least interesting and valu-
able in our garland.’’® The book was, in fact, a rather
striking departure from the traditional substance of the
club’s publications, although it anticipated the character
of many of the works issued by the Bannatyne, the Mait-
land, and the other early Scotch publishing societies.
After the brief storms of external criticism and internal
jealousy which the Roxburghe Club seemed to weather
serenely, the club became much less conspicuous than dur-
ing its first twenty years, both because it had obviously
demonstrated the general utility of its policies, and be-
cause four or five other bibliophile clubs had come to share
its glory. Despite all that can be said in eriticism of the
privacy which makes its literary work decidedly less use-
ful than it might be, it is really pleasant that to-day the first
of the book clubs should without relinquishing its tradi-
tions continue a benign existence into a period when pub-
lishing societies represent possibly a more serious and
efficient scholarship, but generally a less purely amateur
spirit. The Roxburghe has never descended from its orig-
19 Reminiscences of a Literary Life, I, 401-2.
NINETEENTH CENTURY BOOK CLUBS 107
inal exclusiveness—indeed, from the social standpoint, its
membership list is probably more imposing to-day than it
was a century ago. Social fastidiousness, however, it must
be said, is not the sum of its existence; eminent names both
in scholarship and public life appear upon its roster—so
the election of a commoner is probably more than ever an
enviable honor. The publishing policy of the club has been
anything but static during its later years; passing over the
trifling early issues, most of which have been printed else-
where in more recent and emphatically improved editions,
the genuine merits of the modern publications have made
them not only the desiderata of book collectors, but indis-
pensable material for scholars. Such are Stiirzinger’s
three volumes of Guillaume de Deguileville, Gollanez’s edi-
tion of The Parlement of the Thre Ages, Bercher’s The
Nobility of Women, edited by Warwick Bond, and Randle
Holme’s Academy of Armory. The Roxburghe Club has
in its later period taken example from the early Scotch
printing clubs by publishing historical material of decided
value, but of such a character as to preclude the possibility
of successful publication for the open market. In this class
of thoroughly useful publications are the Copley and
Gawdy letters, Herd’s Historia Quatuor Regum Angliae,
the Ailesbury Memoirs, chartularies, local records, and
college accounts. Considering its importance, the fecun-
dity of the club is to-day not remarkable; but there can be
no question as to the satisfactory quality of its recent pub-
lications. In all, the books of the Roxburghe Club now
comprise over one hundred and fifty volumes.
When Scott wrote to Dibdin in 1823 his acceptance
of the election to the Roxburghe Club, he concluded
with a bit of news which it must have rejoiced the
heart of the gossipy cleric to repeat to his cronies:
**It will be not uninteresting to you to know, that a
fraternity is about to be established here something on
108 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
the plan of the Roxburghe Club; but having Scottish
antiquities chiefly in view, it is to be called the Banna-
tyne Club, from the celebrated antiquary, George Banna-
tyne, who compiled by far the greatest record of old
Scottish poetry. The first meeting is to be held on Thurs-
day, when the health of the Roxburghe Club will be
drunk.’’° A Scottish printing club had been first talked
over by Sir Walter Scott, Robert Pitcairn, and David
Laing.** In their respect for Scott’s attainments, his
friends wished to name the club in honor of him, Maidment
and Constable favoring the name of ‘‘ Abbotsford Club,”’
which Scott ‘‘pointedly declined’’ to allow. It was firmly
in the minds of all the original projectors that the club
should be modeled upon the Roxburghe, but that its object
should be, as Sir Walter put it, ‘‘different, and I humbly
think more useful.’’*? Scott intended that the club should
accomplish something of real importance; he wrote in his
journal in 1827, ‘‘I am in great hopes that the Bannatyne
Club, by the assistance of Thomson’s wisdom, industry, and
accuracy, will be something far superior to the Dilettanti
model on which it started’’;?3 and in his review of Pit-
eairn’s Criminal Trials,?* he enlarges upon the striking
differences between the purposes of the Roxburghe Club
and the Bannatyne. The Bannatyne, in the first place, led
a quasi-public existence; it had little of the family secrecy
about its concerns which had always characterized its pred-
20 John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott,
5 v., 1902, IV, 97-8.
21 For a detailed account of the events and correspondence preced-
ing the foundation of the Bannatyne Club, see [James Maidment’s]
Notices relative to the Bannatyne Club, Edinburgh, 1836; v—xiv.
22 Ibid., ix.
23 The Journal of Sir Walter Scott [edited by David Douglas], 2 v.,
1890; I, 350.
24 Quarterly Review, XLIV, 438-75, 1831. The introductory por-
tion of this article is a very winning defence of the book club idea.
NINETEENTH CENTURY BOOK CLUBS 109
ecessor. It began with a membership of thirty-one—the
number of the Roxburghe—but applications for member-
ship were so numerous that it was resolved to sacrifice the
dilettante character of the club in the interests of the
portion of the public which was disposed to support pro-
ductive scholarship to the extent of five guineas a year,
and the number was accordingly increased to one hundred.?®
Not being satisfied with having extended its membership
to such a point that it was practically freed from the re-
proach of unuseful exclusiveness, the club decided that its
publications which possessed an interest so general as to
make a strictly limited issue an object merely of public
envy should be printed in excess of the number actually
required for the members, and put out for public sale. It
is worth noting upon this point that the widespread
clamor that publications of this description should not be
withheld from a public anxious and ready to buy them,
failed absolutely to justify itself, since the fact is recorded
by the permanent secretary of the Bannatyne Club, that
the books which were offered by the club for public sale—
books of large value particularly to the Scottish anti-
quaries—‘‘always proved a complete failure.’’** Another
fact which dignified the methods of the Bannatyne Club
was that lists of desiderata were constantly before the
members of the club, and it was from such lists, which gave
free opportunity for discussion as to the relative value of
publications in prospect, that its works were in the majority
of cases actually taken.*7 Further evidence of the wise
and unhindered seriousness of the club’s purposes is found
25 Bannatyne Club; Testimonial to the secretary, presented 27th
February 1861 (appendix to Adversaria, Notices illustrative of some
of the earlier Works printed for the Bannatyne Club, 1867), 6.
26 Tbid., 6.
27 See the three Albums of the Bannatyne Club, 1825, [1831], and
1854.
110 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
in its exchanges of valuable historical, antiquarian, and
literary publications, and their occasional collaboration in
such publications, with the Maitland Club, the Irish Archae-
ological and Celtic Society, the Wodrow Society, and the
Spottiswoode Society.*®
The first president of the Bannatyne Club was, of course,
Sir Walter Scott. He was succeeded at his death by
Thomas Thomson, who had formerly served as vice-presi-
dent, and who was one of the club’s most capable and
energetic members. Of the one hundred and thirty odd
publications of the club (excluding the garlands, cata-
logues, and albums) which are recorded by Bohn, thirteen
were edited as a whole or in part by Thomson.?® Indeed,
the influence of his activity and personality upon the
fortunes of the club seems to have been so great that after
his death, in 1852, there was apparently some suggestion
of permanently suspending its activities.2° The club, how-
ever, was destined to survive but little longer. Interest in
the Scottish book-clubs at least was by this time on the
wane, and the Bannatyne was forced in 1851 to the rather
humiliating expedient of inviting ten public libraries to
subseribe to its publications as members, in order to sus-
tain its former number. But even this plan proved. inade-
quate as the older generation died away; and from 1856,
when subscriptions to the club ceased, the body was very
evidently moribund.**
The final general meeting of the club was held in 1861,
when the members gave directions for the closing of its
affairs. On this occasion a handsome testimonial was
28 See Henry G. Bohn’s list of the publications of the Bannatyne
and Maitland Clubs in his Appendix to Lowndes’s Bibliographer’s
Manual, VI, 8-26, 1864.
29 Cosmo Innes, Memoir of Thomas Thomson, 1854, 251.
30 Ibid., 207, 242.
31 Bannatyne Club, Adversaria, [app.], 7.
NINETEENTH CENTURY BOOK CLUBS Vili
presented to David Laing, who had held the office of
secretary to the club since its organization. It was at
Scott’s personal instance that Laing had accepted this un-
remunerative responsibility,®? which, it was soon foreseen,
could be competently administered only if it were made
permanent. lLaing’s protracted activity in the club ex-
ceeded even Thomson’s in its tangible results: for twenty-
six of the club’s imprints exclusive of the ‘‘albums’’ and
‘‘oarlands,’’ he was responsible wholly or in part,** and
his secretarial duties undoubtedly gave him responsibilities
in the preparation of much of the club’s work which were
not specifically acknowledged. His editorial work included
what from the standpoint of the club must have been re-
garded as its most important productions, the works of
and relating to George Bannatyne. His association with
the Bannatyne Club was only a single instance of his influ-
ential connection with Scottish literary scholarship through-
out the greater part of the nineteenth century. He oceu-
pied in the publishing traditions of his day, in fact, a
position equalled later only by Halliwell and Furnivall.
Laing was also a member of the Maitland Club—but re-
signed after two years**—and later of the Abbotsford Club.
The printing societies for which he labored included the
Wodrow, of which he was a founder, the Society of Anti-
quaries of Scotland, of which he was for some years presi-
dent, the Shakespeare Society, and the Spalding Club; he
also edited three volumes for the Hunterian Club, although
he was not one of its members. The literary services which
Laing rendered to his country are still regarded by Scots-
men with real sentiment. His editions of Dunbar, Henry-
son, and Lyndesay, for example, beautifully made, as well
32 Tbid., 5.
33 See the valuable bibliography of Laing in Thomas George
Stevenson’s Notices of David Laing, 1878, 43-7.
34 Catalogue of the Works printed for the Maitland Club, 1836, 35.
112 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
as effectively edited, are fondly sought for by Scotch
collectors, even though their textual value has been con-
siderably diminished by the appearance of the later edi-
tions of the Early English Text and the Scottish Text
Societies.
The other prominent scholars who worked upon the pub-
lications of the Bannatyne Club included Cosmo Innes,
John Hill Burton, Patrick Chalmers, and David Irving,
who edited a great amount of local historical and record
material, and also Sir Frederick Madden and Joseph
Stevenson, more widely known outside of their connection
with the Bannatyne. To specify the most notable titles
among the club publications would be quite superfluous,
but it may not be without profit to recall some of the most
valuable in the literary field. These were, in addition to
the Bannatyne memorials and works, Alexander Hume’s
poems, the Buik of Alexander, Buchanan’s De Scriptoribus
Scotis, the collection of Gawaine romances edited by
Madden, Gavin Douglas’s Aeneid and Palice of Honour,
poems by Henryson, and a quantity of miscellaneous mate-
rial of lesser literary value.
The Bannatyne Club may be said to have been, all in all,
the soundest, the most useful, and the most democratic of
all the book clubs. The genuine value of what it produced,
contrasted, for example, with the merely curious interest of
many of the early Roxburghe publications, is marked by
Dibdin with what must have been a touch of humiliation:
‘*Both the Bannatyne and Maitland Clubs must be allowed
to have outstripped our own, not less in the rapid succes-
sion, than in the instructive complexion, of their publi-
cations.’ ’**
The Maitland Club, the object of which was ‘‘to print
works illustrative of the antiquities, history, and litera-
35 Reminiscences of a literary Life, I, 476.
NINETEENTH CENTURY BOOK CLUBS 113
ture of Scotland,’’?* was founded in 1828. Its personnel
included many of the members of the Bannatyne—Scott,
Laing, Pitcairn, Thomson, and Tytler among them—and
its aims corresponded closely with those of the earlier club,
although as a Glasgow organization, the Maitland Club in-
clined a little more towards localism than did its pred-
ecessor. The members of the Maitland were at first
seventy in number, and later one hundred; but in spite of
the limitation of its membership, the body was, like the
Bannatyne, sufficiently alive to its public position to place
its issues in general sale when they were ‘‘of such impor-
tanee as to render it expedient to extend their circulation
beyond the members.’’*? The most useful textual publica-
tions of this club were the poems of Richard Maitland of
Lethington, the patron saint of the club, Henryson’s fables,
Drummond of Hawthornden’s poems, the romances of
Beves of Hamtoun, Lancelot du Lak, and Clariodorus, and
the works of Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty. Many of
the publications of the Maitland were issued jointly with
the Bannatyne Club, and the organization had less frequent
associations of the same kind with the Abbotsford and the
Spalding Clubs. The Maitland Club closed its publications
in 1859, with the issue of its seventy-fifth volume.*®
The Abbotsford Club, founded in 1834 by W. B. D. D.
Turnbull in memory of Sir Walter Scott,°® included like-
wise many of the most active members of both the Banna-
tyne and Maitland Clubs. The purposes of this club were
substantially those of the two other Scottish book clubs,
36 Catalogue of the Works printed for the Maitland Club, 3.
87 Tbid., 6.
88 Henry G. Bohn, Appendix relating to the Books of literary and
scientific Societies; in Lowndes’s Bibliographer’s Manual, VI, 1864,
20-26. Henry B. Wheatley, How to form a Library, 2nd ed., 1886,
187.
89 Henry B. Wheatley, op. cit., 187.
9
114 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
although the club was formed ostensibly for the purpose of
publishing ‘‘all materials which can throw light on the
ancient history or literature of any country, anywhere
described or discussed by the Author of Waverley.’’*° The
publications of the Abbotsford Club did, in fact, possess
much of the tone and color of the literary preferences of
the Author of Waverley. Fourteen of its thirty-one
volumes were reprints of literary material, including three
volumes of mystery and morality plays, and eight medieval
romances.*t This is a higher proportion of literary publi-
cations than is found in any of the contemporary book clubs
save the Roxburghe. The last volume issued by the Mait-
land Club was likewise the last one issued by the Abbots-
ford, although the organization apparently continued an
inactive existence until 1866.*
The form of organization and the aims of the Rox-
burghe, Bannatyne, Maitland, and Abbotsford Clubs were
closely similar. The last three took example from the Rox-
burghe even to the detail of the external form of their
publications—a luxurious quarto in the traditional ‘‘ Rox-
burghe’’ binding; and although the Scottish clubs were
considerably larger, and for that reason, considerably less
exclusive, than the Roxburghe, the fact remains that the
aims of all of these clubs were in no respect popular. The
Spalding Club,** the Spenser Society,** and the Hunterian
Club*® had all of them some of the distinguishing marks
of the book clubs, as well as of the typical printing
societies of a popular stamp—as for example, publications
40 John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott,
IV, 100.
41 Henry G. Bohn, op. cit., 36-9.
42 Henry B. Wheatley, op. cit., 188.
43 Post., 126.
44 Post., 164-6.
45 Post., 169-71.
NINETEENTH CENTURY BOOK CLUBS 115
of a more expensive kind than the plain octavo of the pub-
lishing societies, and a limitation upon the number of
members, in no case, however, less than two hundred. But
the traditional form of the Roxburghe Club and its imi-
tators was not followed by the few later bibliophile clubs;
and with the demise of the three Scotch book clubs shortly
after the middle of the century, the Roxburghe was left
alone in the field which it had opened.
The social incentives of the bibliophile were satisfied at
intervals, however, by the formation of publishing clubs
of similarly defined, but generally more diffuse purposes
than those of the Roxburghe. Probably the most important
of these was the Philobiblon Society, which was apparently
founded chiefly through the efforts of Richard Monckton
Milnes, and under the patronage of the Prince Consort, in
1853.*° The number of members of the Philobiblon Society
was limited, as in the Roxburghe Club, to forty.*7 The
purpose of the society was to publish annually a volume of
historical, biographical, bibliographical, and literary mis-
cellanies; and as the roll of the society included a number
of distinguished foreigners, it was not considered necessary
that the papers should be published in English. It was the
boast of the society that ‘‘not a single copy’’ of its pub-
heations was placed upon sale.*® The Miscellanies were
exquisite octavos upon hand-made paper. The articles in
these ten volumes of mélanges were separately paged
throughout, by reason of the fact that the arrangement of
the annual volumes was designed to be only temporary, and
was ultimately to be replaced by a subject classification.*®
Needless to say, this method of classification was never
carried out.
46 Octave Delepierre, Analyse des Travaux de Société des Philo-
biblon de Londres, 1862, 1; Henry G. Bohn, op. cit., 82.
47 Octave Delepierre, op. cit., 2.
48 Ibid., 2.
49 Tbid., 4.
116 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
The contents of the volumes were largely inedited frag-
ments, letters, notices, and bibliographical comments. The
contributions of literary value were in rather a marked
minority, but included some useful items, such as unpub-
lished letters by Sterne and Dr. Johnson, inedited poems
by John Donne and Samuel Daniel (and these latter, by the
way, were not by Daniel, but by Ben Jonson), a variant
version of Keats’s Hyperion, eight letters between James
Thomson and David Mallet, Burke’s Table Talk, and mis-
cellaneous notes relative to Johnson, Walpole, and Chester-
field. Under the name of this society there were also issued
by contributors nine extra volumes, including Lord Herbert
of Cherbury’s Expedition to the Isle of Khe, Henry G.
Bohn’s Biography and Bibliography of Shakespeare (only
the biographical section of which was new), and two
volumes contributed by Henry Huth: Ancient Ballads and
Broadsides, and Inedited Poetical Miscellames.*°
The book club as an institution is now much less impor-
tant from every standpoint than it was a half century ago.
The history of the Scottish clubs has apparently shown that
when the animating club spirit of exclusiveness is strongly
affected by considerations of public utility, the club as a
club ceases to exist. In addition, it is probably true that
the higher practical value of the output of the larger pub-
lishing societies has demonstrated the relative inferiority of
the book club for any other than social purposes. For these
reasons at least, the book clubs—always except the Rox-
burghe—have gradually disappeared, until all that passes
under the name to-day are a few private bibliophile clubs
which do not pretend to any public functions—for example,
50 Delepierre’s bibliography of the Philobiblon Society, which was
issued in 1862, is of course incomplete. A complete bibliography of
the society may be found in Bernard Quaritch’s Account of the great
Learned Societies and Associations and of the chief Printing Clubs of
Great Britain and Ireland, 1886; 438-8.
NINETEENTH CENTURY BOOK CLUBS Lu7
the Sette of Odde Volumes—and a number of clubs of re-
stricted membership, such as the Malone Society®? and the
Edinburgh Bibliographical Society ;°* these are neverthe-
less sufficiently large, and their publications of sufficiently
wide circulation, to make it advisable for us to class them as
publishing societies rather than book clubs.
Latterly the book elub idea has acquired many commer-
cial features, and has in some eases, probably more partic-
ularly in America, served purely commercial ends. It
would be a difficult matter to say just where a book club
ceases to be a book club, and becomes a promoter’s venture,
but there can be little question that the imprint of many
of our modern clubs is nothing more nor less than a pub-
lisher’s trade-mark; and it is obvious that in many cases
of this kind it is generally unnecessary to take very seri-
ously the scholarly quality of the work so produced.
Of much more importance in the aggregate than the pub-
lications of the book clubs were the publications of the print-
ing societies, which began to spring up rapidly between
1830 and 1850, while the clubs were at the pinnacle of
their vogue. There was in general no social aspect to these
societies, since their existence was something in the nature
of an actual protest against the undemocratic attitude of
“the printing clubs. Their meetings were ordinarily of a
purely fiscal nature, for the greater number did not include
in their programs any provision even for scholarly com-
munications between members, one of the most familiar
functions of earlier learned societies; hence most of these
early publishing societies had no ‘‘transactions’’ to meas-
ure and record the reaction of their publications upon the
scholarly temper. In fact, in most of these bodies the pro-
ceedings of the society were understood to be taken up so
exclusively with the balancing of the accounts of income
51 Post., 197-8.
52 Post., 134-5.
118 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
and expenditure for publishing, that all the actual business
of the society was conducted by a council or by the execu-
tive officers. It is of course quite apparent that such insti-
tutions have been called learned societies largely by virtue
of what the word society does not imply, for in effect
they were nothing more than simple publishing projects, in
which the members—who might as well have been called
subscribers—secured for a small sum annually a volume or
two which came within the scope of the society’s declared
objects, but in the selection or preparation of which they
had very little responsibility or choice.
This fact does not, of course, diminish the value of what
was effected by these agencies. It might be said, indeed, that
the conduct of these societies upon such lines was almost
inevitable, since without question the majority of their
members, scattered as they were in most cases not merely
throughout England but throughout continents, could not
have interested themselves in the routine business of their
organizations. The concentration of the fiscal control and
scholarly policies of the societies in the hands of a small
minority of the membership, therefore, while it provided
opportunities for exploitation and downright abuse of per-
sonal privileges, nevertheless placed the working machinery
of such organizations in hands that were in nearly all cases
capable of efficient and honorable administration. So the
remark so often passed in criticism of these bodies, both
then and now, that they are frequently ‘‘one man’’ organi-
zations, means, in the last analysis, that the vigor and
industry of a very few well-endowed scholars may produce
direction and results out of an ill-defined purpose. It may be
said, in fact, that throughout the history of all these bodies,
the public have been with scarce an exception substantial
gainers, and the managers and editors have been satisfied
with a modicum of distinction and a minimum of remunera-
tion in return for much hard labor and self-sacrifice.
NINETEENTH CENTURY BOOK CLUBS 119
The purposes of these printing societies, then, were
frankly utilitarian. They endeavored to issue intrinsically
important works in sufficient numbers to make the expense
of publication relatively small; and the name and plan of
a society organization assured an immediate sale for the
bulk of their issues. Their primary consideration—the
cutting down of the expense of publication to a minimum—
necessitated a departure from the publishing policy of the
old book clubs. For this reason the recherché volumes of
the Roxburghe and the Bannatyne were replaced by the
substantial and sometimes rather homely books that are
familiar in the bindings of the Surtees, the Camden, and
the Early English Text Societies. The gain in utility was
naturally at the cost of sentiment, except in such instances
as the English Historical Society and the Hunterian Club,
which endeavored to restore some of the fastidious bookish-
ness of the earlier clubs.
Before taking up in detail the question of the work of
these general publishing societies in furthering literary cul-
ture, we must return to an organization with which we are
already more or less familiar, and the chief claim of which
upon our attention so far has lain in its complete failure to
explore a field in which its publishing activities in the nine-
teenth century were to have a very substantial influence.
As early as 1811 John Josias Conybeare communicated to
the Society of Antiquaries a series of papers relating to
early English literature.°* The papers included notices of
the Exeter Book and observations upon Anglo-Saxon
metrics; and they were followed by valuable communica-
tions of a kindred nature by Conybeare and others,** until
apparently the society as a body was awakened to the
53 These papers were published in Archaeologia, XVII, 173-5,
180-8, 189-92, 193-7, 257-66, 267-74, 1814.
54 Archaeologia, XVIII, 21-8, XIX, 314-34, XXI, 43-78, 88-91,
XXII, 350-398, 1815-29.
120 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
importance of the study of old English literature as some-
thing more than a mere adjunct to archaeological research.
Conybeare’s contributions to Archacologia, with a large
and valuable addition of illustrative material, were edited
and published by his brother, William Daniel Conybeare,
in 1826, but apparently not under the auspices of the
Society of Antiquaries.
Conybeare’s communications to the society had consti-
tuted one of the most powerful stimuli to a revival of inter-
est among his countrymen in old English letters, which was
contemporary with, and largely influenced by, the rehabili-
tation of Norse studies by Thorkelin and Grundtvig, and
the investigations of the two Grimms in Germanic phi-
lology.“> The most efficient leaders in the Anglo-Saxon
revival in England were Bosworth, Kemble, and Thorpe;
and it was at Thorpe’s instance that the Society of Anti-
quaries in 1831 determined to take up the burden of pub-
lishing the remains of old English literature. It is probable
that the arguments of Thorpe were powerfully seconded
by Grundtvig’s circulation of a proposal to begin a series
of publications to include the valuable remains of Anglo-
Saxon literature, a project which seems to have struck the
English literary students of the day as something in the
nature of a scholarly challenge.®® Thorpe and his friends
accordingly planned to redeem English scholarship from
its neglect of opportunity, which was made all the more
conspicuous by contrast with the industry of foreign
scholars in old English studies, by endeavoring in 1831 to
found a society for the publication of unprinted Anglo-
Saxon works;°? but since many of the supporters of the
55See Wilcker’s Grundriss zur Geschichte der angelsdchsischen
Literatur, 1885, 45-8.
56 John Petheram, An historical Sketch of the Progress and present
State of Anglo-Saxon Literature in England, 1840, 141-2.
57 John M. Kemble, Letter to Francisque Michel; in Michel’s
Bibliotheque Anglo-Saxonne, 1837, pp. 1-63 (21).
NINETEENTH CENTURY BOOK CLUBS 121
proposed society were fellows of the Society of Antiquaries,
their proposals were submitted to the Council of the Anti-
quaries. It was decided soon afterward that the Anti-
quaries should undertake the projected publications, plac-
ing the issues on public sale, but permitting members of
the society to receive them at half price. A committee of
the society consisting of twenty-two members was therefore
appointed to supervise the issue of these publications. On
this committee were a number of scholars thoroughly
equipped for the work, including Henry Ellis, Francis
Palgrave, and Frederic Madden, all as yet undistinguished
by knightly dignities. A concession to the undeveloped state
of old English scholarship is seen in the decision of the
society to print the works in the original tongue and char-
acter, but with an accompanying translation into modern
English.*® The result of these plans of the society was
the publication of the Caedmonic poems by Thorpe in 18382,
of the Codex Exoniensis in 1842, and of Sir Frederic Mad-
den’s edition of Layamon’s Brut in three volumes in 1847,
With the completion of this series, an emphatically neces-
sary and very timely contribution to the national literary
resources, the Society of Antiquaries once more withdrew
from its active patronage of letters, but with the distinction
of having been the first learned society to lend its support
to early English textual scholarship.
To return, then, to the history of the general publishing
societies: the Surtees Society, which was the pioneer among
them, was established by the Rev. James Raine in 1834.
The Society was founded in memory of the recently de-
ceased Robert Surtees of Mainsforth, the distinguished, if
possibly over-canny antiquary, and its specific purposes
were announced to be ‘‘the publishing such inedited manu-
58 Prospectus of a Series of Publications of Angla-Saxon and early
English literary Remains, under the Superintendence of a Committee
of the Society of Antiquaries of London [1831 or —2], iii-iv.
122 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
scripts as illustrate the intellectual, the moral, the religious,
and the social condition of those parts of England and
Scotland, included, on the east, between the Humber and
the Frith of Forth, and on the west between the Mersey
and the Clyde, from the earliest period to the time of the
Restoration.’*® The society numbered in the first year of
its existence about one hundred and thirty members, and
increased in numbers rapidly. A limit of three hundred
and fifty was placed upon the membership ; but the publica-
tions of the society, which were printed considerably in
excess of this number, were also for sale to outsiders.®
The earlier publications were edited for the greater part
by Raine, who became secretary of the society upon its
actual foundation, and whose services in this capacity were
quite as indispensable as were Laing’s to the Bannatyne
Club. Considering the limitations placed upon the scope
of the society’s work by the definition of its purposes, it
has produced a series of publications really remarkable for
their general importance. Many societies of similarly
local interests have produced works of much more restricted
value; but the Surtees Society, while choosing its material
from its elected neighborhood,—and over half of its pub-
lications are connected with the town and cathedral of
Durham—has published materials of the broadest historical
and literary value. What it has contributed to the study
of English literature generally is typical of the importance
of its publications in other fields; the principal items in
this class are the Towneley Mysteries, the Durham Anglo-
Saxon ritual, Jordan Fantosme’s chronicle, two volumes of
Anglo-Saxon and early English Fsalters, Latin Hymns of
the Anglo-Saxon Church, the Lindisfarne and Rushworth
Gospels, in four volumes, and a metrical Life of St. Cuth-
bert.
59 Taylor, George, A memoir of Robert Surtees, New edition, with
additions, by James Raine, n. d. [1852]; 195-6.
60 Henry G. Bohn, op. cit., 33.
NINETEENTH CENTURY BOOK CLUBS 123
The Camden Society was a still further concession to
the popular demands upon English scholarship. This
society, named in honor of William Camden, was founded
in 1838, four years after the formation of the Surtees
Society, to the example of which the later society admit-
tedly owed its existence. The Camden Society was, how-
ever, by reason of the fact that its interests were not
restricted to a locality, and that its annual fee of only a
guinea and its practically unrestricted membership made
it emphatically a popular society, by all means the most
widely important of the general publishing societies of
this period. It was, in fact, the wholly practical basis of
organization in the Camden Society which gave to Collier,
Crofton Croker, Dyce, and Thomas Wright, all of them
members of the Camden, their cue for the establishment of
similar bodies for the furtherance of scholarship specifically
in the literary field.** The objects of this society were ‘‘to
perpetuate, and render accessible, whatever is valuable, but
at present little known, amongst the materials for the civil,
ecclesiastical, or literary history of the United Kingdom.’’®
The society began publication on a large scale, but the five
hundred copies of its first book were quickly taken up, and
a reimpression was made in the same year. At the first
anniversary meeting, when the members already numbered
over a thousand, it was decided to limit the number of
members for the future to twelve hundred. The publica-
tions of the society were fixed therefore at twelve hundred
and fifty impressions until 1848, when the number was
again reduced to a thousand, and subsequently to six hun-
dred.®** The decrease of popular interest in the society was
61 For a sketch of the early history of the Camden Society see John
Gough Nichols’s Descriptive Catalogue of the Works of the Camden
Society, 1862, iii—viii.
62 Tbid., iv.
63 Ibid., iii.
64 [bid., iv.
124 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
apparently brought about partly at least by the formation
of the Parker, Percy, and Shakespeare Societies within two
years of its establishment, with the consequent attraction
to their ranks of members of the Camden to whom the
special interests represented in the newer societies appealed
more strongly than the miscellaneous interests of the
Camden.® But the membership in the Camden Society
showed no marked decrease until the close of the following
decade. A second effect of these later societies upon their
predecessor was that the announcements of their provinces
of interest served to limit considerably the field of the
Camden Society’s publications, as did also the opening of
the Rolls Series in 1848.
The accomplishments of the society in the realm of his-
torical scholarship, which has been altogether its most use-
ful field, especially in later years, included the publication
of some valuable chronicles, before the Master of the Rolls
preempted this domain, and monastic, political, and social
evidences of very great importance. Its literary publica-
tions opened with Bishop Bale’s Kynge Johan and Thomas
Wright’s collection of Political Songs; and even though
the literary societies soon appropriated this province, the
Camden Society’s contributions to literary study have since
been, at least for the time being, invaluable. The 1842
volume of Arthurian romances, the Promptorium Parvu-
lorum, the Thornton Romances, the Peterborough Chroni-
cle, the works of or attributed to Walter Map, the Ancren
Riwle, the Milton Papers, and a quantity of correspondence,
diaries, miscellaneous poems, and other material of the
greatest importance to students of literature, appeared
first in the publications of this society. It is needless to
say, however, that in most cases these early publications
have been superseded. What the Camden Society, there-
65 Ibid., iv-v.
NINETEENTH CENTURY BOOK CLUBS 125
fore, has accomplished directly in the interests of literary
scholarship gives it an undisputed place not merely as a
powerful example and influence for the later literary pub-
lishing societies, but as a literary agency of emphatically
great importance in itself.
The First Series of the Camden publications extended
from 1838 to 1872, and comprised one hundred and five
volumes. In this First Series appeared almost all the
works of literary significance that the society produced.
The Second Series of the publications, in sixty-two volumes,
which was closed in 1898, included the commonplace book
of John Milton, and the letter book of Gabriel Harvey. In
1897 the Camden Society was absorbed by the Royal His-
torical Society,®® and the publications of the Camden Soci-
ety were continued from that date as the Camden Series of
the Royal Historical Society. The result of the amalgama-
tion was-:of course to limit still further the scope of the
Camden publications, and the new Camden Series has there-
fore been restricted almost exclusively to historical material.
A single reprint of some literary connection has appeared
in the re-clothed Camden Series—The Travels and Life of
Sir Thomas Hoby.
The English Historical Society, founded in the same year
as the Camden, was something of a book club, and some-
thing of a general publishing society. Its membership was
limited to one hundred, and its list of members, being
limited, was properly embellished with many aristocratic
and bookish names. Many of the members were, however,
scholars of note, including Joseph Stevenson, Thomas
Duffus Hardy, Panizzi, and Kemble. To the members the
society issued handsome tall octavo volumes on hand made
paper; but issues of their publications on smaller paper
66 Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, New Series, XII,
232, 1898.
126 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
were sold to the public—though at a price.®’ The object of
the society was stated to be ‘‘to print an accurate, uniform,
and elegant edition of the most valuable English chronicles,
from the earliest period to the accession of Henry the
Highth.’’** It was intended, however, to include in the
publications material of collateral historical value, includ-
ing lives of saints and historical poems.®® The society has,
therefore, for the student of old literature, an obvious 1m-
portance, both in its direct and indirect aims. The literary
value, if not the historical value, of its publications, how-
ever, is diminished somewhat by a system of editing which
deliberately eliminated from the text irrelevant and bor-
rowed material.7° In the eighteen years of the society’s
existence it issued a valuable series of Latin-English his-
torical works, including Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica and
minor works, Gildas and Nennius, and the chronicles of
William of Malmesbury, Nicholas Trivet, and Florence of
Worcester. The most important of the society’s publica-
tions was Kemble’s Codex Diplomaticus Aevi Saxonici, in
six volumes, 1845-8.
The Spalding Club, established in Aberdeen in 1839, was
in reality not a book club, but a publishing society, if we
accept the established distinction between the social aims
and exclusive nature of the one, and the business-like
organization and missionary principles of the other. This
society was brought into existence by Joseph Robertson and
John Stuart,"* and its field was intended to comprise ‘‘the
literary, historical, genealogical, and topographical remains
67 Henry G. Bohn, op. cit., 131.
68 General introduction [to the publications of the society]; in
Venerabilis Bedae Historia Ecclesiastica, recensuit Josephus Steven-
son, 1838; i.
69 Tbid., xiii-xiv.
70 Ibid., iii—xi.
71 [John Stuart], Notices of the Spalding Club, 1871; 1.
NINETEENTH CENTURY BOOK CLUBS 127
of the north-eastern counties of Scotland.*? The numbers
of the club were at first limited to three hundred, but the
extent of the public participation in the project soon made
it advisable to extend the membership to five hundred. The
prominent members of the Spalding Club included, in
addition to Robertson and Stuart, Cosmo Innes, David
Laing, William Knight, Thomas Thomson, and Robert Pit-
cairn. Conditions made the secretary’s office in this society
—as was true, too, in the Bannatyne Club and the Mait-
land Club—one of supreme importance, and acknowledg-
ment of Stuart’s services to the society in this position took
the form of an elaborate memorial when the club was dis-
solved in 1871.%* Exceptional as was the quality of the
Spalding Club’s publications relating to the history and
antiquities of the northern shires, its sole contribution to
Anglo-Scottish literary study was Cosmo Innes’s edition of
Barbour’s Brus, issued in 1857. The Book of Deir, how-
ever, edited by Stuart, and published in 1869, was an
important, and for the society, an expensive, reprint of
Celtic material.
The Spalding Club was ‘‘re-constituted’’ as the New
Spalding Club in 1886. The only publication of the revived
club which may possess interest for the student of literature
are the two volumes of Musa Latina Aberdonensis, 1892-5.
The first of the ecclesiastical publishing societies was the
Parker Society, named in memory of Archbishop Parker.
It was established at Cambridge in 1840, and continued in
existence until 1853, publishing in this short period fifty-
five volumes of ecclesiastical and devotional literature. In
this amount of work there is, needless to say, much of the
highest value to the student of English prose. The society’s
publications included complete or partial works, or re-
mains, of Ridley, Grindal, Cranmer, Coverdale, Latimer,
72 Ibid., 2.
73 Ibid., 94-110.
128 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
Jewel, Tyndale, Bale, and Whitgift; and in addition a
large quantity of liturgical relics and a volume of Eliza-
bethan devotional poetry. The Parker Society had in its
day a membership phenomenally large, extending at one
time to more than seven thousand.’* As evidence of the
relative lack of interest in literary studies at this time, it
is useful to compare this number with the mere thousand of
the Shakespeare Society and the twelve hundred of the
Camden. ,
The Wodrow Society was instituted in 1841, largely
through Laing’s endeavors, for the publication of the early
writers of the Reformed Church of Scotland.”® Its prov-
ince is comparable, therefore, with that of the Parker
Society in England. It would be impossible to place the
bulk of its publications, however, upon the same plane of
intrinsic importance as those of the Parker Society, for
the simple reason that most of the Scottish ‘‘church
fathers’’ count for relatively little in literary history. The
society did publish, though, in 1846-7, two volumes of
Knox’s History of the Reformation in Scotland, edited by
Laing, which were to form the opening volumes for a com-
plete edition of Knox’s works. The society collapsed, how-
ever, in 1848; but Laing, sticking to his prospectus, carried
on the work of completing the promised edition, and issued
the sixth and last volume in 1864. This publication, un-
successful at first under the society’s auspices, and later in
the hands of the publishers who took over the third, fourth,
and fifth volumes, is a real monument to Laing’s scholarly
devotion.
The Spottiswoode Society issued between 1843 and 1851
six volumes of the writings of the Episcopal clergy in
74 A, Hume, The Learned Societies and Printing Clubs of the United
Kingdom, 1853; 268.
75 Thomas George Stevenson, Notices of David Laing, 1878, 23-5.
NINETEENTH CENTURY BOOK CLUBS 129
Scotland; none of these publications, however, requires
special comment.
The Chetham Society, like the Surtees Society, limited
its labors to a special district of England, ‘‘the Palatine
Counties of Lancaster and Chester’’; but, as with the
Surtees Society, its interests were by no means restricted
to unprofitable localism. The society was founded at Man-
chester in 1843, and included among its members from
the beginning scholars and antiquaries of national reputa-
tion. Among the most active members of the early council
were James Crossley and the Rev. Thomas Corser. The
membership was limited to three hundred and fifty (at
present there are almost one hundred institutions upon
the subscription list), and the annual subscription was
fixed at one pound; no significant change has been made in
the rules of the society since its foundation. In sixty-eight
years of existence the Chetham Society has issued one hun-
dred and fourteen volumes in its original series (1843-92),
and sixty-nine volumes in a new series. About thirty of
the society’s volumes supply more or less valuable mate-
rial for the literary student, consisting largely of local
poetry. The most noteworthy of these special works are
Henry Bradshaw’s Holy Life and History of Saynt Wer-
burghe, John Byrom’s poems, in four parts, edited by A.
W. Ward, and Byrom’s Private Journal and Literary
Remains, edited in the earlier series by Richard Parkinson.
A very substantial and interesting descriptive bibliography
of early poetry was the Collectanea Anglo-Poetica, a cata-
logue of Corser’s library in this field, begun by Corser in
1860 and completed by Crossley in 1883, in all eleven
numbers. ?
The Caxton Society was established in 1845 ‘‘for the
publication in a cheap and commodious form, of chronicles
and other documents hitherto unpublished, illustrative of
the history and miscellaneous literature of the British Isles
10
130 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
during the middle ages.’’*® The society had no stated sub-
scription, but the members placed themselves under obli-
gation to take one copy each of all the books printed by the
society; and all the income from the sales of the separate
volumes remaining after the payment of the expenses of
publication were to be regarded as the remuneration of
the editors. The original members were thirty-three in
number, and included Bosworth, the Rev. J. A. Giles, Pal-
grave, and Thomas Wright. The Caxton Society published
between 1844 and 1854 sixteen volumes, the first three of
which were issued not with the imprint of the society, but
under the serial title Scriptores Monastict. The first
volume to bear the society’s name was Silgrave’s Chronicle,
published in 1849. The lack of system in publication seems
in many other respects to imply that the editors of the
separate volumes carried the arrangements very much in
their own hands and that there was no really effective ad-
ministrative oversight for the work of the various editors;
the volumes were not numbered in the actual order of their
issue, and they were printed by different publishers with-
out any approach to uniformity in their make-up. The
great bulk of the society’s publications are in Latin, largely
letters, brief biographies, and, most importantly for our
purposes, chronicles. These last include Geoffrey of Mon-
mouth’s Historia Britonum, the Chronicon Angliae Petri-
burgense, and others of less importance. The society also
published two documents of more immediate literary inter-
est: Peter Heylin’s versified Memorial of Bishop Waynflete,
and Grosseteste’s Chasteau d’Amour, with an English
version.
The only remaining society of the first half of the nine-
teenth century whose publications have had a wide impor-
76 Information relative to the organization of the Caxton Society
is given in the announcements of the society in various volumes of
its publications.
NINETEENTH CENTURY BOOK CLUBS 131
tance in the study of English literature is the Hakluyt
Society, which was founded in 1846 with the object of
printing ‘‘rare and valuable voyages, travels, naval expedi-
tions, and other geographical records.’’7 The society
opened with an annual subscription of one guinea, but in-
creased this later to a guinea and a half. For this modest
amount the subscribers received down to the year 1898 a
First Series of one hundred volumes; and twenty-nine
volumes of the Second Series have been issued to the year
1912. The Hakluyt Society has published a series of travel
books which possess the greatest literary value, including
not only early works by Hawkins, Ralegh, Strachey,
Hakluyt, Dr. Giles Fletcher, Baffin, and others, but impor-
tant sixteenth and seventeenth century translations of
foreign books of travel. In addition to the regular series of
publications, the society has supported as an extra series
the Messrs. MacLehose’s reprints of the most important
early English travel books, including a complete Hakluyt
in twelve volumes, and a Purchas in twenty.
It is of course important to mention that many mono-
graphs on literary topics appeared throughout the second
quarter of the century in the publications of such bodies
as the Society of Antiquaries and the British Archaeolog-
ical Association. The most prominent of literary scholars
found these agencies of publication indispensable when
there were no special journals for literary scholarship.
Less distinguished scholars found in the periodical or occa-
- sional publications of local societies opportunity for more
or less meritorious articles on literary topics. The impor-
tance of these bodies for such purposes is not to be under-
estimated ; and it is even now growing. The skeptic on this
point would do well to look over a file of the publications of
the Birmingham and Midland Institute, the Powysland
77 [Announcement] The Hakluyt Society, 1912, ii.
132 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
Club, or the county archaeological and antiquarian societies
—for example, those of Cumberland, Devonshire, Norfolk,
Shropshire, and Somersetshire.
Since the middle of the nineteenth century there have
been comparatively few new societies formed, barring the
literary learned societies themselves, whose interests have
touched very closely those of literary students. In the
collapse of society activities between 1850 and 1870, only
the most useful and influential survived; and to these very
few have been added since, save in special fields. In addi-
tion, with the increase in the number of special societies in
later years there has been a distinct tendency to more
clearly defined specialization, so that if a text or an article
of literary import is included in the publications of an
historical or an archaeological society nowadays, it is
merely a coincidence. Such organizations, therefore, as
the Oxford Historical Society, the Royal Historical Society,
and the modern ecclesiastical societies, have by no means
the points of contact with literary study that the Surtees
Society, the British Archaeological Association, and the
Parker Society, for example, had in their earlier days. In
fact, those even of the general publishing societies which
have lived through their period of trial are, as we have
seen, to-day of very much less significance to the student of
literature than they were at an earlier date. Sufficient
illustration of this is found in the fact that the Surtees
Society has published no literary text since 1891; the
Camden series has since its adoption by the Royal His- °
torical Society been turned over entirely to historical mate-
rial; and A. W. Ward’s edition of Byrom’s poems has been
the only literary work published by the Chetham Society
since 1873. These facts explain at once the great increase
in the number of efficient and long-lived literary societies
that sprang up during the latter half of the nineteenth cen-
NINETEENTH CENTURY BOOK CLUBS 133
tury, and the extreme paucity of literary material among
the publications of special societies in other fields, and even
of the once receptive general publishing societies. What
has been accomplished, then, since 1850 or thereabouts, for
literary study by societies outside the field of literary pub-
lication may be dismissed very briefly, and without special
consideration whether the nature of their activities should
rank these bodies as book clubs or printing societies.
Of these later societies, the first both in point of pri-
ority of establishment and of the value of its output for
students of English literature is the Folk-Lore Society,
founded in 1878 chiefly through the efforts of W. J.
Thoms, a worker in the earlier Shakespeare Society, the
projector of Notes and Queries, and the inventor of the
term ‘‘folk-lore.’’ The society was organized for the ‘‘ pres-
ervation and publication of popular traditions, legendary
ballads, local proverbial sayings, superstitions, and old
customs.’’** The program of the body was large, but its
achievement has been quite equal to its declared purposes.
The success of its work was, in fact, assured from the begin-
ning by the quality of the scholarship which it represented :
among the first members of the council were Andrew Lang,
EK. B. Tylor, W. J. Thoms, Max Miiller, and Frederic
Ouvry; and the English scholars-who have contributed to
the publications of the organization have included, in
addition to these, Fleay, Havelock Ellis, York Powell,
Alfred Nutt, Joseph Jacobs, Laurence Gomme, Napier, and
Skeat. The Folk-Lore Record was the society’s first organ,
five volumes of which were issued from 1878 to 1882.
This was followed by the Folk-Lore Journal, of which seven
volumes appeared to 1889. In turn this was incorporated
with the Archaeological Review under the title Folk-Lore,
the present mouth-piece of the society. In these three
78 Folk-Lore Record, I, Preface, 1878.
134 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
periodicals is to be found much literary material, including
illumination of many crucial passages in the light of the
society ’s special researches, and much matter which, if not
strictly literary in itself, constitutes one of the most useful
adjuncts to literary study, such as charms, mumming, prov-
erbs, local rimes, place names, folk-tales, and a hundred
related subjects. Besides its periodical, the Folk-Lore
Society has published a number of separate treatises, in-
eluding Aubrey’s Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme,
from the manuscript, Alfred Nutt’s Studtes on the Legend
of the Holy Grail, and many volumes of local folk-lore,
including a series of County Folk-Lore which has com-
prised so far five volumes. From this brief record it is
apparent that the Folk-Lore Society has been, both in the
magnitude and the intrinsic worth of its work, of the
greatest importance in the literary field; indeed, it might
not be too much to say that it has been the most continu-
ously valuable of all the non-literary societies.
Two bibliographical societies have issued works of marked
utility in our province, the Edinburgh Bibliographical
Society, founded in 1880 as a private club devoted chiefly
to local interests,*® and the Bibliographical Society, founded
in London in 1892. For the Edinburgh Bibliographical
Society William Macmath issued a Bibliography of Scottish
popular Ballads in Manuscript, James Cameron a Bibliog-
raphy of Scottish theatrical Interature, R. A. S. Macfie a
Bibliography of Fletcher of Saltoun, and J. P. Edmonds
Elegies and other Tracts issued on the Death of Henry,
Prince of Wales, 1612. Under the auspices of the later
Bibliographical Society have appeared W. W. Greg’s List
of English Plays written before 1643 and printed before
1700, and his Inst of Masques, Pageants, &c, a supplement
79 Charles Sandford Terry, Catalogue of the Publications of
Scottish historical and kindred Clubs and Societies, 1780-1908, 1909;
66.
NINETEENTH CENTURY BOOK CLUBS 135
to the previous volume. The 7ransactions of this body con-
tain also many items of interest. Both of these societies
have issued a number of longer and shorter works on the
history of printing, the book trade, and kindred subjects
of much potential value to students of English literature.
A number of amateur and learned bodies of less general
importance have printed from time to time within recent
years texts and monographs of literary interest. Among
these may be mentioned the Royal Historical Society,
organized in 1868, the moving spirit of which was the Rev.
Charles Rogers. In accordance with its announced purpose
of pursuing some of the “‘less explored paths’’ of history,
it published in its first two volumes of Transactions the
Poems of Sir Robert Aytoun, and the Poetical Remains of
King James the First of Scotland. To the ninth and tenth
volumes of the Transactions the Rev. F. G. Fleay contrib-
uted two valuable papers, On the Actor Insts and On the
History of the Theatres in London, both covering the period
preceding the Commonwealth. In the third and fifth
volumes of the third series of Transactions C. H. Firth pub-
lished his Ballad History of the Reigns of the later Tudors,
and Ballad History of the Reign of James I. Rogers
established in London in the same year as the Royal His-
torical Society the Grampian Club ‘‘for the editing and
printing of works illustrative of Scottish literary history
and antiquities.’’? The publications of this club included
Boswelliana, the commonplace book of James Boswell, and
three genealogical works by Rogers, Genealogical Memoirs
of the Family of Sir Walter Scott, Genealogical Memoirs of
John Knox and of the Family of Knox, and the Book of
Robert Burns, three volumes of biography, family history,
and memoirs. The club has published nothing further
since 1891.
In 1877 two book clubs were established in Scotland, the
136 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
first the Scottish Literary Club, founded by Thomas G.
Stevenson,*? and the other The New Club, formed in
Paisley, which republished Jamieson’s Etymological Diction-
ary of the Scottish Language in four volumes from 1879 to
1882, with a supplement in 1887. It published also the
Buke of the Howlat and the Black Book of Paisley and
' other Manuscripts of the Scotichronicon.
As types of societies of casual significance for our pur-
poses, cursory mention of a few of the most generally known
may close a chapter which has already descended danger-
ously near to mere enumeration. The Aungervyle Club,
established in Edinburgh in 1881, was probably something
in the nature of a proprietary name. In its four series of
reprints, which appeared from 1881 to 1888, are included
a number of short and curious poetical fragments and mis-
cellaneous pieces of small intrinsic value. The Oxford
Historical Society should be mentioned for the fact that
although it has done little for essentially literary scholar-
ship, its editions of The Infe and Times of Anthony Wood
and of Hearne’s Remarks and Collections, together with
its contributions to correlated subjects, such as print-
ing, book collections, and the early history of the Univer-
sity, have provided very useful materials for the literary
investigator. The Scottish History Society has published
in its miscellanies a few monographs upon figures of at
most secondary literary importance, including James VI,
Maitland of Lethington, and Gilbert Burnet. The Viking
Club, founded in 1892 as the Orkney, Shetland, and
Northern Society, has printed thoroughly useful saga and
folk-lore material, and in 1912 published a translation of
Stjerna’s essays upon Beowulf. The Royal Philosophical
Society of Glasgow in 1902, one hundred years after the
date of its foundation, instituted a Historical and Philo-
81 Post., 169.
NINETEENTH CENTURY BOOK CLUBS 187
logical Section ; since then there have appeared in the T'rans-
actions of the society a number of papers by F. J. Amours,
George Neilson, and other Scottish specialists, on topics in
Middle English and Middle Scots literature.
These records, then, mechanical and formal as by their
nature they must be, serve to show what our modern
scholarship owes to a day when literary societies had no
separate existence, and to a tradition which regarded litera-
ture as the handmaid of many related studies. When the
literary societies themselves entered the field, the tendency
was for the societies of general aims, or of special aims in
other provinces of learning, to eschew literary studies, so
that the history of the influence of such societies upon
English scholarship is, as it has already been pointed out,
one of progressive decline in importance and interest.
CHAPTER VI
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES
The history of English societies for literary scholarship
divides itself into two definitely marked periods. The first
of these was contemporary with the effervescence of pub-
lishing society activities in the second quarter of the nine-
teenth century, apparently influenced by the success of
the small and exclusive book clubs. The second period
opened with Frederic J. Furnivall’s establishment of the
Early English Text Society in 1864, when a wholly new
scholarly tradition, derived in large part from Germany,
not only gave societies once more an excuse for existing, but
made them indispensable as an agency for the effective
realization of the rapidly expanding aims of contemporary
scholarship.
The Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom
was the only society of the nineteenth century whose posi-
tion as a chartered society under royal patronage admitted
it to the dignity shared by the Royal Society, the Society
of Antiquaries, and other learned establishments of their
rank. It was also the first important society organized
definitely for the purpose of literary study; although, as we
shall see, its aims as defined by its charter were rather mis-
cellaneous, and so broad in their scope that it might have
been foreseen that the society could not realize a number
of its stated objects. In addition, the circumstances of its
establishment made its activities, at least during its early
period, more pretentious than serious; and it was at first
burdened, as all such royal establishments must be to
some extent, by a number of aristocratic figureheads. The
first officers and council of the society were, in fact, men of
138
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 139
title and ecclesiastical dignitaries, with not a single scholar
of first rate literary attainments among them. Indeed, the
entire constituent membership of the society at that time
was distinguished by the almost total absence of names of
scholarly prominence. Finally, the extension of the soci-
ety’s activities to the whole domain of literature, both Eng-
lish and foreign, resulted in the distraction of its attention
from the revival of interest in Anglo-Saxon, which was at
the moment of the society’s foundation advancing rapidly
in England, and in the concentration of much of its effort
upon classical and oriental studies, especially Egyptology.
As a significant influence upon English literary scholar-
ship, therefore, the society which, from its name, should
have been one of its most active organized forces, was in
reality surpassed in activity and importance by a score of
unsubsidized and unpatronized volunteer societies. The
society remains to-day, in fact, less a really literary society
than a dilettante organization for every kind of polite
purpose.
This society was planned as early as 1820; the first gen-
eral meeting was held in 1823, and its charter was granted
in 1825.1. Its declared objects, which promised much to
English scholarship, were to promote the publication of
valuable manuscripts, and to encourage the search for such
materials, ‘‘to promote the publication of works of great
intrinsic value, but not of so popular a character as to
induce the risk of private expense,’’? ‘‘to read at its public
1 Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature of the United
Kingdom, v. I, pt. I, London, 1827; Advertisement.
2 One of the most interesting proposals to endow literary labor, and
possibly the first fully developed scheme of the sort, is to be found in
the plans of the Society for the Establishment of a Literary Fund,
which outlined its work in its Claims of Literature, London, 1802;
93-163. The society actually distributed upwards of sixteen hundred
pounds from the time of its establishment in 1790 to 1802. The
present income of the fund is about four thousand pounds.
140 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
meetings papers upon subjects of general literature,’’ ‘‘to
adjudge honorary rewards to persons who shall have ren-
dered any eminent service to literature, or produced any
work highly distinguished for learning or genius; provided
always, that such work contain nothing hostile to religion
or morality,’’ and ‘‘to elect, as honorary associates, persons
eminent for the pursuit of literature; and from these to
select Associates upon the Royal Foundation, or upon the
Foundation of the Society, as circumstances may admit.’”
The last of the society’s stated objects was provided for
by an appropriation from the Privy Purse of one thousand
guineas annually, to be divided between the ten ‘‘ Royal
Associates’? named by the society; and in emulation of the
monarch’s patronage of letters, the society itself elected ten
‘Honorary Associates,’? who were to receive the same
emolument.* The Royal Associates were to be ‘‘persons of
eminent learning, and authors of some distinguished work
of literature.’’ In addition, the society was empowered to
award annually two Royal Medals to the writers of remark-
able works. The appropriations for the Royal Associates
and the Royal Medals, however, were discontinued after
the death of George IV. In the period during which both
were granted, the Royal Associates had included Coleridge
and Malthus, and the Honorary Associates Crabbe and
Southey. Among the recipients of the medals were Mit-
ford, Dugald Stewart, Scott, Southey, Crabbe, Washington
Irving, and Hallam.®
The further activities of the Royal Society of Literature
have not placed English scholarship under a very great debt.
Its province has at one time or another included the whole
of classical and oriental antiquity, British archaeology,
political economy, numismatics, history, comparative reli-
3 Transactions, v. I, pt. I, vii—viii, 1-2.
4 Ibid., xiv.
5 Biographia Britannica Literaria, II, [Advertisement] iii-—iv.
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 141
gion, biblical criticism, comparative philology, and geog-
raphy. Its chief promise of special aid to English letters
was its effort to publish a complete Biographia Britannica
Literaria, which was undertaken under the editorship of
Thomas Wright in 1842, and the expenses of which were
defrayed from a bequest of five thousand pounds by the
Rev. George Richards. This work, however, was never
earried beyond the second volume, published in 1846, which
brought the undertaking only through the Anglo-Norman
period. In addition to this publication the society issued in
1876 a valuable autotype reproduction of the manuscript
Common-Place Book of John Milton, and in 1897 a fac-
simile of the Princess Elizabeth’s prose translation of
Margaret of Navarre’s Mirror of the Sinful Soul. Latterly
the society has given two series of popular lectures, to
commemorate the five hundredth anniversary of Chaucer’s
death, in 1900, and the tercentenary of Milton’s birth in
1908. Our final judgment of the society’s work, however,
must be that in both bulk and quality it suffers by compari-
son with that of private societies of more serious and con-
centrated aims.
The first society to limit its field to publications illustra-
tive of the history of English literature was the Perey
Society. This society was founded in 1840, as were the
Shakespeare and the Parker Societies, and curiously
enough, it was dissolved in the very year in which these two
societies ceased publication. The question of priority
might be disputed between the Perey Society and the
Shakespeare Society, but it seems to be generally accepted
that to the Percy belongs the distinction of having been the
first society to devote itself exclusively to the printing of
English texts. In point of value, however, the publica-
tions of the Perey Society are much less noteworthy than
those of the Shakespeare Society, for the former are by
6 Ibid., II, iv.
142 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
comparison slight, fragmentary, and generally unimposing.
The leading workers in both societies were in the main the
same, including Thomas Wright, Halliwell, Dyce, and Col-
lier, and less importantly, Rimbault, Cunningham, and
Fairholt. The two societies were, however, conducted on
quite different principles. The Percy Society was by the
nature of its publications more prolific, averaging dur-
ing its early period one issue a month; the Shakespeare
Society, on the other hand, printed works not merely of
high value in the aggregate, but almost without exception
of the greatest importance each in itself. A point of
further difference lies in the fact that the Percy Society,
like the earlier general publishing societies, was organized
merely for the purposes of publication; the Shakespeare
Society, on the other hand, held meetings at which scholarly
questions were discussed and critical and historical papers
read, and the most valuable of these were published from
time to time as the Shakespeare Society’s Papers. These
scholarly meetings, which gave the Shakespeare Society a
greater distinction as a veritable learned society, were
thought to constitute one of its most important functions.
The Perey Society issued during the thirteen years of its
life ninety-four numbers of its publications, with two others
that were withdrawn from general circulation. These
issues were in the form of thin unbound volumes; for the
frequency of their appearance and the relatively small
income derived from the modest subscription of only a
pound yearly from five hundred members prevented the
publications from showing much bookish pretentiousness.
The fact that the society was named after the erstwhile
Bishop of Dromore implies something as to the nature of
the works which it published. Twenty-three of the num-
bers were made up of popular ballads, songs, carols, and
nursery rimes; another twenty-three included tracts,
pamphlets, and curious pieces illustrative of manners, tra-
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 143
ditions, and customs; fourteen of the numbers were re-
prints of miscellaneous verse, and nine of Middle English
and Scots poetry, including Hawes’s Pastime of Pleasure,
selections from lLydgate’s minor poems, and Thomas
Wright’s new text of the Canterbury Tales; five numbers
were interludes and dramatic dialogues, and five medieval
tales and romances. In addition to these there first ap-
peared in the Perey publications Massinger’s Believe as
you Last,” Henry Porter’s Two Angry Women of Abing-
don, Wotton’s poems, and Barnfield’s Affectionate Shep-
herd. The remaining volumes comprised collections of
proverbs and conceits, scriptural paraphrases, devotional
poetry, Lord Mayors’ pageants, and other material.
The Perey Society’s product is not to be scorned because
its bulk seems on the surface to be more imposing than its
quality. Since in these productions the objects of the body
were very effectively realized, it would be vain to wish that
the society’s aims had been larger or better directed. That
the reading public seemed to feel, however, that the Perey
Society had distinguished itself for industry rather than
solid accomplishment is apparently to be inferred from a
note in the Athenaeum in 1855, in reference to the pros-
pective organization of the Warton Club, which was formed
to succeed the Perey Society: ‘‘Certainly it will be a relief
to book-buyers to be spared the infliction of another series
so long as that of the Percy Society. Several smaller series
7In the main, the history of the early societies is one of amicable
relations one with another. Over Croker’s edition of this play, how-
ever, developed a personal quarrel between Croker and Collier in
which the council of the Percy Society took a part. The dispute
originated in a paper, On Massinger’s Believe as you List (The
Shakespeare Society’s Papers, IV, 133-9, 1849), which found a
reply in Croker’s anonymous Remarks on an Article in the Papers
of the Shakespeare Society [1849].
144 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
would be better than one which is altogether indefinite and
interminable.’’§
The Shakespeare Society dated its existence from 1840.°
The prospectus of the society stated its chief object to be
‘‘the publication or republication of works connected with
and illustrative of the plays of Shakespeare and his con-
temporaries; and of the rise and progress of the English
8 Athenaeum, May 26, 1855; 609.
9 The Shakespeare Society of general fame was not the first of its
name, or the first, in all probability, to attempt some tangible
memorial to Shakspere. As early as 1770, a society of the name
existed in Edinburgh, the objects of which were apparently in the
main—and like those of the majority of the Scotch clubs of the time—
convivial (Notes and Queries, 2nd Series, IV, 185-6). The first
Shakespeare Society to leave traces of any serious interest in the
works of its nominal patron and to issue a publication was probably
the Sheffield Shakespeare Club, founded in 1819 as a protest against
the fulminations of a local cleric upon the immorality of theatre-
going (Sheffield Shakespeare Club, Proceedings from its commence-
ment in 1819, to January 1829. Sheffield, 1829; v). This club
““bespoke’’ a play annually, and held dinners in honor of its bard.
Its meetings, judging from the reports of them, were of no more
impressive dignity than those of the Roxburghe Club immortalized
by Haslewood, or the gathering of the Bannatyne Club recorded by
Scott, as a wind-up to which Lord Eldin ‘‘had a bad fall on the
staircase,’’ and Scott himself ‘‘did not get to his carriage without
a stumble neither.’’ (Familiar letters of Sir Walter Scott, 1894;
II, 178). The reports of the dinners of the Sheffield Club are, in
short, a record of endless toasts, rather undiscriminating praise of the
object of their admiration, and small talk upon everything from
music to politics. In a word, none of the reminiscences of the
Sheffield Shakespeare Club could convince us that it had any project
for systematic or serious study of Shakspere. There was also
founded an Edinburgh Shakespeare Club in 1820; it must, however,
be taken even less seriously than the Sheffield body, for its objects
are stated to have been ‘‘the cultivation of literary pursuits, and the
promotion of sociality and friendship among the members (Rules
and Regulations of the Edinburgh Shakespeare Club and Library,
Edinburgh, 1826). Its title was certainly not intended to suggest
a particularly serious attention to any aspect of literary study.
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 145
stage and English dramatic poetry, prior to the suppres-
sion of theatrical performances in 1647.’’ The publications
of the society were also to include old plays and tracts, and
of the latter especially those which shed light upon Eliza-
bethan stage history. The organization was admittedly
modeled after the Camden and Percy Societies: its adminis-
tration was vested in an elective council of twenty-one
members; its dues were only one pound annually; and its
publications were to be inexpensive, and for that reason
more numerous than would have been the case if the form
and character of the book club publications had been fol-
lowed. A significant provision of the prospectus was that
members of the society should be ‘‘invited to contribute
works for publication.’’?°
The first council of the Shakespeare Society included
Thomas Amyot, Campbell, Collier, C. W. Dilke, Dyce, Halli-
well, Knight, Macready, Sir Frederic Madden, Milman,
and Thomas Wright. Much of the heaviest executive work
was carried on by Collier, the first director, and throughout
its history altogether the most industrious member of the
society. Halliwell and Collier found an outlet in this body
for great energies and intense, though possibly unneces-
sarily spectacular, scholarly application. It must be ad-
mitted, indeed, that whatever the shortcomings of these two
students were, it was through their efforts particularly
that the earlier Shakesperean study of the age secured its
impetus and influence.
The Shakespeare Society led an active existence until the
year 1851, publishing in this time forty-six volumes; after
the society was practically defunct, it issued its final two
volumes, which had been previously in preparation, in 1852
and 1853. One volume which the society had in hand at
the time of its dissolution was never published; this was
10 ‘Tt is acknowledged on all hands’’ ... [ Prospectus, 1840].
11
146 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
Peter Cunningham’s selections from Oldys’s notes to Lang-
baine’s English Dramatick Poets.
The publications of the Shakespeare Society, it must be
remembered, contained material which was then generally
unfamiliar. For example, the treatises on the stage by Gos-
son, Heywood, and Northbrooke, well known as they are to
us, were first made popular property through their publica-
tion by this society. Their reprints of source plays, pre-
Shaksperean plays, Heywood’s dramatic works, mystery
eycles, and kindred material, though more or less faulty in
the eyes of modern scholarship, must be looked upon as
opening up to the reading public a field which had been
heretofore practically closed. In addition to its reprints,
the society published four volumes of its Papers, selected
from those presented at its meetings. In these volumes is
to be found a great deal of historical, interpretative, and
illustrative criticism which is less valuable now than it
once was merely because it has been absorbed into the tra-
ditions of scholarship.
It is unfortunate that much of what might have been
the most noteworthy of Collier’s labors for the society
forms to-day part of the ground upon which his veracity has
been impugned. There can scarcely be a doubt that the sus-
picion which had already begun to attach itself to Collier’s
work in the fifties was largely responsible for the decline of
the Shakespeare Society’s activity and the failure of
popular support for it. It must also be apparent that
11JTt is difficult to find printed evidence of the suspicions of
Collier’s dishonesty at so early a date, for the public outcry against
him did not begin until after the publication of his Notes and
Emendations to the Text of Shakespeare’s Plays in 1852, and the
law of libel was then as now probably sufficiently deterrent to prevent
the publication of suspicions unbacked by evidence; but in T. Crofton
Croker’s Remarks on an Article inserted in the Papers of the Shake-
speare Society [1849] there are undoubted intimations that by this
time Collier’s discoveries were beginning to be seriously called into
question (op. cit., 8, 9, 12).
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 147
Halliwell, Knight, and Dyce, who were among the first
scholars of the time to express their skepticism as to the
authenticity, if not the honesty, of Collier’s emendations to
Shakspere, must have been impressed by the tone and the
evidential value of the criticism which greeted Collier’s
letters to the Athenaeum in 1852;)? and with faith in the
society’s most strenuous leader so sadly shattered, and the
genuineness of a handful of the society’s publications
called into open question, it was of course impossible that
the remaining workers in the society should continue to
appeal to public confidence as they had done for eleven
years. It is true that the society’s generous scale of pub-
lication in its earlier years had impoverished its resources
to some extent, for it was necessary for the council to ex-
plain upon this ground the appearance of only two volumes
for the year 1851;7° but this does not diminish the impor-
tance of the fact that the publications of the society ceased
to appear in the year in which the Collier controversy
arose, only two volumes, already in preparation, remain-
ing to be issued in the following two years.
The works edited by Collier for the Shakespeare Society
which had been suspected are those which contain docu-
ments from Dulwich College now proved to have been
doctored by Collier; these were the Memoirs of Edward
Alleyn, The Alleyn Papers, and the Diary of Philip Hen-
slowe.4* The results of Collier’s misconduct are of course
more far-reaching than their effect upon the value of
12 For an account of the history of Collier’s critical forgeries and
the ensuing controversies see Notes on the Life of John Payne
Collier by Henry B. Wheatley, 1884; 30-38, 47-8, 51-67.
13 Athenaeum, May 1, 1852; 490.
14The extent of Collier’s forgeries is discussed in George F.
Warner’s Catalogue of the Dulwich Manuscripts, and further in-
vestigation of the treatment of Henslowe’s diary is to be found in
Mr. W. W. Greg’s new edition of the document.
148 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
works which are now known to be unreliable, for all that he
produced—including almost half of the Shakespeare Soci-
ety’s publications—must clearly be affected by some degree
of uncertainty as to its complete authenticity and accuracy.
The oldest of the societies whose record has been one
of unbroken and unterminated service to English scholar-
ship is the Philological Society, organized in 1842.7%° The
society’s revised rules state that it was formed ‘‘for the
investigation of the structure, the affinities, and the his-
tory of languages; and the philological illustration of the
classical writers of Greece and Rome;’’ the special refer-
ence to the domain of classical philology, however, was by
resolution omitted in 1878. The constituent members of
the society numbered upwards of two hundred, among
whom the most conspicuous in English studies were Bos-
worth, Garnett, Hallam, Kemble, Thorpe, and Trench. In
the beginning, however, none of these distinguished scholars
was as active as two others probably less accomplished,
Edwin Guest and Hensleigh Wedgwood, both of whom con-
tributed numerous papers on syntax and special etymolo-
gies to the Proceedings and the later Transactions. These
records of the meetings of the society contained from its
early years useful articles on English dialects, Anglo-
Saxon and Middle English grammar, place, animal, and
plant names, and etymologies; interest in the English field,
which was at first overshadowed by that in classical philol-
ogy and anomalous tongues, increasing until it became the
first concern of the organization.
15 There were without question other philological societies of similar
aims in active organization before this date; but although some of
them were known to the members of the Philological Society, their
records have apparently disappeared. A sketch of the history of a
single one, the Etymological Society at Cambridge, which published
some of its papers—in part on English subjects—in the short lived
Philological Museum, may be found in the Proceedings of the
Philological Society, V, 183-42 (1854).
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 149
The last and the present generation of English scholars
began to enter the society soon after its foundation, Furni-
vall, Wheatley, Morris, Ellis, and Sweet beginning their
contributions in the sixties, and Murray and Skeat in the
following decade. The infusion of new blood, which
brought with it enthusiasms and not unrealizable dreams,
turned the society eventually into the channels of activity
which have brought it its greatest usefulness and distinc-
tion: textual publication, spelling reform, and most impor-
tantly, the stupendous project for an historical English
dictionary.
The publication of the dictionary was first proposed by
Richard Chenevix Trench, an English scholar of consider-
able note, in 1857, and was urged in two papers read before
the society in 1858, On some Deficiencies in our English
Dictionaries. The principal points in these two papers
were those which determined the attitude of the society
upon the subject of a dictionary from this time on: that a
dictionary should be complete, and should exercise no
principle of exclusion for the purpose of establishing a
puristic standard, or upon grounds of obsoleteness, foreign-
ism, or localism; and that it should treat extensively etymo-
logical history and relationships. Trench’s original pro-
posal, however, contemplated only a supplement to the
dictionaries of Johnson and Richardson, and when work
was undertaken by the society, it was for that purpose. But
after an extended analysis, by over one hundred collectors,
of the most typical materials for further etymological
studies, it was thought that the magnitude of the work upon
which the society found itself actually embarked called for
a completely new lexicon upon scientific principles. To
this end, two committees were appointed, one Literary and
Historical, composed of Trench, Furnivall, and Herbert
Coleridge, and the other Etymological, including Hensleigh
150 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
Wedgwood and Prof. Henry Malden, a classical scholar.*®
The system of work upon the dictionary was to be volun-
teer codperation, especially for the work of collecting
illustrative quotations. There were to be readers of exam-
ples of English from all periods subsequent to the decline
of Anglo-Saxon, and sub-editors for the arrangement of the
materials alphabetically and historically. For this purpose
lengthy and specific rules for the guidance of collectors
were drawn up, and the arrangement of the dictionary
was outlined in the Canones Lexicographici in 1860. As
the dictionary was at first planned, it was to consist of
three parts: a main non-technical section, a section of
technical and scientific terms and proper names, and an
etymological appendix. This plan was, however, ultimately
abandoned. After 1861, when Coleridge died, Furnivall
carried much of the work of collection and arrangement
upon his own shoulders. But in 1876, when he had
a few publishing societies upon his hands (and the first
impulse to his revival of the publishing society plan came
from his wish to make available in print the materials for
the Middle English portion of the dictionary), he proposed
placing the work under the supervision of a special editor.1"
Dr. J. A. H. Murray was appointed to this position in 1878.
In 1879 Murray announced?® that contracts with the
Delegates of the Clarendon Press had been signed early in
that year, and gave at the same time a highly interesting
picture of the extended and careful preparations for the
reception, classification, and digestion of the raw material,
and of the varied and complicated problems which pre-
sented themselves when the undertaking was actually under
16 Proposal for the Publication of a new English Dictionary by
the Philological Society, 1859; 1-2.
17 Frederick James Furnivall, a Volume of personal Record, 1911;
xliv.
18 Transactions of the Philological Society, 1877-8-9; 567-86.
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 151
way. The society in the meantime had been incorporated
for the purposes of the contract. The contract itself excited
some little comment among the members of the society,
Furnivall and Sweet objecting strenuously to the small
percentage of the profits of the enterprise which was to fall
to the society; but it was accepted by the society in con-
sideration of the large advance which the Press was re-
quired to make for initial expenses, and of the difficulty
which the society had already had in getting any publisher
to undertake a work of the magnitude they wished.?® As
it was, the Clarendon Press contracted for a dictionary of
between six and seven thousand pages, limiting consider-
ably the scope of the etymological portion as it had been
originally planned; and the society, therefore, reserved the
right to publish after the completion of this first dictionary
an expanded dictionary of about ten volumes of sixteen
hundred pages each. The contract stipulated that three
years should be spent upon the accumulation and arrange-
ment of material, and that the dictionary should be
completed within ten years after the actual beginning of
publication.
In 1879, then, the real work of the editor was begun; but
it was found immediately that there were large hiatuses
in the material already collected, and for this reason re-
newed appeals were made for readers. When it was con-
sidered that the preliminary work for the first parts was
completed, the apparatus consisted of over three million
quotations from five thousand authors, which had been
collected by thirteen hundred readers. The sub-editors
who had given gratuitous service to the project then num-
bered thirty.2° The delays in the progress of the work,
19 IJbid., App., xv—xvill. A copy of the contract itself is to be
found in App., xlix—lix.
204 New English Dictionary on Historical Principles founded
mainly on the Materials collected by the Philological Society, I,
v-vii, 1888.
152 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
however, were much greater than any of the workers con-
cerned had anticipated; for the general magnitude of the.
labor, and the care necessary in completing information
and settling points in word history, had occasioned serious
stoppages in the machinery.” The first copy was finally
sent to the press in 1882, the first part was issued in 1884,
and the first volume was completed in 1888. The work
has to-day progressed almost through the ninth volume,
with a single volume necessary to complete it. In spite of
the fact that it has not been constructed upon the scale
which the society at first intended, it represents in extent
and convenience of arrangement an achievement quite un-
paralleled. Indeed, it is as far in advance of the other two
great national dictionaries, Littré’s and Grimm’s, as these
are superior to their predecessors.
It was through the recognition of the need of more
Middle English texts in the compilation of the dictionary
that Furnivall first secured the Philological Society’s ap-
proval of a plan for the publication of desirable English
texts. In this way were issued in 1862 Furnivall’s Early
English Poems and Inves of Saints, and Morris’s edition
of the Liber Cure Cocorum, in 1863 Morris’s edition of
Richard Rolle of Hampole’s Pricke of Conscience, and in
1864 a fourteenth century Castel of Loue, translated from
Grosseteste, edited by R. F. Weymouth. The society’s lack
of funds, however, prevented its continuing such work,??
and the Early English Text Society was accordingly
organized by Furnivall in 1864 to carry on the under-
taking.
In 1869 Danby P. Fry, one of the members of the Philo-
logical Society, endeavored to induce the society to institute
some methods of reform in English orthography. A com-
21 Transactions of the Philological Society, 1882-4, 508 sq.
22 Transactions of the Philological Society, 1873-4, 236.
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 153
mittee was appointed, consisting of Ellis, Morris, Joseph
Payne, Russell Martineau, Fry, and later Wheatley and
Murray, to report upon the question, but the members
were unable to agree upon a course of action.*®> After the
committee was dissolved, Fry and Ellis submitted two pro-
posals, embodying their individual ideas of the direction and
extent of revision,** but the matter soon ceased to engage
the serious attention of the members. After attempts at
spelling reform in America had brought the matter once
more before the Philological Society’s notice, Dr. Murray
made the question one of the points of his presidential ad-
dress in 1880.*° He did not favor a wholesale amendment,
for, as he put the matter in his own words, ‘‘My own opin-
ion is that at present and for a long time to come, until
indeed the general principles of phonology are understood
by men of education, no complete or systematic scheme of
spelling reform has the least chance of being adopted in
this country, and I do not think that the promulgation or
advocacy of such bears any practical fruit.’’ He did, how-
ever, favor action on the part of the society, ‘‘representing
the English scholarship of the country,’’ to the end of
issuing a list of amended spellings, the alterations in which
should be confined to ‘‘the omission of such letters as are
both unphonetiec and unhistoric, and for which no so-called
etymological plea ‘can be submitted.’’ Following these
recommendations, Henry Sweet issued as a basis for dis-
cussion some notes upon suggested changes,”* and after two
meetings of debate on the subject, the society printed its
Partial Corections of English Spellings aproovd by the
Philological Society.27 Although from this time on, many
23 Transactions of the Philological Society, 1870-72, 19.
24 Ibid., 17-88, 89-118.
25 Transactions of the Philological Society, 1880-1; 139-155.
26 Ibid., App., *65—-*89.
27 Ibid., Supplement, 1-38.
154 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
individual members used the corrected spellings, the posi-
tion which the society was courageous and confident enough
to take seemed to have very little influence upon English
usage generally. The matter slept, therefore, until Henry
Bradley, in his presidential address in 1892,?° gave it as his
opinion that the whole project is really not as simple as
most of his colleagues assumed, that after all the older
spellings do convey somewhat adequately useful suggestions
of etymological history, and that this fact, especially in a
tongue so rich in technical and other special word construc-
tions, is of more practical significance than most of the re-
formers seem willing to admit. Since this time the society
has given no important formal expression of its attitude on
the still seriously debated question.
The Philological Society continues to-day as one of the
most vital forces in English scholarship; and its Trans-
actions continue to publish much of the highest value in
literary, but more especially linguistic, study, by the most
eapable English scholars of our day. When we consider
that from the Philological Society actually sprang Furni-
vall’s project for the Early English Text Society, and
indirectly his other publishing society schemes, and Ellis
and Skeat’s plan for the English Dialect Society, it must
be admitted that in the actual extent of its influence, if not
in the bulk of its published results, this society has been
the most powerful and fruitful organized aid to English
scholarship that the last century produced.
The Aelfric Society, which was founded in 1848, outlined
in its prospectus a much more modest program than had
been attempted as yet by any publishing society.?® Its
plan was to publish ‘‘those Anglo-Saxon literary remains
which have either not yet been given to the world, or of
28 Transactions of the Philological Society, 1891-4, 263-6.
29 **Tt is proposed to establish ...’’ [Prospectus, 1842 ?].
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 155
which a more correct and convenient edition may be deemed
desirable.’’ The first class of its proposed publications
was to include the Anglo-Saxon homilies and lives of saints,
and the second class the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and
Alfred’s Bede and Orosius. It was considered that the
undertaking could be carried to completion in four years,
and at a cost of about five pounds a member if a hundred
members were secured. The society actually opened its
existence, however, with less than half that number.*® On
the first membership list appeared the names of Bosworth,
Kemble, Madden, Thorpe, and R. M. White; the remaining
members included a generous proportion of clergymen,
schoolmasters, and amateur antiquaries. It can be seen,
therefore, that the society quite failed to excite anything
like a general interest in its plans.
The publications of the Aelfric Society were issued in
parts, with translations of the texts. All of its program
that was completed was Thorpe’s Homilies of the Anglo-
Saxon Church, in ten parts, 1843-6, Kemble’s Poetry of the
Codex Vercellensis, in two parts, 1844-56, and The Anglo-
Saxon Dialogues of Solomon and Saturnus and Adrian and
Ritheus, in three parts, 1845-6. Upon the issuance of the
second part of the Vercelli Book in 1856, the society was
dissolved.**
No new literary club was organized in England for an-
other eleven years, when the Warton Club appeared in
1854. Its first volume was issued in the following year.
This club was designed to succeed the Percy Society, dis-
continued in the preceding year, although it was to have
only two hundred members, as against the Percy’s five
hundred. A curious fact in relation to this body is that
its existence was planned to terminate at the end of six
30 Aelfric Society for the Illustration of English History and
Philology [Announcement, 1843].
31H, G. Bohn, Appendix to Lowndes’ Bibliographer’s Manual, 67.
156 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
years, an assurance that was evidently intended to antici-
pate objections to a series of publications of undetermined
length and inclusiveness. Thomas Wright and Halliwell
appear again as the promotors of the new society, which
was to be administered in a novel and in some respects ob-
jectionable manner. It was, as the Athenaeum reviewed
the scheme, ‘‘to be entirely under the management of a
committee of ‘six gentlemen,’ who announce in their pros-
pectus that they are ‘known for their attainments in this
branch of literature.’ There are to be no general meetings,
no president, no treasurer, no secretary, no auditors of
accounts, none of ‘the forms of a society.’ The ‘six gentle-
men’ are to be a Permanent Committee, and nobody else is
to say a word.’’*? The proposed object of the club seems to
have been ‘‘the reprinting of such rare but well chosen
tracts by Greene, Nash, Breton, Taylor the Water Poet, &c.,
as afford valuable illustration of manners, or are interest-
ing in any other point of view.’’*? The club, however, did
not realize any of these specific purposes; in fact, it did
not live out its predetermined existence, for with the publi-
cation of the Anglo-Norman text of Fulke Fitz-Warine, the
Latin Exercises of Mary Queen of Scots, and two fifteenth
century miscellany manuscripts, the Warton Club came to
an end in 1856.
The foundation of the Early English Text Society in
1864 marks the beginning of a remarkable revival in liter-
ary society activity.24 No large or influential English
society had been founded since the Perey and Shakespeare
82 Athenaeum, May 26, 1855, 609.
383 Notes and Queries, 1st Series, V, 238.
34 A large part of my information as to the Early English Text
Society has been taken from the annual announcements, especially
from that for November, 1911. . For further facts, particularly with
reference to the society’s fiscal organization, I am under obligation
to W. A. Dalziel, Esquire, the Honorary Secretary.
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 157
Societies in 1840, but a number of efficient organizations,
many of them the creations of the founder of the Early
English Text Society, took example from the success of
this project and lived long and energetic lives. Of the
private societies for the furtherance of literary scholar-
ship which had preceded it, none were still in existence
save the Philological Society, and the field of this society
was divided with the study of other tongues. The decline
of the early societies which published English texts is with-
out doubt to be assigned primarily to the wane of the first
vogue of the society idea; but it was probably accelerated
also by the personal scandal which became associated with
the most prominent of all, the Shakespeare Society. It is
probably true, in addition, that since the earlier text
societies had exploited the Elizabethan field fairly thor-
oughly, there was little reason or incentive as yet for the
exploration of the provinces of Old and Middle English—
which had without question failed to appeal to more than a
narrowly confined interest—until the actual necessity of
publishing the earlier materials loomed large in the minds
of scholars.
As Scott had received the dilettante club idea and con-
verted it into something more generous and practical, and
as Halliwell, Collier, and Thomas Wright had dominated,
with good purpose, and to good ends, the later democratic
societies, Furnivall revived the scheme, so common in the
eighteenth century days of publication by subscription, of
providing a market for a needed series of reprints which
could not have been supported by the conditions of every-
day publication, and organized a society upon the plainest
and simplest business proposition: ‘‘I’ll furnish the books
if you’ll pay for them.’’ It may be said of the Early
English Text Society, as of most of the other societies which
Furnivall founded, that it was his society from the day of
its organization to the day of his death.
158 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
This society, however, even though it was primarily a
business proposition pure and simple, was not without a
basis of sentiment, and this Furnivall did all he could to
foster. Its origin, as has been seen, lay in Furnivall’s
desire to make accessible the bulk of the unprinted and
scarce linguistic material which should properly form the
foundation of the Philological Society’s projected etymo-
logical dictionary.*® It could scarcely be hoped that the
class of literary material promised by such a plan could by
the remotest possibility appeal to anything like a general
literary taste. The society began in fact with one hundred
and thirty-seven members, and now after very nearly a
half-century it numbers scarcely over three hundred.
There is real cause for remark in the fact that the member-
ship of a society of such illustrious aims and attainments
should compare so unfavorably with that of some of the
earlier publishing societies, which in a few cases exceeded
a thousand. But the reasons for the marked difference
seem simple and obvious. In the first place, the objects of
the Shakespeare and Percy Societies, and in their own
fields, of the Camden and Parker Societies, after all were
intended to appeal to a taste that had been under popular
cultivation for a comparatively long time; but the publi-
cations of the new society could appeal continuously only
to scholars of special training. On this point there was
really little to justify the querulous complaint that Furni-
vall published in his announcements from year to year, that
*‘the society’s experience has shown the very small num-
ber of those inheritors of the speech of Cynewulf, Chaucer,
and Shakspere, who care two guineas a year for the
records of that speech.’’ The society’s publications were
to have, and have had, little to do with Shakspere; most
Englishmen “‘have a feeling for’’ Chaucer, but not for the
35 Ante, 150, 152.
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 159
majority of his contemporaries; Cynewulf is a name with-
out meaning for the great number. If this were all there
were to be said for or against the project from the stand-
point of its failure in popular appeal, the plea might not
be unjustified; but to ask an Englishman, even with a well
developed respect for his national traditions, to take with
his Chaucer and Cynewulf reams upon reams of homilies,
dull metrical romances, interminable didactic poems, saints’
lives, cook books, and surgical treatises, was and is un-
reasonable. The society has received fair support from the
classes of subscribers whose wants it might be expected to
fill—trained philologists and institutions; but it has never
succeeded in its general appeals to readers at large, chiefly
because these appeals are not grounded in reason. There
may have been more substance in Furnivall’s character-
istically direct comparison: ‘‘it is nothing less than a
scandal that the Hellenic Society should have over a thou-
sand members, while the Early English Text Society has
not three hundred.’’ The complaint itself is the best evi-
dence in the world that for most educated people a dead
language which has no important traditional culture asso-
ciated with it is indeed a very dead thing. And whatever
enters most significantly into the general cultural traditions
of our day, it is not derived from any intellectual force of
medieval England or Anglo-Saxon England.*°®
36 That Furnivall started his project in the face of a really pro-
found lack of interest in and preparation for ancient English litera-
ture seems to be attested by the tone of some of the early reviews
of the society’s publications. For example, the Saturday Review’s
judgments (November 5, 1864) upon the first two books issued by
the society: With reference to Furnivall’s Arthur, ‘‘As matters of
philological study, we are ready to receive texts about King Arthur
or about any other subject under heaven; but in any other point of
view, we must confess that we are tired of King Arthur. ... We
must confess that we do not enter into the apparently prevalent love
of everything Arthurian for its own sake.’’ And with regard to
160 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
Another thing which without question affected the suc-
cess of the Early English Text Society was Furnivall’s
personality. As strongly endeared as he was to his near
friends by exceptional personal qualities, he possessed other
qualities—summed up in the word ‘‘bumptiousness’’ by
one of the distinguished English scholars of the time who
could not work in harmony with him—which cost him the
affection, and even the tolerance, of many men of attain-
ments who otherwise would probably have been glad to
aid his projects. His constant bullying, for instance, of
some of the old Shakespeare Society group, must have pre-
judiced his undertakings in the public mind and made
him appear as a rather irritating apostle of scholarly integ-
rity. His complete autocracy, also, in practically ail of
his society schemes, while it may have been in part neces-
sary to their continued existence, was probably a source of
occasional pain even to his collaborators.%”
But even though Furnivall’s reiterated protests against
the general lack of popular interest in English literary
antiquities may not have been wholly justified by the con-
ditions of the society’s organization and administration,
and the nature of the texts which it was its business to pro-
Morris’s Early English Alliterative Poems: ‘‘The first poem, called
by Mr. Morris ‘The Pearl,’ is one of those visions of Paradise of
which we have already seen so many. ... What strikes the ordinary
reader at first sight is the. extreme difficulty, and what we would call
the uncouthness, of language in these poems.’’
87T am not speaking wholly at random here. A collection of cor-
respondence to and from the Rev. Joseph Woodfall Ebsworth, which
is now in my possession, contains comments from Furnivall’s
acquaintances upon the value of the personal equation in the
Furnivall projects which are not strictly in harmony with the
opinions expressed by his friends in the memorial volume. [I inti-
mate this not from any desire to quarrel with the common judgment
of a great character, but to suggest what seems one clear reason why
his societies were in comparison with other societies of similar ob-
jects, both before and since, relatively weakly supported.
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 161
duce, it must be said that the setting afoot and successful
conduct not merely of the Early English Text Society, but,
in time, of the Ballad and Chaucer Societies, the New
Shakspere Society, the Browning Society and the Wiclif
Society, was a task which required Atlantean strength and
energy, not to say unquestioned scholarly attainments and
high executive capacity. It is to be doubted whether any-
one other than Furnivall could at this time, in the face of
slow interest and a variety of discouragements, have carried
through such a series of editorial and administrative labors
over so long a period of years. The Early English Text
Society was from the date of its foundation until Furni-
vall’s death in 1910 under his directorship; which is to
say that practically the entire history of the society is a
history of his personal labors for it.
In the Original Series of the society’s publications, which
opened at a guinea a year at the time of the society’s founda-
tion, there have appeared in forty-eight years one hundred
and forty-three numbers. In the Extra Series, which was
opened in 1867, there have appeared one hundred and nine
numbers. This series was issued for the reprinting of
black letter books and already published manuscripts which
were either scarce or inadequately edited. To indicate
even in the most general fashion the variety and extent of
the society’s work would be to give a bibliography of its
publications; and this, fortunately, is issued annually in
satisfactory form by the society itself. The society has, in
a word, already printed the bulk of important Old and
Middle English literature, exclusive of Chaucer and ballad
material; so its work of the present and future is less
within the purely literary field than formerly, and within
that field is being given over inevitably to what must be
regarded as of secondary value or interest. Its most monu-
mental publications are Merlin, Lyndesay’s works, Skeat’s
edition of Piers Plowman (since revised for the Clarendon
12
162 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
Press), the Cursor Mundi in four texts, the Blickling
Homilies, Aelfric’s Metrical Lives of Saints, the Old Eng-
lish version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, and the auto-
type edition of the Beowulf manuscript. The most impor-
tant publications in the Extra Series are probably Ellis’s
Early English Pronunciation, Barbour’s Bruce, Lovelich’s
Holy Grail, the Charlemagne Romances, many of the extant
mystery cycles and fragments, Hoccleve’s works, and
Lydgate’s works. These suggestions of what may be
merely of the greatest intrinsic value and scholarly magni-
tude among the society’s publications serve at least to
emphasize by omission the importance of the vast body of
poetry, philosophy, romances, saints’ lives, books of man-
ners, homilies, scriptural paraphrases, moral and devo-
tional works, and miscellaneous treatises which have not
been named.
The workers engaged upon the Early English Text
Society’s publications have included most of the distin-
guished English scholars of recent years. To enumerate
them would be to run through a list of scholarly names of
late or present prominence. A substantial measure of what
the society has actually accomplished for English literature
and linguistics is to be found in its statement of the year
1911 that the publications had to that date covered a cost
of over thirty thousand pounds. For the future the society
announces that at the present rate of production it has in
preparation or prospect material sufficient for fifty years to
come; and the amount of work which the society feels it
ought to undertake would require a century or two of
publication after the appearance of what is at present upon
its lists. A point of generosity—and probably well re-
warded generosity—in the Early English Text Society’s
plans is that its back volumes are for sale to non-members
at an advance of fifty percent over their cost to members.
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 163
This provision gives the society a greater range of public
usefulness than any of the older societies or most of those
of the present day possess.
The form of organization of the Early English Text
Society furnishes in general the model for most of Furni-
vall’s later societies, that is, for all the remaining text
societies founded before the close of the nineteenth cen-
tury save the Spenser Society, the Hunterian Club, and
the Seottish Text Society. These societies of Furnivall’s
have been very close corporations; it would be scarcely
accurate to call their form of organization even oligarchie,
though the control of the Early English Text Society, as
the type, is nominally vested in a Committee of Manage-
ment of about twenty members. The exigencies of whole-
sale publication such as Furnivall planned have always, of
course, required extensive collaboration and administra-
tive responsibility on the part of a large number of gifted
co-workers; but it has been generally understood that the
founder and director of the Early English Text Society
was not merely a nominal head. As for the administrative
arrangements of the society, the Committee of Management
possesses all the governing powers of the body—fiseal, edi-
torial, and executive ; the members possess no voting powers.
The executive body is self-continuing ; it selects the society’s
publications, appoints its editors, makes no provision for
recommendation by subscribers of works which they may
think it advisable to undertake, and allows the members no
judgment upon the works proposed. All this contrasts
rather strongly with the custom of the Bannatyne Club,
which published at intervals lists of desiderata, and made
the vote of the members the final word upon what the
society should undertake; it is in just as strong contrast to
the administrative policies of the Camden Society, the
Shakespeare Society, and the Scottish Text Society, for
164 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
instance, all of which constantly solicited from their mem-
bers suggestions and advice. There is, however, it must be
admitted, a patent difference between the aims of the Early
English Text Society and of most of the other text soci-
eties; and this difference may justify a special and undemo-
eratic kind of organization. In the societies whose activities
have been compared with those of the Early English Text
Society the principle underlying the selection of the works
to be printed has been established upon the clear considera-
tion that whatever was to be published could be no more
than representative or illustrative of a very large field of
choice. The Early English Text Society, however, set
out from the beginning to print an entire corpus of early
and middle English literature and linguistic material; and
for this reason the questions of selection and order of
publication were clearly secondary to the necessity of
accepting special opportunities—editorial proposals, offers
of manuscripts or copies, and so on. Indeed, it may be that
the founder of the Early English Text Society foresaw that
if his subscribers were left to choose their publications, the
‘‘plums’’ might have been quickly harvested, and an im-
poverished body might have been forced to struggle un-
supported through the task of publishing a quantity of
material pronouncedly lacking in popular appeal, or even
have been obliged to abandon its scheme in the end. Its
plan, then, which was to offer everything as it came, with
the understanding that in the end everything was to be pro-
duced, contains no elements of real unfairness; in fact, the
society’s willingness to sell copies of its works to outsiders
upon reasonable terms is a concession to purely popular
demands which it was not required, in the chosen nature of
its work, to make, but which has justified more than any-
thing else its appeal for extended popular support.
The Spenser Society, which, curiously enough, issued
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 165
none of Spenser’s works,** was formed in Manchester in
1866%° with James Crossley, a local scholar and antiquary
of recognized gifts, as its first president. He was suc-
ceeded upon his death by A. W. Ward. The announced
purpose of the society was ‘‘the reprinting of the rarer
poetical literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies.’’*° A notable departure from the aims of any
scholarly organization hitherto existing, however, was its
resolution ‘‘to reprint the works of each author in as com-
plete a form as possible.’’ The society was to be limited
to two hundred members, and its issues were to be of an
expensive character. The dress finally chosen for the pub-
lications was a small quarto on a curious ribbed paper,
with reprints in folio of the works which had been
originally issued in that form. In the first year of publi-
cation, 1867, the membership lists were closed with the
number provided for.*t The publications of the society
consist of two series, the Original Series containing forty-
seven volumes, and the New Series six volumes, with two
extra ones. The issues comprised the complete works of
John Taylor the Water Poet, Michael Drayton, and George
Wither, the non-dramatic works of John Heywood, and
separate pieces by Alexander Barclay, Bodenham, and
Churchyard. The society was closed in 1894,* its last
volume, Oliver Elton’s Introduction to Michael Drayton,
the only purely critical volume published by the society,
appearing in the following year. The reprints of the
Spenser Society were produced upon a high plane of
88 The society received an apportionment of Grosart’s edition of
Spenser, but with the editing of this work the society had of course
nothing to do.
39 Dic. Nat. Biog., XIII, 229.
40 Notes and Queries, 3rd Series, XI, 308.
41 Athenaeum, June 15, 1867, 792.
42 Athenaeum, October 13, 1894, 496.
166 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
textual accuracy and general excellence; in fact, with the
Hunterian Club, this society is the best example of the
purely amateur type of organization, which, combining the
aims and methods of both the dilettante clubs and the
scholarly societies, achieve work which is at once of the
highest practical value and the greatest aesthetic attraction.
The work of Hales and Furnivall upon the Percy Folio
Manuscript in 1867 brought to Furnivall the plan of
founding a society for the publication of all the extant
English ballad material.**? The Ballad Society was there-
fore advertised to commence publication in 1868. The
Pepys collection at Magdalene College, Cambridge, the
largest in existence, was the one which Furnivall wished to
attack first; he accordingly proposed to the Fellows of
Magdalene that they should act in union with the Ballad
Society for the publication of their collection; but his
proposal was rejected.4* William Chappell then under-
took to edit the Roxburghe collection, but he insisted that
the entire body of these ballads should be copied before
publication was begun; so in the meantime Furnivall him-
self began the publications of the society with his series of
classified Ballads from Manuscripts, the first part of which
appeared in 1868. The first number of Chappell’s Roz-
burghe Ballads came out in the following year, and publi-
cation went on apace, Furnivall’s issue of Captain Cox’s
Ballads appearing in 1871, his Love Poems and Humorous
Ones in 1874, and J. W. Ebsworth’s Bagford Ballads in
1877 and 1878. Chappell’s declining health had mean-
while compelled him to stop work upon the completion of
the third volume of the Roxburghe Ballads and Ebsworth
took up the work from this point. From this time on,
Ebsworth was the sole editor of all that came from the
43 Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript, edited by John W. Hales and
Frederick J. Furnivall, 1867-8; I, xxv—xxvi.
44 [Announcement of the Ballad Society, 1878.]
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 167
society, the remaining five (really six) volumes of the
Roxburghe Ballads taking up exclusively all the time and
money of the society after the Bagford Ballads were com-
pleted. The twenty-fifth and final part of the Roxburghe
Ballads, which was the last of the society’s issues, was pub-
lished in 1899, thirty years after the opening of publica-
tion. A general index to this collection which Ebsworth
had in preparation did not receive enough subscriptions to
permit its publication,*® and an edition of Civil War
Ballads which he was to have undertaken was carried no
further than the announcement.
The Ballad Society is a rather striking example of the
eventual failure of a society not founded upon a genuinely
collaborative basis. From the beginning Furnivall was
the nominal head of the society, but from 1875 on Ebsworth
was the really responsible head, and carried all the editorial
work quite unaided, as he said to his friends and to the
public in his valedictory notes. The society when it com-
menced publication in 1868 had very nearly two hundred
members; but, Ebsworth says, the first income ‘‘was
frittered away in payments to incompetent copyists, of
texts that would not be needed for a score of years,’’ and
considerable portions of which were not to be used at all;
and ‘‘the most wasteful extravagance of space was per-
sisted in’’ in the early publications.*® In 1880, when only
the Roxburghe Ballads remained to be completed, the mem-
bership had decreased to about one hundred and thirty,
and for the concluding number of the Roxburghe Ballads
there were considerably less than one hundred subscribers.
All this seems to speak of weak administrative methods; we
may take Ebsworth’s word for it. But it reflected also
poor editorial policies on Ebsworth’s part. Not taking to
45 The Roxburghe Ballads, VIII-IX, 878.
46 The Roxburghe Ballads, Preface to Part XXV, viii**-ix**,
168 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
heart the admonition of the editor of Notes and Queries,
who found fault with the bulky critical apparatus of the
first of the society’s volumes,*7 Ebsworth loaded down his
books with useless and facetious (and latterly mis-
ogynistical) comment, fragmentary quotations, editorial
confidences, doggerel of his own, and a thousand needless
editorial obstructions of all kinds. The quality of the
work, in comparison with that of the Early English Text
Society and the Chaucer Society, could have been only dis-
appointing to those who had supported the enterprise;
and it can not be questioned that these silly extravagances
cost him many subscribers. It was apparent for many
years, therefore, that the Ballad Society could not outlive
the completion of the monumental work then in hand, and
it passed away when the Roxburghe collection was printed
off.
The Chaucer Society, Furnivall’s third society project,
was established in the same year as the Ballad Society, and
has led an industrious and thoroughly useful existence
ever since. Furnivall served as administrative head of this
society until his death, and was the responsible editor of
most of its publications. Upon his death he was succeeded
by Professor Skeat. Since the society had by this time
completed most of the important textual work which it had
undertaken, its textual publications, which constituted its
First Series, had been for some time appearing at wider
intervals; and its works upon sources, analogues, language,
chronology, contemporary illustration, social studies, por-
traits, and syntax, to which its Second Series was devoted,
had been taking up a larger proportion of its time and
effort. The great work of this society was its publication
of the six parallel text edition of the Ellesmere, Hengwrt,
Cambridge, Corpus, Petworth, and Lansdowne manuscripts
47 Notes and Queries, Fourth Series, III, 255.
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 169
of the Canterbury Tales. These texts were also reprinted
separately, with the addition of the Harleian and Cam-
bridge Dd manuscripts. The ninety-seven volumes of the
First Series contain also all the manuscripts of the minor
poems, in parallel and separate texts, a parallel text edition
of Troylus and Criseyde, The Romaunt of the Rose, Boethius,
The Treatise on the Astrolabe, autotypes of manuscripts,
rime indexes, and related material. Among the prominent
contributors to the special publications of the Second Series
were Skeat, Koch, Littlehales, Kittredge, Spielman, and
Ellis. The dissolution of the Chaucer Society was. an-
nounced in 1912.
The moving spirits of the Hunterian Club, of Glasgow,
which began its publishing activities in 1871, were members
of the faculty of the University; the name of the society,
in fact, was taken from that of the University library and
museum. The club limited its membership to two hundred,
and printed only ten copies of its publications in excess of
this number. The aims of the club were apparently not
social. Its membership was gathered largely in and about
Glasgow, but included a number of outside subscribers,
among them Collier, Halliwell, Grosart, and Furnivall.
None of these prominent scholars, however, were directly
concerned with the issuance of the club’s publications; these
were produced almost entirely through the efforts of local
students. David Laing, who edited three gift-books for the
society, was, curiously enough, never a member, although
there seems to have been the best of feeling between this
patriarch of Northern scholarship and the club. One detail
of the club’s aim was unique as a society project, in that
it contemplated issuing all of its texts in fac-simile, as far
as the necessity of setting up the texts in type would
permit. The first works undertaken by the club were those
of Samuel Rowlands, which began to appear in 1871 and
170 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
were completed in 1880. Of equal importance with the
club’s edition of Rowlands’s tracts is its edition of Thomas
Lodge. Its most important and extensive work, however,
was the reproduction of the entire Bannatyne manuscript,
with some of the old Bannatyne Club’s critical apparatus,
but without excisions or changes of any sort. The first
number of this publication was put out in 1873, and the
seventh, which completed the reprint itself, in 1881. The
glossary to the work was not issued until 1894, six years
after the club had practically ceased to exist.
When the Hunterian Club was nearing the end of its
publication of the Bannatyne Manuscript, it decided to rest
upon the achievements of the past. In the whole period of
its activity it had shown an enviable industry and scholarly
responsibility ; but from the fact that its membership never
reached the expectations of the founders, it is probably
safe to assume that the financial affairs of the body were a
source of pretty constant anxiety on the part of the admin-
istrative officers. That the society accomplished so much
systematic and entirely finished work is, in view of its
small numbers, really remarkable. There is probably no
body of its kind throughout the century which, propor-
tionately to the brief period of the Hunterian’s existence,
succeeded in producing in all of its publication from first
to last so much of intrinsic worth with scholarly accuracy
and unimpeachable taste in book making. The club, in
short, appropriated what was happiest and most useful in
both the bibliophile clubs and the printing societies.
It is regrettable, in view of what the Hunterian Club
accomplished, that the closing of its activities should be
marked by an extraordinary instance of the essential
narrowness of the bibliophile instinct. In giving notice
of the discontinuance of the club after the completion of
the Bannatyne volumes, the Highth Annual Report in-
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES ib ck
formed the members that ‘‘the Council has further decided
that all previous issues remaining in stock after the 1st of
July, 1888, shall be destroyed, so as effectually to prevent
any of the club’s publications finding their way into the
book market as remainders.’’** It is difficult to excuse this
kind of action under any conditions; still there is a trace
of justice in the council’s explanation that it would be un-
fair to the members who had borne the pains and expenses
of publication if a large quantity of their product should
be thrown for a trifling price into the hands of those who
had stood aloof from the enterprise when it had entailed
a degree of personal and financial sacrifice.
In the autumn of 1873 Furnivall published his pros-
pectus for a New Shakspere Society. This document is a
rather interestingly thorough-going Furnivallian piece. It
begins with the characteristic appeal to the national
honor,*® and defines a field of activities for the society’s
entire existence; which was in short the establishment of
a Shakspere canon of authorship and chronology. The
society’s principal publications were to comprise parallel
reprints of the quartos and folios, and possibly a critical
edition of Shakspere’s works and a biography; although
Furnivall apparently intended to attempt little with the
Shakspere text, upon which, said he, ‘‘there will not be
much to do, thanks to the labours of the many distinguisht
48 Hunterian Club, Eighth Annual Report [1887], 3.
49 ““Tt is a disgrace to England that while Germany can boast of a
Shakspere Society which has gathered into itself all its country’s
choicest scholars, England is now without such a society. It is a
disgrace, again, to England that even now, 257 years after Shak-
spere’s death, the study of him has been so narrow, and the criticism
So wooden, that no book by any Englishman exists which deals in any
worthy manner with Shakspere as a whole, which tracks the rise and
growth of his genius from the boyish romanticism or the sharp
young-mannishness of his early plays, to the magnificence, the
splendour, the divine intuition, which mark his ripest works.’’
172 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
scholars who have so long and so faithfully workt at it.’’
Incidentally, the society was to take up conjectural read-
ings, pronunciation, ‘‘under Ellis’s leadership,’’ and
Shaksperean spelling. Tennyson was first offered the posi-
tion of Honorary President, but declined ; so the presidency
of the society remained unfilled until 1879, when Brown-
ing accepted it. ?
The membership at the opening was about two hundred
51 The New Shakspere Society’s Transactions, 1874, I, viii. There
is a characteristic note here: ‘‘ With regard to the formation of the
society I wish to say a word or two, because some people have com-
plained that I have taken too much on myself in this matter. I
can only say that I formd this society in the same way that I
formd all the other societies I have founded; that is, having a special
work to get done, I askt people to come forward and help to do it.
I didn’t ask people in general to come forward, and tell me what
to do, because I knew (more or less) what special things I wanted
done; and when this was the case, I have always found the best
way was, to say so, and let anybody who thought your object a
worthy one, come forward and offer to help in attaining it. But to
let a number of people come together haphazard, sit down on your
objects, and turn your means to other ends, is a way I don’t see the
good of; a way I never have taken, and never mean to take.’’
174 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
and fifty. The society immediately precipitated itself into
the machinery of German critical scholarship, and busied
itself with the ‘‘tests,’’ metrical, pause, and speech-ending,
with great enthusiasm. From the beginning the society had
in view the attainment of definite conclusions, finality, the
absolute settlement of questions; and this confident atti-
tude seemed to many outsiders to imply that the conclu-
sions were likely to be reached before the proofs were
adduced; but in the main the members worked with care
and restraint; and there were really but few of them who
sacrificed themselves to hasty or one-sided judgments.
The society was very active during the first few years of
its existence. By the year 1886 it had issued thirty num-
bers of its publications, exclusive of its Transactions.
These numbers included in the Second Series a promising
beginning for the society’s projected quarto and folio re-
prints, including separate and parallel reprints and revised
reprints of Romeo and Juliet and Henry V, and further
editions of The Two Noble Kinsmen and Cymbeline. The
Third Series contained only one volume, Arthur Brooke’s
Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Iuliet. The first of the
series of allusion books contained entire reprints of well-
known Elizabethan material, such as Greene’s Groatsworth
of Wit and Chettle’s Kind-Hart’s Dream; the other two
volumes in this series being composed of shorter critical
and allusive excerpts. In the Shakspere’s England series
appeared Harrison’s Description of England, Stubbes’
Anatomie of Abuses, and a number of shorter pieces. The
only volume in the proposed series of emergent dramatic
genres was Furnivall’s edition of the Digby Mysteries.
Four numbers of the Miscellanies Series had also been pub-
lished. In the Transactions of the society from the first
there had appeared papers exceeded in importance only
by the best analytical work of the Germans, and also, inevi-
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 175
tably, some papers more remarkable for daring than dis-
cretion. F. G. Fleay was the earliest constant contributor
to the proceedings; and throughout the period of the
society’s activity papers were read by J. W. Hales, John
K. Ingram, Delius, Spedding, P. A. Daniel, Ruskin,
Brinsley Nicholson, Grace Latham, Robert Boyle, Sidney
Lee, Stopford Brooke, and a multitude of others of greater
or less prominence; in all, a singular array of scholars.
The most conspicuous feature of the meetings was, as Furni-
vall had proposed, protracted discussion, in which Furni-
vall himself appropriated a large portion of the general
time and opportunity.
An unfortunate distraction to the society, when it was
at the supreme point of its accomplishment, however, arose
in the form of a long-continued and very bitter contro-
versy, which involved Swinburne, Furnivall, and Halliwell-
Phillipps, and was pursued with a reckless rancor that
would have done credit to Ritson or Gifford.®? The quarrel
began when in 1876 Swinburne, venturing upon an almost
exclusively aesthetic study of Shakspere, possibly in delib-
erate opposition to what he regarded as the mechanical
methods of German scholarship which were made so much
of by the New Shakspere Society, attempted to decide for
Shakspere’s unaided authorship of Henry VIII,>> and in
particular against Spedding’s critical judgment of the
metrical questions involved.®* Furnivall replied to Swin-
burne’s arbitrary and hasty opinion in a letter, not very
52 Furnivall’s management of the society had already been made
the object of an absurd attack issued anonymously by John Jere-
miah: Furnivallos Furioso and ‘‘the Newest Shakespeare Society,’’
a dram-attic squib of the period in three fizzes, London, 1876.
53 Fortnightly Review, XXV, 37-45, 1876.
54 Of the several Shares of Shakspere and Fletcher in the Play of
Henry VIII, Gentleman’s Magazine, August, 1850, 115-23. Re-
printed in The New Shakspere Society’s Transactions, 1874, Ap-
pendix to Part I, 1*-18*.
176 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
provoking, to the Academy,** in which he submitted evi-
dence of the error of Swinburne’s pronouncements. In the
succeeding number of the Academy,°® Swinburne took issue
with Furnivall’s criticisms in ungracious fashion, but the
substance of his argument was an evasion of the statements
to which he had committed himself, and Furnivall answered
this in the second number following.®? There was really no
reply possible to Furnivall’s use of exact evidence; so Swin-
burne for the time being held his peace. He soon retaliated,
however, with the publication of two scathing and thor-
oughly laughable parodies upon the learned investigations
of the New Shakspere Society,°® ridiculing the use of met-
rical and related tests, and the rash manipulation of inter-
nal evidence. In 1879, however, the quarrel became more
bitter, when, in a Note on the Historical Play of King
Edward IIT,°® Swinburne again held up to ridicule the
‘*New-Shakespearean synagogue’’ and their ‘‘ New Shakes-
peare.’’ Relying too much upon his ‘‘delicacy of ear,’’ he
ventured in this article to pronounce final judgment upon
some questions of Shakesperean diction; and Furnivall
descended upon him with naked dirk gleaming in his hand.
In two letters addressed to the editor of the Spectator,®° he
took up specifically Swinburne’s confident decisions upon
55 [X, 34-5, January 8, 1876.
56 TX, 53-5, January 15, 1876.
57 1X, 98-9, January 29, 1876.
58 Report of the First Anniversary Meeting of the Newest Shake-
speare Society (April 1, 1876), Examiner, April 1, 1876; The Newest
Shakespeare Society; Additions and Corrections, Examiner, April 15,
1876. Both of the papers are reprinted in the appendix to A Study
of Shakespeare, 1880.
59 Gentleman’s Magazine, August and September, 1879; 170-81,
330-49. This paper also is appended to A Study of Shakespeare,
1880.
60 September 6 and 13, 1879. The two letters were reprinted, with
comments, by Furnivall in the same year under the title Mr. Swin-
burne’s ‘‘ Flat Burglary’’ on Shakspere.
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 177
the questions, and with the incontrovertible evidence of
quotation and reference he attacked Swinburne’s pose as a
eritic whose intuitive faculties were superior to the syste-
matic analysis of the ‘‘Newest Shakespeare’’ school, and
practically annihilated his pretensions.
Early in 1880 appeared Swinburne’s A Study of Shakes-
peare, which was elaborated from two articles, The Three
Stages of Shakespeare, published in the Fortnightly® in
1875 and 1876; the two articles which, by the way, had
provided Furnivall with his first ammunition. This volume
was reviewed very harshly by Dowden in the first number
of the Academy for that year,®* and with special emphasis
upon Swinburne’s contumacy in sticking to his old asser-
tion that Shakspere was the sole author of Henry VIII.
The review was greeted with letters from both Swinburne
and Furnivall,®* and later in the year another couple of
letters followed,** leaving Furnivall in the attitude of
challenging Swinburne to ‘‘ dispute his facts and argument,’’
and Swinburne satisfied that with ‘‘such a person’’ he
would ‘‘almost as soon think of entering into correspond-
ence as of entering into controversy.’’ Furnivall fired a
parting shot in a letter, again crowded with damaging
evidence of Swinburne’s fatuity, in the next number of the
Academy. Swinburne was without question disastrously
beaten.
At this point Halliwell-Phillipps joined the encounter.
When Swinburne was preparing to publish his Study of
Shakespeare, which was to include in an appendix the three
articles in criticism of the New Shakspere Society, he
decided to display his reverence for the old canons of
61 XXIII, 613-32, XXV, 24-45, 1875-6.
62 XVII, 1-2, January 3, 1880.
83 Academy, XVII, 28, January 10, 1880.
64 Tbid., XVII, 476, June 26, 1880; XVIII, 9, Boars 1880.
65 XVIII, 27-8, July 10, 1880.
15
178 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
Shaksperean criticism by dedicating his volume to Halli-
well; and Halliwell, whose vanity was apparently easily
tickled, accepted what he probably regarded as a gracious
compliment. Whether Halliwell, who up to this time had
been a peaceful and inactive member of the New Shakspere
Society, could read to the bottom of Swinburne’s idea, and
actually saw that Swinburne was hiding behind him to take
a shot at Furnivall, is of course hard to say; the probability
is that he relished the compliment and was a bit slyly
pleased that Furnivall, whose new scholarship had so
greatly overshadowed that of his own day, would have to
swallow Swinburne’s aspersion. In any event, there was
no question in Furnivall’s mind as to the state of things.
‘*T at once wrote to Mr. Hell.-P.,’’ he says,®* ‘‘saying with
what astonishment I had heard that he, affecting then to be
my friend, had agreed to let these insolent Reprints, &c. be
dedicated to him. I pointed out to him that, as the char-
acter of the Pigsbrook articles was known to him, and all
of the Shakspere set, his acceptance of the dedication of
them would be a deliberate adoption by him of the insults
in the articles; and I told him that if his name appeared
before the book, it would stop all relations between him and
me; I would cut him dead; and that if he thus adopted and
offered insults to my friends and me, he would find it a
game which two could play at.’’ Halliwell denied his
responsibility for the contents of the book, but Furnivall
reiterated his threat. The volume appeared in 1880, with
the dedication to Halliwell.
Furnivall’s revenge appeared in his Forewords to his
reprint of the second quarto of Hamlet, the second of the
Shakspere Quarto Fac-Similes. Here he referred to Swin-
burne and Halliwell under the corporate name of ‘‘Pigs-
brook and Co.,’’ and called ‘‘what they are pleased to call
66 The ‘‘Co.’’ of Pigsbrook g Co., [1881], 2.
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 179
their opinions,’’ ‘‘porcine vagaries,’’ descending to rather
meaningless vulgarity throughout his foot-notes to the pref-
ace. Halliwell then appealed to the Committee of the New
Shakspere Society, asking their censure for Furnivall’s
attack,** but the Committee replied that they did ‘‘not
consider the matter as falling within their jurisdiction.’’®
Halliwell thereupon wrote to Browning, the Honorary
President of the society, asking him to use his office for the
purpose of securing a retraction from Furnivall,®® whose
position as Director of the Society was proclaimed upon
the title-page of the Quarto Fac-Similes, and who had
advertised the volumes as appearing ‘‘with the approval
of the Committee of the New Shakspere Society, and the
co-operation of its leading editors.’’ Browning wrote in
reply that his connection with the society was purely honor-
67 Furnivall closed his pamphlet with a P. S.: ‘‘ You will see that
I have said nothing of Mr. Hell.—P.’s action as regards the Com-
mittee; but as I see it, this it is. After two warnings not to do an
act which I, being Chairman of the Committee, tell him will be an
insult to our Society, and each of us, he deliberately does the act. I
retaliate, in a book for which I am solely responsible. He then
comes coolly to the men whom he has insulted, and using fresh
insulting expressions to me, their Chairman, asks them to blame me.
Had I been free to act for them, I should of course have torn
Mr. Hell.—P.’s letter into four pieces, and sent ’em back to him
with the inscription ‘‘Mr. Phillipps’s insolent epistle is returned to
him.’’ But the Committee treated him with great forbearance, and
he, unfortunately, has not been able to appreciate it.’’ The ‘‘Co.’’
of Pigsbrook § Co., 6.
68 [Halliwell’s published Correspondence with Browning], 3.
69 ‘The obvious course would have been to have appealed to a
general meeting of the Society, but here a difficulty arises, there be-
ing no provisions under which such a meeting can be summoned,—
no constitution, no laws, no regulations, and no power whatever
vested in any of the members,—there being, in fact, no Society at
all. ... Under these circumstances, ... you will, I feel sure, excuse
my asking if you will not insist upon the Director’s withdrawal of
the above-quoted disreputable language.’’ (Ibid., 4.)
180 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
ary and that he had not as yet, in fact, attended any of its
meetings; but the point of Halliwell’s appeal he did not
touch. Halliwell then wrote him another letter, assailing
the management of the society, and chiefly its Director,
and published the correspondence.
Furnivall again returned to the fray with a very arro-
gant open letter, The ‘‘Co.’’ of Pigsbrook & Co., in which,
after accusing Halliwell of evasion in disclaiming respon-
sibility for the contents of Swinburne’s book, he sought
refuge for himself by endeavoring simultaneously to dis-
sociate his personal action from his official connection with
the society, and to justify that action as retaliation for ‘‘an
insult to our society.’’*° After Halliwell’s publication of
his correspondence with Browning, the Athenaeum took
up the cudgels for him.“ It gave its opinion that ‘‘the
Committee ought at least to express its disapprobation’’ of
Furnivall’s ‘‘flowers of rhetoric,’’ and added that it was
‘‘hopeless for them to deny responsibility for the preface
in which Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps was wantonly insulted.”’
In the early part of the same year a memorial was addressed
by some-of the prominent members of the society to the
Committee, asking for censure. The Committee again, how-
ever, refused to interfere.“ As a result there was some-
thing of an exodus of members from the society,”? and
70 The ‘‘Co.’’ of Pigsbrook & Co., 6.
71 February 5, 26, March 12, 19, 26, April 16, 1881.
72 Athenaeum, March 12, 19, 26, April 2, 1881; 367, 397, 429, 461.
73 Among those who expressed in this manner their disapproval of
Furnivall’s part in the controversy were R. C. Jebb, J. W. Hales,
Buxton Forman, C. M. Ingleby, Henry Morley, and Leslie Stephen.
Spedding, whose position as to the authorship of Henry VIII was the
immediate ground of Furnivall’s attack upon Swinburne, was among
those who resolved to retire from the society. He wrote shortly
before his death (which occurred before the final action of the Com-
mittee upon the memorial): ‘‘If the society has no organization
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 181
Skeat, Grosart, Aldis Wright, Ulrici, Delius, Elze, and Leo
resigned their honorary vice-presidencies. The gaps were
then filled up by Sweet, Murray, and Prof. Paul Meyer of
the Collége de France. Furnivall addressed a note to the
seceding members of the society: ‘‘On the point taken by
you,’’ this ran, ‘‘opinions differ. My opinion is that ‘the
duty’ of the New Shakspere Society is to mind its own
business,—that is, to study Shakspere. . . . I regard as an
impertinence your intrusion of yourselves into a dispute
declared by me to be private between Mr. Halliwell-
Phillipps and myself, and I am now glad to be rid of you,
whose return for the faithful work I have given you (and
others) is this present censorious caballing against me.’’™*
It has been said, though possibly with some degree of
prejudice, that this episode was the immediate occasion of
the decline of the Shakspere Society’s effective work.7> In
any event, it is certain that with decimated numbers, and
discord still grumbling within the society’s ranks, it was in
a much weaker state than before, and it is a fact that from
1882 on, the publications of the society, barring the Trans-
actions, became noticeably fewer and less important, until
they ceased altogether in 1886. The eight volumes of Fur-
nivall’s ‘‘Old Spelling Shakspere,’’ which were advertised
from 1883 to 1886 as ‘‘at press,’’ never came out; and the
dozen volumes, more or less, which the society had ‘‘in
preparation’’ or under consideration at this date joined the
‘Old Spelling Shakspere’’ in the limbo of books all but
published. From this time on, the only issues of the society
were its Transactions, which chronicled its activities until
1892, the last paper recorded bearing date June tenth of
eapable of putting a stop to the use of such language by its
Director, it is not a society to which a gentleman can belong.’’
(Athenaeum, March 26, 1881, 429.)
74 Athenaeum, April 30, 1881, 593.
75 Shakespeareana, 1892; 185-6.
182 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
that year. In the same year Furnivall announced what
proved to be the society’s last publication, a reprint of
Robert Laneham’s Letter, from the plates of his edition of
Captain Cox’s Ballads for the Ballad Society in 1871, for,
as he explained, ‘‘the falling off in the subscriptions to the
New Shakspere Society makes it needful that a cheap re-
print shall be provided for the issue of 1887’’* (then five
years delayed). The society afterwards passed quietly out
of existence, no notice being given of its dissolution, if it
was ever formally dissolved, and none of the contemporary
reviews commenting upon its disappearance.
The first suggestion for the formation of a society for
the scientific study of English dialects was made by Aldis
Wright in a letter to Notes and Queries in 1870.7 This
letter was followed by comments from a number of linguis-
tic scholars,”® and finally Alexander J. Ellis proposed the
formation of the English Dialect Society in the introduc-
tion to the third part of his Karly English Pronunciation,
published in 1871. The society was soon afterward organ-
ized with about one hundred and twenty-five members; it
planned the issuance of four series of publications, to
include bibliographies of all works illustrative of provin-
cial dialects, reprints of old glossaries, original glossography,
and miscellanies. As a beginning for the society’s collect-
ive work, there was issued in the first year a set of Rules
and Directions for Word Collectors, and the Philological
Society’s plan was followed of gathering and filing slips
containing illustrative examples contributed by a large
number of workers. The result was that through this col-
laborative research and the trained scholarship of a few
76 Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare Gesellschaft, XXVII, 249,
1892.
77 Notes and Queries, 4th Series, V, 271, March 12, 1870.
78 The communications are quoted in the announcement of the
English Dialect Society for 1873.
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 183
gifted leaders, the society published between 1873 and
1896, when the publications were closed, eighty volumes of
county and other local glossaries, old lexicons, and other
important linguistic material. The society was rather an
exceptional example of distributed activity, for a large
number of scholars, many not very well known, appeared
as editors of its issues. The most prominently active of
these were Skeat and Ellis, J. H. Nodal, F. T. Elworthy,
James Britten, Thomas Hallam, Joseph Wright, and R. O.
Heslop. The English Dialect Society was brought to a
close at the moment that Joseph Wright began to carry out
the society’s original purpose of publishing a dialect dic-
tionary; and Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary itself is
of course derived in large part from the great mass of
linguistic material published in the society’s eighty
volumes.”®
The first important society of a type more or less familiar
and more or less generally ridiculed during the last decades
of the nineteenth century was the Wordsworth Society.
This society, like other societies of its kind, devoted itself
exclusively to spreading the appreciation of the works of
a single author, and an author, too, not very far removed
either in point of time or of intellectual outlook from those
who endeavored to study him. The limitation of the field
of interest of a considerable body of men in such a manner
tended almost inevitably to the cultivation of a scholar-
ship that was not always measured by common sense, and
an enthusiasm touched at times by very narrow prejudices.
It is a matter of common remark that in a number of the
greater and lesser societies and clubs formed for the exalta-
tion of a single literary figure, careless and precipitate
judgment interfered with sound study and often invited
irritating ridicule. Before the close of the century there
79 The English Dialect Dictionary, edited by Joseph Wright, I, vii.
184 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
was a Carlyle Society, a Bronté Society, a Ruskin Society,
and Shelley Societies, Browning Societies, and Burns Soci-
eties not a few. The vogue of these organizations unques-
tionably did much to increase general interest in their
favorite authors, and, more tangibly, to provide historical
and biographical material of very real value; indeed, these
projects enlisted the efforts of small bodies of original
workers who, without the incentive and the direction of
collective study, could have produced absolutely nothing of
themselves. On the other hand, the laudation of a single
literary personage no doubt warped the vision of many of
the participants in these pleasant projects, and prepared
the way for much futile appreciative criticism and much
purely nonsensical speculation. There is something intrin-
sically absurd in the introduction of literary culture as a
diversion at afternoon teas; and this was what the vogue
of many of the later Browning Societies, for instance,
apparently meant. On the other hand, taken seriously, by
scholars of adequate training, and readers of literary judg-
ment, such societies could, and did, accomplish much; and
nothing is more significant of the difference between a real
and an affected literary cultivation than the solid results of
the activities of the more important of what we might call the
‘* personage societies,’’ as contrasted with the trivial or pre-
tended interests of others. For there is something well
worth while after all even in the collection of anecdotes, the
tracing out of localities in literary allusions, the unearthing
of remarks and fragments of correspondence, and a dozen
other slight kinds of literary crusading. No one can deny
that the Wordsworth Society was very largely instrumental
in re-creating Wordsworth’s reputation, and that the gen-
eral recognition of the intellectual substance of Shelley’s
work owes a very great deal to the members of the Shelley
Society. The Browning Society, with all its followers,
great and small, cultivated a specious popularity for Brown-
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 185
ing’s work which has left a very solid and healthy residue
of understanding appreciation, even though the popularity
of the poet among many of his following consisted at one
time in the mere fun of endeavoring to rationalize his
phrasal surds.
By the very nature of the case, however, less of the mean-
ingless partiality inherent in such projects was to be
found in the Wordsworth Society. This society was first
planned in 1879,*°° and was established at Grasmere in the
following year.®t The organization contemplated at first
no public function, but the number of applications for
membership induced the organizers to enlarge their original
scheme. From the first the society possessed a social pur-
pose, as well as that defined as its special aim: textual and
chronological work upon the poet, and the collection of
letters, reminiscences, and related matter of biographical
interest. William Knight was throughout the existence of
the society, from 1880 to 1886, its secretary and its prin-
cipal worker. In its closing year the society numbered
nearly three hundred and fifty members. The council of
the society included at various times Knight, Dowden,
Stopford Brooke, Arnold, Lowell, Browning, and Lord
Houghton, the last four of whom were presidents of the
body. During its life the society issued no extensive work
upon Wordsworth’s text, its Transactions including prin-
cipally critical, biographical, and exegetical essays and
addresses. In addition to these, however, the volumes
contain a good bibliography of Wordsworth? by Prof.
80 The Transactions of the Wordsworth Society, issued in eight
numbers from 1882 to 1887, furnish information on all important
points in the history of the body. This information is effectually
digested, however, in Prof. Knight’s preface to Wordsworthiana,
1889.
81 Wordsworthiana, v.
82 Transactions, I, 5-15. Subsequently corrected and again pub-
lished in vol. VII, 121-9.
186 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
Knight, W. F. Poole’s Bibliography of Periodical Reviews
and Criticisms of Wordsworth,** reprints of correspondence,
and Knight’s invaluable List of Wordsworth’s Poems ar:
ranged in chronological Order.84 The most important of
the addresses before the society were published by Knight
in 1889, after the dissolution of the society, as Words-
worthiana.
All in all, the Wordsworth Society must be said to have
been one of the sanest and most discriminating of all the
societies which cherished a personal cult. Among its
members were many men of letters, scholars, and critics of
irreproachable taste and discernment—Leslie Stephen,
Canon Ainger, Aubrey De Vere, Professor Jebb, Richard
Herne Shepherd, Professor Masson, Ruskin, and others
of only less distinction. It would be difficult to accuse such
men of having cultivated a meaningless enthusiasm; in-
deed, the attitude of the society in fleeing as from the
death the term ‘‘ Wordsworthian’’ is sufficiently indicative
of the good sense that marked its purposes and proceedings.
Its history is from beginning to end, in short, a demonstra-
tion of the usefulness of a definite, even though a possibly
sentimental, bond of union for the furtherance of careful
and not over-academic study of a single literary character.
The Browning Society was in many respects the most
important of its type; and the most criticized and ridiculed,
because its founders had the temerity to undertake the
serious study of a living poet—a poet, too, who was looked
upon by many readers and critics in England as a mere
turner of cryptic phrases. The first meeting of this society
was held on October 28, 1881, with three hundred in attend-
ance, of whom seventy were members.®® The society was
83 Ibid., V, 95-102.
84 Ibid., VII, 55-117.
85 Monthly abstract of Proceedings, in Browning Society’s Papers,
pag rid BP bs
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 187
founded, apparently with Browning’s tacit acquiescence,
by Furnivall and Miss E. H. Hickey.** From the first, great
interest was shown in the undertaking, and within a year
of its foundation the original membership was doubled.
One noteworthy feature of the Browning Society was the
number of women comprised among its members, including
such active and enthusiastic workers as Miss Hickey, Mrs.
Orr, and Mrs. Ireland. The plan of the New Shakspere
Society, and later of the Shelley Society, to encourage the
organization of branch societies wherever possible was
adopted by the Browning Society with remarkable success,
to the point even of establishing an esoteric vogue which
extended literally to the farthest corners of the English
speaking world.
The first number of the Browning Society’s Papers in-
cluded Browning’s introductory essay to the spurious
Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, originally published in
1852, and the first instalment of Furnivall’s Bibliography
of Robert Browning.®” Beginning with the second number,
the Papers reflected the activities of the members in criti-
cism, exposition, and illustration of the poet’s works.
Among the best known contributors were James Thomson,
Walter Raleigh, Arthur Symons, C. H. Herford, Furnivall,
and William M. Rossetti; writers less known outside the
exclusive realm of Browning study were J. T. Nettleship,
Edward Berdoe, Helen J. Ormerod, and Mrs. Alexander
Ireland.
Plans for a number of special publications appeared at
an early date. Thomas J. Wise was to undertake a lexicon
or concordance to Browning’s works, but this was aban-
86 Ibid.
87 Furnivall’s ‘‘Forewords’’ contain a characteristic division of
Browning’s works into four ‘‘periods,’’ with an interesting anticipa-
tion of a fifth.
188 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
doned for lack of funds.** An interesting proposal from
Hiram Corson to reprint the Latin and Italian documents
which formed the foundation for the story of The Ring and
the Book was relinquished only upon Browning’s with-
drawal of his permission to print ‘‘the book.’’’® Mrs. Orr
was also to undertake a cheap primer; but this project was
taken over by the Bells,®° who issued in 1885 her Handbook
to Browning’s Works, a much larger book than the society
had looked for. Mrs. Orr’s Handbook was distributed to
the members of the society, as were a number of trade
publications on Browning, including Arthur Symons’s
Introduction to the Works of Robert Browning, and
Sharp’s Life of Browning; the writers of most of the
volumes distributed in this way were themselves members
of the society. The only book outside the Papers which
was issued for the Browning Society alone was the fac-
simile reprint of the excessively scarce Pauline, which was
delivered to the members in 1887. The reprint of the
prose Infe of Strafford was issued through arrangement
with a Boston publisher.
The entertainments and plays offered by the society were
interesting side-issues of its work. The plays produced
were In a Balcony, A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, Colombe’s
Birthday, and Strafford. The last of these was given in
1888, after which it was decided that the expense of pro-
duction was scarcely justified, in view of more pressing
obligations.
Until this year the society’s history was apparently one
of continually growing success, the membership having
risen in seven years to something over two hundred and
fifty. There was from the beginning, however, some differ-
88 First Report of the Browning Society’s Committee, 1882, 2;
Second Report, 1883, xii.
89 First Report, 3; Third Report, xxi.
90 First Report, 3.
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 189
ence of opinion as to how long the body should continue
in existence. Mrs. Orr suggested in 1883 that it should be
closed in five years; this Furnivall stoutly opposed, and
his views were supported by a vote on the question.®** In
1888 EK. C. Gonner moved the dissolution of the society
forthwith, as he was dissatisfied with its want of critical
aim, the missionary character of its work, and the growing
tendency to theological discussion. Gonner’s motion was
seconded by Bernard Shaw, and was followed by very
heated discussion, in which Furnivall gave it as his con-
viction that ‘‘the society should not be wound up, and that
this meeting should say distinctly that the time had not
even come for asking the members’ opinion about it.’’%
The conclusion from the debate was that the society should
move out of the theological rut and should devote itself
more seriously to critical and expository work. Upon the
vote, only one member, J. Dykes Campbell, supported the
sponsors for the motion; there seems to be some significance,
however, in the fact that the three who stood together were
all members of the society’s Committee. In 1889 there was
a sharp decline in the recorded membership of the society,
which was given then as two hundred; this decrease in the
membership had its effect upon all the interests of the
society.°* Browning’s death, at the very close of this year,
could not fail, under these circumstances, to mean for the
society either of two things: resurrection, or calamity. It
proved to mean the latter. In spite of the natural appear-
ance of a reawakened interest in Browning’s work, the
society was evidently doomed. At three meetings following
close upon the death of the poet there were no papers pre-
sented. It was resolved in the next year, 1891, that the
91 Browning Society’s Papers, Pt. IV, 83*.
92 Ibid., Pt. X, 274*-280*.
93 Highth Annual Report, xxxilii.
190 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
society should be discontinued after 1892.°* Four years
later the last echo of its activity was heard when Thomas J.
Wise issued in the name of the Committee a call for two
years’ subscriptions from former members for the purpose
of publishing a bibliography, a collection of letters, and
Part VI of the Papers, which had been due for several
years. Evidently there was not sufficient response to this
appeal to enable the Committee to conclude the society’s
publications and announce its existence as formally closed.
The effect of Scotch sentiment in reviving and sustaining
a hearty interest in Scottish literary antiquity, which we
have already seen reflected in the accomplishments of the
Bannatyne, the Maitland, the Abbotsford, and the Hunter-
ian Clubs, is seen in its most gratifyingly practical aspect in
the Scottish Text Society, founded in 1882.°° The organizers
of this society whose names have been identified most con-
tinuously with the scholarly traditions of the nineteenth
century were Aeneas J. G. Mackay, Masson, Skeat, Thomas
Graves Law, and Sir James Murray. In its very earliest
years the society received a support that the Early English
Text Society, whose publications, it must be assumed,
should have appealed to a much larger number of readers,
has scarcely surpassed even at the present day. That the
Seottish Text Society should have begun its existence with
three hundred members, while the Early English Text
Society began with considerably less than half that number,
and that the present membership of the Scottish society
should exceed that of its sister organization by about one
hundred and fifty, although the society 1s actually eighteen
years younger, are both facts that excite questions. This
marked difference in the amount of interest shown in the
94 Tenth Annual Report, ix—x.
95 For information relative to the history of the Scottish Text
Society I am largely indebted to Mr. W. T. Dickson, Honorary Secre-
tary of the Society.
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 191
schemes for the revival of the literary past of the two
nations is probably explained in part by the real affection
on the part of Scotsmen for all that the language and liter-
ature of the nation have meant to it, the like of which is
assuredly not to be found south of the Cheviot Hills. It is
probably to be explained to some degree, too, by the more
liberal and unautocratic administration of the Scottish
Text Society. On this point there are some marked differ-
ences in the government of the two societies which it is
worth while to point out.
The Early English Text Society is still, as we have seen,*®
governed by a self-continuing council, in whose hands the
entire administration of the society is held; its members
have no voice in the selection of texts, and no voting
powers of any sort. In the Scottish Text Society, on the
other hand, the council is elective, going out by rotation;
this insures the expression of the will of the members in
the administration of the society without sacrificing the
advantage of a relatively permanent executive establish-
ment. In addition, in the Scottish Text Society the opin-
ions and criticisms of members on the proposed publica-
tions are invited, and its fiscal accounts are published.
There can be little question, it would seem, then, that an
administrative program of this kind is more effective and
more generally to be approved than one in which the name
of a society may be utilized, as it has been utilized at
times, to carry forward what is ostensibly a collective
scheme upon lines of personal preference. A further rea-
son for the larger success of the Scottish body may lie in
the fact that its first and plainest function was the reprint-
ing of a series of literary monuments acquaintance with
which has been part of the culture of every representative
Scotchman, while the English society was to undertake the
96 Ante, 163.
192 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
publication of a number of works of distinctly inferior im-
portance, many of which were practically unreadable by
anyone not specially trained in an unspoken tongue. An-
other consideration which may in part account for the
better support for the Scottish Text Society is that, with
a proper Scotch recognition of what is at least proverbially
a proper Scotch characteristic, the Society gives its sub-
seribers extremely good book value for their guinea a year
of subscription.
Since its organization the Scottish Text Society has pub-
lished sixty-three numbers, comprising the works of Dun-
bar, Henryson, Ninian Winzet, Mure of Rowallan, and
Alexander Montgomerie, the poems of Alexander Scott and
Alexander Hume, Blind Harry’s Wallace, James I’s Kingis
Quar, Sir Tristrem, George Buchanan’s vernacular writ-
ings, Barbour’s Bruce, the Gude and Godlie Ballatis,
Bellenden’s Livy, Wyntoun’s Chronicle, six volumes of
saints’ legends, four volumes of Satirical Poems of the
Reformation, the histories of Lindesay of Pittscottie and
Bishop Lesley, Lancelot of the Laik, and William Geddie’s
Bibliography of Middle Scots Poets.
The Shelley Society, founded at London in 1886,°" had
aims and working methods generally similar to those of
the Browning Society. The bulk of its published work con-
sisted of a valuable series of textual reprints, from early
editions and manuscripts. The plan of the Shelley Society,
it seems, was the outcome of a proposal made to Furnivall
by Henry Sweet that he should found such a body. Furni-
vall jumped at the suggestion, and the exact words of his
reply, as he repeated them to the members of the society at
its first meeting, giving as they did a glimpse of Furni-
vall’s self-confident enthusiasm, formed the theme of a very
97 The first three years of the society’s history are covered in the
Note-Book of the Shelley Society ... Vol. I, Part I [all published],
London, 1888.
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 193
clever and amusing bit of quizzing by Andrew Lang in the
Saturday Review for March 18, 1886.°° It was considered
when the society was inaugurated that ten years would
suffice to accomplish all its purposes, and as part of its
program, it was decided to follow the plan of the New
Shakspere and Browning Societies of furthering the influ-
ence of its work by the establishment of as many branch
societies as possible, which should maintain an occasional
correspondence with the London body.
One of the earliest projects of the Shelley Society, and
one which met with the bitterest opposition from many of the
earnest defenders of the national morality, was a dramatic
production of The Cenci; in fact, this was one of the
declared objects of the society at the date of its foundation.
The performance, in 1886, was of course, because of the pro-
hibitions of the censor, a private one, Miss Alma Murray
playing in the principal role.®® In the same year the society
produced Hellas, but naturally with much less comment,
either favorable or adverse.
The publications of the Shelley Society were to follow
the arrangement of those of the New Shakspere Society in
a serial division, in this case into four parts, including
98 ‘¢ “By Jove, I will; he was my father’s friend!’ Thus Dr.
Furnivall, in choice blank verse, replied when he was asked by Mr.
Sweet (Sweet of the pointed and envenomed pen, wherewith he pricks
the men who not elect him a Professor, as he ought to be), ’twas
thus, we say, that Furnivall replied to the bold question asked by
bitter Sweet. ‘And what that question?’ Briefly, it was this—
‘Why do not you, who start so many things, societies for poets live
and dead, why do not you a new communion found—Shelley Society’
might be the name—where men might worry over Shelley’s bones?’
‘By Jove, I will; he was my father’s friend,’ said Furnivall; and
lo, the thing was done!’’—and much more in the same strain.
99 Comments covering the whole history of the staging of The
Cenci, from the first notices of the proposal to the criticisms of the
performance, may be found in the Shelley Society’s Note Book,
39-93.
14
194 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
respectively the Papers of the Society, fac-similes of the
manuscripts and early editions of the poet, memorials, and
bibliographical works. The Second Series, as it actually
appeared, included some volumes which were not fac-
similes, however; no volumes were published in the Third
Series; and eventually an Extra Series was undertaken in
order to hasten the publication of volumes which could not
be printed immediately from the available funds of the
society. Furnivall did none of the editorial work of the
Shelley Society; in the production of the texts of the
Second Series Thomas J. Wise was by far the most active
of the members; Buxton Forman contributed occasional
volumes, and Bertram Dobell, Dowden, Stopford Brooke,
and T. W. Rolleston lent a hand in others. It is doubtful
whether the reprinting of the Shelley Society texts was of
at all the same degree of usefulness as it usually is in
societies which give their attention to more remote periods.
It is probably not too much to say that there is not the
same field for this sort of labor upon Shelley as there might
be upon earlier authors, exposed to the uncertainties of
manuscript publication and very careless printing. Out-
side of the texts, the publications of the society were not
of specially great importance, since William M. Rossetti’s
Memoir of Shelley and Browning’s Essay on Percy Bysshe
Shelley were not originally issued for the society. The
serial arrangement, which was designed to form an effec-
tive classification for the publications, as a matter of fact
turned out to be cumbersome and misleading, as none of
the series was completed, and hiatuses occur in all of those
in which any volumes appeared.
The Shelley Society continued in active existence until
1892, gathering in this period of six years a large amount
of material valuable to the Shelley student, but accomplish-
ing less, probably, than it had intended in the direction of
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 195
encouraging a more general interest in Shelley and his
writings. It was, in fact, probably the case with the Shelley
Society, as with most others of its class, that its benefits
were confined in the main to its own members.
The remaining years of the nineteenth century produced
no new literary societies of wide prominence. Since 1900,
however, two or three important organizations have begun
with promise, one of which has also closed its career.
An organization of unique interest among English learned
societies is the British Academy. When in 1899 there was
established the International Association of Academies, it
was urged by the newly instituted body that steps should
be taken toward corporate representation of the branches
of study not dealt with by the Royal Society. The Royal
Society itself, therefore, made overtures to a number of
representative scholars; and at a conference which followed
it was decided that the establishment of an entirely new
academy would be more effective than a federation of
societies whose interests lay within the unrepresented fields.
The Royal Society, however, was unwilling to carry further
its initial effort; so those who had received the Royal Soci-
ety’s first communication undertook the steps toward
organization upon their own responsibility. In 1901 a
meeting was held at which it was resolved: ‘‘It is desirable
that a society representative of historical, philosophical,
and philological studies be formed on conditions which will
satisfy the requirements of the International Association
of Academies,’’*°° and invitations for membership in the
British Academy for the Promotion of Historical, Philo-
sophical, and Philological Studies were soon afterward sent
to a number of prominent scholars in these branches. The
Academy held its first meeting in 1901, and received a
royal charter in the following year. The names upon the
100 Proceedings of the British Academy, 1903-1904, ix.
196 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
original list of fellows which should particularly interest
us were E. Maunde Thompson, A. W. Ward, Gollancz,
Murray, Skeat, Leslie Stephen, and Whitley Stokes; there
were subsequently added within the year A. H. Firth,
Furnivall, W. P. Ker, W. R. Morfill, A. 8. Napier, and
Joseph Wright, and in later years A. C. Bradley, Henry
Bradley, W. J. Courthope, Andrew Lang, Sidney Lee, and
George FE’. Warner.
The work of the British Academy in its special fields was
to be prosecuted through the activities of Sectional Com-
mittees ;*° and a point of interest in its intellectual out-
look was the early announcement of the policy of avoiding
the presumption of acting as in a position of scholarly
authority.*°? In relation to the special field of English
scholarship, the Academy had at the time of its foundation
no specific plan, beyond the encouragement of the pro-
grams of linguistic and literary research already on foot.1%
Since the establishment of the Academy, the fellows chosen
to represent English philological scholarship have presented
to the meetings of the body valuable monographs upon
diverse subjects; but the Academy has so far undertaken
no comprehensive work in this field.
The Early English Drama Society, apparently less an
actual association than a proprietary name, was founded
by John S. Farmer in 1905, ‘‘to provide a corpus of early
English dramatic literature, commencing with the transi-
tion period between interlude, comedy, and tragedy,’’?4
and also to re-issue book and manuscript rarities in fac-
simile reprints. The society published between 1905 and
1908 a series of thirteen volumes of Early English Drama-
tists in modernized spelling, comprising the complete works
101 Ibid., 3.
102 Ibid., 9.
103 Tbid., 11.
104 The Early English Drama Society, [Announcement, 1905], 1.
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 197
of John Heywood, and a practically complete body of pre-
Elizabethan moralities, interludes, comedies, and tragedies,
both well and little known, and containing also an extra
volume of discoveries, ‘‘Zost’’ Tudor Plays. A second
series of twelve volumes of early Elizabethan plays was
planned and announced to succeed the published series, but
the society closed before this was set on foot. The dissolu-
tion of the organization was probably hastened by a scath-
ing review of its first publications in the Academy for
March 24, 1906,7° a review which questioned both the good
faith of the organizers and the scholarly character of their
texts. Asa result of this criticism, four of the six honorary
vice-presidents withdrew from the society. Setting aside
the personal questions connected with the break-up of the
organization, it must be said that the society had done little
more than to print in a new form a number of plays already
generally available, the three volumes of John Heywood,
for example, having been issued originally by the Spenser
Society, two even of the three ‘‘ Lost’? Tudor Plays having
been already published by the Malone Society, and a large
number of the remaining plays having appeared in previous
collections, particularly in Carew Hazlitt’s Dodsley.1%
The Early English Drama Society also published a Fac-
simile Series of early manuscripts and rare printed plays,
and a series of Musewm Dramatists, which was simply a
selection of separate plays from the Karly English Drama-
tists series, printed off in compact volumes as students’
texts.
One of the most productive societies of the present day is
the Malone Society, founded in London in 1906 through the
105 March 24, 1906, 280-1. See also The Academy, for March 31,
April 7 and 28 (315, 323, and 338-9).
106 From Hazlitt’s Dodsley, by the way, the Academy reviewer
intimates, Hickscorner was apparently reprinted; and not from the
text of Wynkyn de Worde’s edition.
198 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
recommendations of a committee consisting of F. 8. Boas,
E. K. Chambers, R. B. McKerrow, A. W. Pollard, and
W. W. Greg.?*? Mr. Chambers has been the president of
the society since its foundation, and Mr. Greg the general
editor of its series of publications. The society has been
publishing during its five years of existence, at the uniform
rate of five a year, a series of type facsimile reprints
of Tudor plays, in the format of the familiar Eliza-
bethan quarto. It has also published every year one num-
ber of its Collections, consisting mainly of dramatic frag-
ments and theatrical records, and paged continuously to
form a volume of four or five numbers. In its productivity,
its care in the preparation of texts, and in the charm of its
books as books, the Malone Society has set a standard of
efficient and tasteful publication which has already placed
it in a position of unusual and well deserved distinction.
The English Association was founded in January, 1907,
‘“‘to enforce the truth ... that the accurate and pliant
writing of English, the correct speaking of English, and the
just appreciation of English literature are not less impor-
tant acquirements than any other that can come of educa- —
tional training.’’4°> The incidental purposes of the society
are ‘‘to afford opportunities of intercourse and cooperation
among all who are interested in English language and liter-
ature; to discuss methods of teaching English and the co-
relation of school and university work; and to encourage
and facilitate advanced study in English language and
literature.’’ The project was suggested by a group of sec-
ondary school masters; and from the beginning the program
of the society has been mainly educational. Its publications
so far have been its Essays and Studies, which have ap-
107 Athenaeum, October 20, 1906, 488. Mr. Greg has been kind
enough to send me information relative to the organization of the
society.
108 Academy, January 19, 1907, 71-2.
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 199
peared annually for the last three years, and which have
included papers and addresses by Henry Bradley, W. P.
Ker, George Saintsbury, F. S. Boas, A. C. Bradley, and
other prominent scholars and educators.
It would be impossible to cover in detail the work of a
number of minor literary societies which have published
material of great potential value to students. Among the
great number of such societies, however, may be mentioned
the Manchester Literary Club, founded in 1861, and issuing
a series of annual 7’ransactions in which contributions have
been printed from a group of workers of some note outside
of the society itself, among them George Milner, W. EH. A.
Axon, and J. H. Nodal. The Scottish Literary Club issued
in 1877 and 1892 two publications of local literary
interest ;*°° and the Paisley Burns Club, likewise, between
1878 and 1881 published three volumes of local eighteenth
century authors. The Wiclif Society, organized by Furni-
vall in 1882, is still engaged upon the publication of the
body of Wiclif’s Latin works. The Bronté Society, of
Bradford, has led since 1894 an active existence, publish-
ing in its annual Transactions a number of good Bronté
items, including a well executed bibliography in two parts.
The Rymour Club, founded at Edinburgh in 1903, has
issued a few numbers of useful records of purely popular
literary material. Local philological societies are of course
rarer than local literary societies. Two, however, seem
deserving of special notice. The Cambridge Philological
Society, composed of trained scholars connected with the
University, has printed in its Transactions since 1881 notes
of a number of valuable contributions on phonology, ety-
mology, and the like. The Yorkshire Dialect Society, organ-
ized in 1886, has done a commendable amount of serious
work in local linguistic study.
109 ©, §. Terry, op. cit., 160.
200 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
A few societies which have not issued regular publica-
tions have nevertheless exerted a perceptible influence upon
literary scholarship; examples of these are the Carlyle and
Ruskin Societies—both of which were formed for the study
of the artistic, social, and literary theories of the writers of
their choice, rather than for objective literary study.
Other societies of importance are the Modern Language
Association, the Elizabethan Society, and a host of local
Shakspere and Browning societies and the like, including
all classes of students, and ranging over a wide scale of
effectiveness and accomplishment. The cultural aims of
such institutions are as a rule, however, so general or so
vaguely defined, that to include such societies among our
learned societies would be to test severely the elasticity of
the term.
It is difficult to draw definite conclusions from this his-
torical review as to anything beyond the tangible value of
the aid which these bodies have given to English scholar-
ship. We have seen that the form of the society’s organi-
zation has always been determined largely by the nature
and the extent of its literary interests; that societies made
up at first of mere dilettanti were replaced by associations
of interested students whose capacities were to be measured
by the earnest but undeveloped scholarship of the first half
of the nineteenth century; and that these societies in turn
died out after the middle of the century, and were suc-
eeeded by a number of organizations established and con-
ducted by men ripened in careful and efficient modern
scholarship, and determined to make the entire field of
English literature available for general study—and their
fight has been always up-hill. The quality of the results
obtained by these various and varied organizations has
been affected by a number of conditions, their period, their
personnel, the extent of popular interest in their projects,
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 201
and most of all, of course, their working efficiency. It can
not be said that the number of any given society can be
taken as a measure of the actual value of its work, even
when there is no numerical limit placed upon its member-
ship. Numbers generally means wealth, and wealth means
opportunities for wide diffusion of the special aspect of
culture for which the society’ stands as advocate and
agent; but the Early English Text Society, which from the
standpoint of the bulk and the scholarly value of its pub-
lished product must be regarded as clearly the greatest of
all, is in the actual number of its members still a small
society.
Nor can much be said in a general way as to what is the
most effective method of organization. We:have reviewed
all types of association, from the aristocratic club of a
handful of members, which can make its business the sub-
ject of an evening’s informal talk, to the large text society,
international in its scope, with which the members have
scarcely what might be called a speaking acquaintance.
All these forms of organization are adapted to special pur-
poses; each must be more or less effective in its own way.
In general it may be said that unreasonable limitation upon
the membership places an unnecessary restriction upon a
society’s usefulness; on the other hand, where the object
of the society is not merely to sell books, and where there
is in addition a social purpose to be served, such a limita-
tion is practically unavoidable. As to administrative
methods, probably the most successful society is the one
whose corporate organization does not view the members
merely as subscribers, but as constituents, and to a certain
extent, even as collaborators. The advantage which the
Seottish Text Society seems to enjoy in this respect over
the Early English Text Society has already been re-
ferred to.11°
110 Ante, 191-2.
202 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
Most societies in this field, at least in England, are what
insurance statisticians would call ‘‘bad risks.’’ To be sure,
a few of these organizations, such as the Warton Club and
the Shelley Society, have at their foundation placed a more
or less definite limit upon the period of their existence.
Others, like the Wordsworth Society and the Browning
Society, are confined by the nature of their interests to
relatively brief life. Causes really unconnected with the
essential work of a society have too often cut off promi-
nent organizations before their utility has been effectively
realized ; this was apparently the case with the Shakespeare
Society and the New Shakspere Society, in both of which
the personal concerns of important members exercised a
serious if not fatal influence upon the fortunes of the
society. But taking all these special conditions into con-
sideration, the fact remains that the average literary
society may count itself fortunate if it has seen, say, its
fifteenth anniversary. On the whole, the text societies
may be said to have a more promising outlook for long serv-
ice than what for want of a better term we might call the
critical. societies. In the latter, the general indefiniteness
of the program, the reaction in interest in the chosen sub-
ject after a certain period of strenuous activity has been
passed, the undue importance of personalities, big and
little, all combine to produce friction and disarrangement
when the machinery seems to be running most smoothly.
In the text societies the definiteness of the program, the
constant rate of progress, the tangible value of the product,
may not capture the unthinking enthusiasm of a large
number, but may be counted upon to retain the interest of
a faithful and thoroughly appreciative few, still sufficient
in number to make the project easily self-supporting from
year to year. Of all the societies devoted exclusively to
English literary studies, the Early English Text Society
———S
PHILOLOGICAL AND TEXT SOCIETIES 203
has been so far the most enduring. The Chaucer Society,
the junior of its sister body by only four years, and the
only society of the sort approaching the longevity of the
Early English Text Society, was dissolved after forty-four
years of service, having completed in this time a series of
texts and treatises unequalled by any organization save the
first and favorite of Furnivall’s printing societies. The
Early English Text Society, at the close of fifty years’
activity, seems to have before it many years of profitable
labor; and if the signs of its present vitality are not
deceptive, it should live to accomplish fully one of the most
monumental publishing projects of our age of monumental
works—a project, in fact, paralleled only by a few series
produced either with the aid of heavy subsidies or under
the auspices of strong and wealthy institutions.
CHAPTER VII
AMERICAN SOCIETIES AND CLUBS?
It is not to be expected that the activities of learned
societies in the United States should produce results to be
compared in a large way with those secured by such socie-
ties in Great Britain. Although the work of American
scholars upon English literature has for many years earned
the respect of both British and Continental students, and
although latterly American scholarship has frequently
contributed to the publications of foreign text societies,
isolation, special interests, the remoteness of manuscript
material, have all provided an effective bar to extensive
cooperative publication in this country. In addition, Eng-
lish literary antiquity is something in which America does
not and can not directly share; an American society for the
publication of English texts would be, therefore, for senti-
mental as well as geographical reasons, almost an impos-
sibility. The history of publishing societies in the United
States has shown that this fact is very generally appre-
ciated; so we find the really scholarly societies working
along lines subordinate to or collateral with the labors of
1Two facts have made it advisable to treat our American publish-
ing societies less in detail than English organizations of a similar
nature. In the first place, very few of them rank in importance,
either historically or in the extent of their production, with the Eng-
lish societies; in the second place, the history and bibliography of
American societies has been altogether very well done, in four works
to which in most of this chapter, except the portion dealing with
purely philosophical societies, I have been under continuous obligation.
These are Growoll’s American Book Clubs, 1897, Bowker’s Publica-
tions of Societies, 1899, Griffin’s Bibliography of American Historical
Societies, 1907, and Thompson’s Handbook of Learned Societies and
Institutions, 1908.
204
es
SO a ee ee
ee a een
eee
ah
AMERICAN SOCIETIES AND CLUBS 205
European scholars, or devoting their efforts to the ltera-
ture of their own nation. With the book clubs, which to-day
occupy a much more important place in the United States
than in England, the case is somewhat different, for manu-
scripts, memorabilia, curiosa of every sort, of the modern
period, migrate much more readily than the literary treas-
ures of medieval or Saxon England; and since at any rate
this kind of literary material does not antedate the Ameri-
ean civilization, it is actually more or less a part of Ameri-
ean literary culture. Book Clubs in America, therefore,—
and these are practically the only literary organizations
which have produced reprints on an extensive scale—have
drawn largely upon English literature and literary remains
of the last three centuries, as well as upon the less promising
field of American literature.
Societies devoted extensively or seriously to philological
study have been in the United States very few in number.
The oldest of them all is the American Philological Asso-
ciation, organized in New York in 1868 for investigation in
the entire field of philology.? Its scholarly outlook at the
time of its establishment was similar to that of the Philo-
logical Society of London; but for patent reasons the
American Association at first showed a special interest in
aboriginal American dialects. In the early meetings of
the Association papers upon English linguistics were not
infrequent; at present, however, none of the English
scholars in the Association exhibits a specially active inter-
est in its work, though the society still includes in its
membership many of the best known modern language stu-
dents. The American Philological Association was affiliated
in 1900 with the Philological Association of the Pacific
Coast. This new section of the Association still shows an
2 Transactions, 1869-70; App. 1-30, 1871.
3 Transactions, XXXI (Proceedings), xxix, 1900.
206 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
active interest in modern language studies, and many
papers in this province are read at its annual meetings.
The discontinuance of the American Philological Associa-
tion’s work in modern philology must be ascribed largely to
the appropriation of this field in 1884 by the Modern
Language Association of America; and the reason that the
Pacific Coast Association still continues its interest in modern
languages is probably that the meetings of the two divisions
of the Modern Language Association are practically inac-
cessible to Far Western scholars.
The American Philological Association first identified
itself with the spelling reform movement in America
in 1875, six years after the Philological Society had
introduced the question in England. The provisional
work of the Association in turn redirected attention to
the subject in the English organization, after interest
in it had for the time being apparently waned.® In 1883
the two societies entered into a working agreement for
the furtherance of spelling reform. Following up the
initial efforts of the American Philological Association, the
propaganda was spread by the Spelling Reform Association,
and in 1892 the Modern Language Association approved
the adoption of the Philological Association’s rules. The
cause is being advanced in the United States to-day
chiefly by the militant Simplified Spelling Board, which
was organized in 1906 ‘‘to carry on the process of simpli-
fication and regulation,’’’ and in England by the Sim-
plified Spelling Society, established in 1908. After the
problem was brought up by the members of the Philological
Society of London, altogether the most fruitful work in this
direction was accomplished—and is still being accom-
4 Transactions, XXIV (Proceedings), xxxv—xxxvi, 1893.
5 Ante, 152-4.
§ Tbid.
7 Simplified Spelling Board, Circular No. 16, 1907.
AMERICAN SOCIETIES AND CLUBS 207
plished—by American organizations. Whether this is be-
cause of the greater activity of these societies, or the less
strongly intrenched tradition of conservatism in the United
States, is of course an open question.
The Modern Language Association of America was organ-
ized at a conference of forty modern language teachers at
Columbia College in December, 1883.8 The first aims of
this body were almost exclusively pedagogical. The weak-
ening of the tradition of purely classical culture had been
much more rapid in the United States than in England, and
the demand for modern languages in both the cultural and
the vocational branches of university instruction had re-
sulted in a concentration of the attention of teachers of
these languages upon scientific methods of teaching them.
It was in response to the growing importance of questions
connected with the changing order of things that these
teachers formed their union; and for the first few years of
the Association’s existence, therefore, it was occupied pri-
marily with educational questions, particularly with the
problem of standardizing requirements and instruction in
the modern languages. Although the special interest of the
Modern Language Association placed it for this reason in
a position of natural opposition to the classical languages,
the organization was as a matter of fact in its early years
opposed to radical action in favor of substituting the mod-
ern for the classical tongues in the university curriculum.®
This association has from its earliest period included in
its membership the great majority of well known American
scholars; for although the exclusively pedagogical outlook
was abandoned shortly after its foundation, in actual fact
the organization is made up to-day almost entirely of mod-
ern language teachers in the colleges and universities, in all
8 Proceedings at New York, 1884; in Transactions, I, i-vii, 1886.
9 Ibid., xviii—xix.
208 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
well over a thousand. The nature of its work, however, is
to-day quite changed: it is concerned principally with ques-
tions of pure scholarship; and its Publications have been
for twenty years a distinguished medium of scholarly
communication.
The Publications, which represent effectively the associa-
tion’s present interests, include in the main literary and
linguistic monographs, frequently of more considerable
length than is generally acceptable to reviews less gener-
ously supported. The confinement of the scholarly labor of
the members to purely historical and commentative work
is accounted for in large measure by the circumstances
which naturally prevent American scholars from develop-
ing an original tradition in English scholarship. And it
is worth noting in passing that the conditions which limit
the possibilities of English textual scholarship in America
have brought it about that in this subsidiary field of scholar-
ship there is in general a much greater productivity in the
United States than in England. American scholars, for
example, are maintaining a larger number of modern lan-
guage periodicals and reviews than are to be found in Eng-
land. The condition may also be explained in part, it is
true, by the fact that American students have borrowed
the monograph habit from Germany, while the parapher-
nalia of German scholarship has not been taken over in
England either as readily or as thankfully as in America.
The Modern Language Association of America is now
separated for working purposes into two divisions. In 1896
a number of members in the Middle West, considering the
inconvenience of attending meetings in the East, proposed
a separate conference.*° As a result of this action, the
Central Division of the Association was established, with
its own officers and its own place of meeting, but using the
Publications as its organ.
10 Publications, XI (Proceedings), Iviii-lix, 1896.
AMERICAN SOCIETIES AND CLUBS 209
Out of the Modern Language Association have grown two
independent organizations which, although they have no
formal connection with the older society, usually for rea-
sons of convenience hold their meetings at the place and
time appointed for the annual meeting of the Association.
These are the American Dialect Society and the Concord-
ance Society, both of which have issued some valuable pub-
lications.
The first of these, the American Dialect Society, was orga-
nized in 1889 for the investigation of the English dialects
of America. Professor Child, then one of the most important
figures in American scholarship, was its first president?
In its first year the society numbered over two hundred
members, well distributed throughout the country, and for
a time there was a gratifying and continuous increase in
membership ; but the numbers of the society are now appar-
ently decreasing, as the last report of the society gives only
about 150 names. The society has published since its or-
ganization Dialect Notes, a serial devoted to dialect records
and history, word lists, and similar material. It has also
aimed at the publication of an American Dialect Diction-
ary, but no definite steps have been taken toward the
realization of this plan; and in the present state of the
society, which is making ominous appeals for increased
financial support, it is unlikely that the Dialect Diction-
ary will be, for some years to come, anything more than a
glorious hope.
The Concordance Society, established at the annual
meeting of the Modern Language Association in 1906, aims
to provide subventions toward the publication of concord-
ances and word indexes to English writers, ‘‘to formulate
plans for the compilation of such works, and to assist in-
tending compilers of such works with suggestions and
11 Dialect Notes, I, 1, 1896.
15
210 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
advice.’”12, The Society has numbered from its organiza-
tion about one hundred members. Its first publication
was a Concordance to the English Poems of Thomas Gray,
published under the editorial supervision of Albert S.
Cook in 1908; and this work was followed in 1911 by its
Concordance to the Poems of William Wordsworth, edited
by Lane Cooper. The society’s method of support for such
projects is to appropriate amounts from its income, derived
from annual dues of five dollars, as payments to pub-
lishers, not to compilers, toward the expenses of publica-
tion of these works, which could not under ordinary con-
ditions be looked upon as promising commercial ventures.
Its work is one of the best examples of the effectiveness of
cooperative labor and financial support for a large plan
of publication which, however useful, it would be impos-
sible to realize under private auspices.
Local societies for literary study, especially of the type
most familiar toward the end of the nineteenth century,
have been very numerous in the United States. There
have been, of course, many Shakspere societies in the most
important cities; and in the eighties and nineties there was
a rather remarkable growth, followed in most cases by a
rapid decay, of Browning societies. Few of these local
bodies achieved the dignity of publishing anything of per-
manent value to literary students; but two or three merit
special, if only passing mention.
The Shakspere Society of Philadelphia, actually the
oldest Shakspere Society in existence, was established in
1851.17. Its importance is largely due to the fact that at
an early date Horace Howard Furness became associated
with it; it is even apparently true that the plan for Fur-
ness’s Variorum Shakspere originated among the members
12 The Concordance Society, Circular No, 7 [1911].
13 New Shakespeareana, III, 108-9, 1904.
AMERICAN SOCIETIES AND CLUBS 211
of this society.1* The only publications of the society are
five brochures, two relating to its own history, and three
of them critical essays.
The most widely known society of this type is probably
the Shakespeare Society of New York, established and
incorporated in 1885.45 For the first twenty-two years of
the society’s existence its destiny was directed by Apple-
ton Morgan, a lawyer of local repute. Within this period
it produced a series of publications in their bulk quite
imposing, including the Bankside Shakespeare, a series of
parallel reprints of quarto and First Folio texts, issued
in twenty-one volumes from 1885 to 1906. The Bankside
Sequel, for the reprinting of texts of which no printed
copy exists prior to the First Folio, has supplied so far
only a single volume. The Bankside Restoration Seres,
designed for the reproduction of Restoration adaptations
of Shakspere, now numbers five volumes. In addition the
society has published twelve numbers of its Papers. Al-
together the record of the society is readily seen to be one
of commendable industry; in particular, its series of re-
prints have without doubt a very definite potential value ; yet
it must be said that the organization does not possess the
scholarly importance which the bulk of its publications
would lead one to assume. From 1889 to 1893 it con-
ducted a periodical called Shakespeareana, and from 1902
on, its successor, New Shakespeareana. In these two pub-
lications, as well as in some of its Papers, are to be found
the society’s contributions to Shakspere criticism; and
this criticism, it must be admitted, tends in the main to be
rather provincial. Moreover, the attitude of some of the
most influential members of the society toward the criticism
and scholarship represented in the work of other institu-
tions and other individuals, is generally a little over-
14 New Shakespeareana, II, 30, 1903.
15 Shakespeareana, II, 264, 1885.
212 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
confident, and in controversy almost always needlessly
provocative. The real importance of the society, therefore,
lies rather in its published reprints than in its larger but
rather careless and whimsical body of critical work.
Among the numerous Browning clubs which sprang up
in America after the establishment of Furnivall’s Brown-
ing Society, only one, the Boston Browning Society, has
published any work of serious value to students of the
poet. The Boston Browning Society Papers, published in
1900, and covering the activities of the society from 1886
to 1897, included contributions from Thomas Wentworth
Higginson, George Willis Cooke, and other local scholars
of repute.
Book clubs came into vogue in America during the
period when their popularity in Great Britain was begin-
ning to wane, when, in fact, the famous Scottish clubs
were struggling for continued existence. These American
book clubs possess naturally less interest and significance
for the student of the broader field of English literature
than their English predecessors. This is true in part be-
cause the English field has usually been regarded in the
United States as belonging for reasons of sentiment to
English scholars; and in part because the strong national-
ism, indeed localism, of most of our American organiza-
tions has without doubt directed their activities into lines ©
mainly of national interest. Moreover, since the history of
early American literature is in the main representative of
an intellectual tradition which has been in the past, and is
therefore likely to continue to be, of small interest save
to the ‘‘good American,’’ it is quite apparent that the dearth
of important literary publications among American print-
ing clubs is emphasized by the relatively slight value of
much of their published product. There are, however,
three notable exceptions to this rule: the Grolier Club, the
Dunlap Society, and the Bibliophile Society.
AMERICAN SOCIETIES AND CLUBS 213
The best known among American book clubs is the
Grolier Club, organized in 1884 by a group of men ‘‘inter-
ested in the arts entering into the production of books.’’
The distinguished press-maker and collector, Robert Hoe,
was the first president of the club.1° The organization
was formed with the idea that a union of book lovers and
book makers could accomplish much for bibliophile inter-
ests in America; with so clear and practical an aim, it was
inevitable that it should take its place among the makers
of tradition in this field.
Because of its consecration to the bibliophile cause, how-
ever, some of its numerous publications in the domain of
English letters possess no special merit beyond their exqui-
site quality as books; such are the issues of Fitzgerald’s
Rubdiyat, Irving’s Knickerbocker History of New York,
Charles Reade’s Peg Woffington, and Milton’s Areopagi-
tica. In a class of real scholarly distinction, however, are
Richard de Bury’s Philobiblon, The Poems of John Donne,
with emendations by Lowell, Two Note Books of Thomas
Carlyle, Copeland’s translation of the History of Helyas,
from Wynkin de Worde’s edition of 1512, and two important
bibliographical works: a Catalogue of original and early
Editions of some of the poetical and prose Works of Eng-
lish Writers from Langland to Wither, published in 1893,
and three volumes of similar nature covering the period
from Wither to Prior, published in 1905. The catalogues
of the club’s occasional exhibitions also contain something
of distinct value to either dilettante or student. So far
these have included exhibitions in honor of Dryden in
1900, Franklin in 1906, Milton in 1908, Johnson in 1909,
Pope in 1911, Thackeray in 1912, and Dickens in 1913.
The Dunlap Society was established in 1885 at the sug-
gestion of Professor Brander Matthews for the purpose of
16 Brander Matthews, Bookbindings Old and New, with an Account
of the Grolier Club, 1895, 302.
914 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
preserving and publishing material pertaining to Ameri-
can dramatic writing and the American stage.17 The
society was inactive from 1891 to 1896, and its printing
has again been suspended since 1902. Its publications
consist entirely of American dramatic literature and theat-
rical records. The First Series of fifteen volumes, running
from 1887 to 1891, included four early American plays, an
equal number of dramatic biographies, and a number of
papers and addresses relating to the American stage. The
New Series of the society’s publications began with its re-
organization, in 1896, after five years of inactivity. In
this series appeared in 1900 two valuable bibliographies,
Oscar Wegelin’s Early American Plays, 1714-1830, and
Robert F. Roden’s Later American Plays, 1831-1900. All
the remaining volumes in this series of fifteen were con-
cerned with American stage history and dramatic biog-
raphy. The Dunlap Society possesses, apparently, a unique
interest as the only organization which has devoted itself
exclusively to the entire domain of a nation’s dramatic
literature and history.
The Bibliophile Society, founded in 1901 in Boston,
‘‘for the purpose of the study and promotion of the arts
pertaining to fine book making and illustrating,’’** has in
its twelve years of life distributed to its members an im-
posing series of publications, many of them possessing great
and at times unique importance to students of English and
American literature. The first president of the society was
Nathan Haskell Dole. Its first issue was four volumes of
Horace’s Odes and Epodes, with a selection of the best
English versions; and in its second year it produced an
elaborate edition of Dibdin’s Bibliomania. The earliest
volume of significance to the English scholar was a fac-
simile reprint of Rossetti’s Henry the Leper, a paraphrase
17 Growoll, American Book Clubs, 1897, 278-80.
18 Tenth Year Book, 1911, 171.
AMERICAN SOCIETIES AND CLUBS 215
from Hartmann von Aue. In 1906 was published a mem-
orable edition of The Letters of Charles Lamb, in five
volumes, and in the following year three volumes of un-
published manuscripts by Thoreau. In 1907 appeared
The Romance of Mary Wollstonecroft Shelley, John
Howard Payne, and Washington Irving, from a series of
letters, and later The Private Correspondence of Charles
Dickens and Maria Beadnell and The Dickens-Kolle Corre-
spondence. The society’s latest publication is its Note
Books of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited in three volumes
by Buxton Forman. In addition, the regular publications
have included unpublished poems by Bryant, Thoreau,
and Keats, letters from Thomas Love Peacock, and unpub-
lished orations by John Fiske, the ‘‘Geddes Burns’’, and
a reprint of Thoreau’s Walden, from the manuscript, con-
taining many points of difference from the trade edition.
In the Year Books of the society are also preserved many
valuable pieces, including unpublished fragments by
Whittier, Longfellow, Thoreau, Bayard Taylor, Scott,
Cooper, and Tom Moore. This survey of the issues of the
Bibliophile Society shows it to be one of the most impor-
tant clubs publishing English texts. Indeed, considering
its brief existence, its industry and the scholarly character
and the rarity of the originals of its productions place it
second to no body of its kind.
In the United States there have been for more than a
half century a number of clubs, some of them consisting
of no more than four or five members, which have pub-
lished occasionally works of literary interest. The major-
ity of these strictly private clubs have put their attention
principally upon local American history and literature;
but the publications of a few of them possess a broader
significance.’® The earliest of these, the Bradford Club,
19 For the history of most of these smaller institutions see Growoll’s
American Book Clubs, 1897, and Thompson’s Handbook of Learned
Societies and Institutions, 1908.
216 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
founded in New York in 1857, issued three years later The
Croakers of Halleck and Drake, a series of satires con-
tributed in 1811 to the Evening Post of New York. The
Naragansett Club, of Providence, sent out between 1865
and 1874 six volumes by or relating to Roger Williams.
The Club of Odd Volumes, organized in Boston in 1886,
published from 1894 to 1898 five volumes of Early Amer-
ican Poetry and some useful histories of the Massachu-
setts press and book-trade.
The Rowfant Club, established in Cleveland in 1892,
has published a number of works in English literature,
most of them more noteworthy for bibliophile excellence
than for original or critical value. Among its issues are
a volume of Drake’s poems, Landor’s Letter to Emerson,
Frederick lLocker’s Rowfant Rhymes, and Franklin’s
Autobiography. In a class of superior merit, however,
are Samuel Arthur Jones’s Bibliography of Henry David
Thoreau, 1894, Lowell’s Lectures on English Poets, deliv-
ered in 1855 before the Lowell Institute, and published by
the club in 1897, and W. H. Cathcart’s chia of
the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1905.
The Society of the Duodecimos, a club of twelve mem-
bers organized in 1893, issued in 1897 an important edi-
tion by Charles Eliot Norton of The Poems of Mrs. Anne
Bradstreet. The Caxton Club of Chicago, formed two
years later, published in 1898, Some Letters of Edgar Allan
Poe to E. H. N. Patterson. The Club for Colonial Re-
prints, founded at Providence in 1903, has issued two
small Freneau and Roger Williams items. Besides these
minor book clubs, other kinds of organizations have ren-
_ dered service of more or less magnitude to English studies
in America; for example the Acorn Club, with a series in
Colonial history and bibliography, the Princeton Histor-
ical Association, with its three volumes of The Poems of
AMERICAN SOCIETIES AND CLUBS Si
Philip Freneau (1902-1907), and the Bibliographical Soci-
ety of America, with many papers in literary bibliography.
In addition to these must be mentioned the American
Historical Association and a number of local historical
societies in the East, most notably the Prince Society and
the Massachusetts Historical Society, which have included
in their publications from time to time occasional exam-
ples of early American literature or historical documents
which possess a value for literary students.
It will be seen from the present brief review of Ameri-
ean literary organizations that the place of learned socie-
ties in the traditions of American literary scholarship is
relatively unimportant. The Modern Language Associa-
tion only has produced work comparable in volume and
significance to the productions of English learned socie-
ties. The book clubs, however, have played, and are likely
to continue to play, an important part in the furtherance
of literary culture; in fact they compare favorably with
their great predecessors in England and Scotland. AI-
together, America’s part in this special movement is very
creditable. .
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Prospectuses, announcements, advertisements, and annual re-
ports of societies have been omitted from this bibliography.
Where such leaflets have furnished information of substantial
value, foot-note references to them have been given in full. See
infra, Aelfric Society, Ballad Society, Browning Society, Con-
cordance Society, Early English Dialect Society, Early English
Drama Society, Early English Text Society, English Historical
Society, Hakluyt Society, Hunterian Club, Philological Society,
Royal Society of Literature, Scottish Text Society, Shakespeare
Society, Simplified Spelling Board, and Society of Antiquaries.)
American Book Prices Current .... 18 v., New York, 1895-
1912.
(AmeERICAN DtAteEct Socrtetry.) Dialect Notes. Published by
the American Dialect Society. 3 v., Norwood and New
Haven, 1896—[1912].
AMERICAN PHILOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION. Transactions ,... 43
v., Hartford, ete., 1871-1912. (Later volumes have title
Transactions and Proceedings.)
ARNOLD, Martruew. The Literary Influence of Academies. In
Essays in Criticism, London, 1895.
Asser. Life of King Alfred together with the Annals of Saint
Neots... . Edited ... by William Henry Stevenson.
Oxford, 1904.
AUBREY, JOHN. ‘Brief Lives, chiefly of Contemporaries, set
down ... between... 1669 & 1696. Edited by Andrew
Clark. 2 v., Oxford, 1898.
AvuBreY, JoHN (Editor). Letters [from the Bodleian] written by
eminent Persons in the seventeenth and eighteenth Centuries
, 2 v. in 3, London, 1813.
Bacon, Sir Francis. The Advancement of Learning. Edited
by William Aldis Wright .... 2d Ed., Oxford, 1873.
Bacon, Sir Francis. The New Atlantis.... Hdited... by G.
C. Moore Smith. Cambridge, 1900.
218
BIBLIOGRAPHY 219
(Bate, JOHN.) A letter from Bishop Bale to Archbishop
Parker. Communicated by H. R. Luard.... Cambridge
Antiquarian Communications, III, 157-73. Cambridge,
1879.
(BANNATYNE CuuB.) Adversaria. Notices illustrative of some
of the earlier works printed for the Bannatyne Club.
[Edited by David Laing.] Edinburgh, 1867.
BarTHOLD, F. W. Geschichte der Fruchtbringenden Gesellschaft
Berlin, 1848.
BIBLIOPHILE Society. First [Second, ete.] Year Book. 11 v.,
[Boston], [1902]-1912.
Bircou, THomas. The History of the Royal Society of London
for Improving of Natural Knowledge .... 4 v., London,
1756-7.
Boun, Henry G. Appendix relating to the Books of Intterary
and Scientific Societies. (Vol. 6 of William Thomas
Lowndes’ Bibliographer’s Manual of English LInterature.)
London, 1864.
Boston Brownina Society. Papers ... 1886-1897. New
York, 1900.
BOSWELL, JAMES. Life of Johnson... . Edited by George
Birkbeck Hill. 6 v., Oxford, 1887.
Bowker, R. R. Publications of Societies; a Provisional List of
the Publications of American Scientific, Literary, and other
Societies .... New York, 1899.
Boye, Rosert. Works. To which is prefixed the Life of the
Author. A new Edition. 6 v., London, 1772.
BRABROOK, Epwarp WILLIAM. On the Fellows of the Society of
Antiquaries who have held the Office of Director. Archaeo-
logia, LXII, 59-80, 1910.
British AcADEMy. Proceedings ..., 1903-1904. London, n. d.
British Museum. Catalogue of Printed Books; Academies,
Part I [complete in this part]. London, 1885. Supplement.
London, 1900.
Brownine Society. Papers.... Nos. 1-13 [No. 6 not issued],
in 3 v., London, 1881-91.
Burton, JoHN Huu. The Book-Hunter Etc. New York, 1883.
220 SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
Caedmon’s Metrical Paraphrase of Parts of the Holy Scriptures
[Edited by] Benjamin Thorpe. Society of Anti-
quaries, 1832.
(CAMDEN, WiuuIAM.) Gulielmi Camdeni et Illustrium Virorum
Epistolae .... Praemittitur G. Camdeni Vita, Scriptore
Thoma Smitho.... Londini, 1691.
CAMPBELL, JOHN, Lorp. The Lives of the Lord Chancellors and
Keepers of the Great Seal of England.... 8 v., London,
1846-69.
Carew, RicHarp. The Survey of Cornwall.... With the Life
of the Author... [by Pierre des Maizeaux]. London, 1723.
CHALMERS, GrorGE. The Life of Thomas Ruddiman.... Lon-
don, 1794.
CHAMBERLAYNE, Epwarp. Angliae Notitiae or The Present
State of England .... Continued by his Son, John Cham-
berlayne.... 21st Ed., London, 1704.
CHATTERTON, THOMAS. Poetical Works. With an Essay on the
Rowley Poems by W. W. Skeat. 2 v., London, 1875.
(CLERK, Sir JOHN.) Memoirs of the Life of Sir John Clerk of
Penecuik .... Edited ... by John M. Gray. Scottish
History Society, 1892.
CowLEY, ABRAHAM. Essays, Plays and Sundry Verses. The
text edited by A. R. Waller. Cambridge, 1906.
[CroKkER, THOMAS CrRoFTON.] Remarks on an Article inserted
in the Papers of the Shakespeare Society. [1849].
Cust, LioneL, and Sipney Cotvin. History of the Society of
the Dilettanti. London, 1898.
(Deror, DANIEL.) Earlier Life and chief earlier Works. Edited
by Henry Morley. London, 1889.
DELEPIERRE, OcTAvE. Analyse des Travaux de la Société des
Philobiblon de Londres.... Londres, 1862.
DispIn, THomAs FrRoanaunt. The Bibliographical Decameron
3 v., London, 1817.
DispIn, THOMAS FROGNALL. Reminiscences of a Literary Life.
2 v., London, 1836.
Dircks, H. A Biographical Memoir of Samuel Hartlib. Lon-
don, n. d.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Papa t
DRYDEN, JOHN. Works .... Illustrated with notes... anda
life of the author by Sir Walter Scott. Revised and cor-
rected by George Saintsbury. 18 v., Edinburgh, 1882-93.
[Duncoan, WituiAm James, Editor.] Notices and Documents
illustrative of the Literary History of Glasgow during the
greater Part of the Last Century. Maitland Club, 1831.
(EDINBURGH SHAKSPEARE CLUB.) Rules and Regulations of the
Edinburgh Shakspeare Club and Library, Instituted
MDCCCXX .... Hdinburgh, 1826.
Evuis, Sir Henry (Editor). Original Letters of Eminent
Literary Men of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Highteenth
Centuries. Camden Society, 1843.
English Dialect Dictionary (The). Founded on the Publications
of the English Dialect Society and on ... material never
before published. Edited by Joseph Wright. 6 v., London,
1898-1905.
EVELYN, JOHN. Memoirs... comprising his Diary, from 1641
to 1705-6, and a Selection of his Familiar Letters ....
Edited ... by William Bray. 5 v., London, 1827.
Firzmavurice, Lorp Epmonp. The Life of Sir William Petty,
1623-1687 . . . . London, 1895.
FLETCHER, JEFFERSON B. Areopagus and Pleiade. Journal of
English and Germanic Philology, I1, 429-53. Bloomington,
[1898].
FiLucet, Ewaup. Die dilteste englische Akademie. Anglia,
XXXII, 261-8. Halle a. S., 1909.
Forses, JAMES Davip. Opening Address, 1862. In Proceedings
of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, V, 2-34, 1866.
(FURNIVALL, FREDERICK JAMES.) Frederick James Furnivall, a
Volume of Personal Record. Oxford, 1911.
FURNIVALL, FREDERICK JAMES. The “Co.” of Pigsbrook & Co.
[London, 1881. ]
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STUDIES IN ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
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Literature.’’)
Lord Byron as a Satirist in Verse. By CLaupE M. Fuess, Ph.D. Cloth,
I2mo, pp. xi-+ 228. Price, $1.25 net.
Spenser’s “ Shepherd’s Calender” in Relation to Contemporary Affairs.
By JAMES Jackson Hiccinson, Ph.D. Cloth, 12mo, pp. xiii + 364.
Price, $1.50 net.
The Commedia dell’Arte. A Study in Italian Popular Comedy. By
WINIFRED SMITH, Ph.D. Cloth, 12mo, pp. xv-+ 290. Illustrated.
Price, $2.00 net.
Literary Influences in Colonial Newspapers, 1704-1750. By ELizaBETH
CHRISTINE Cook, Ph.D. Cloth, 12mo, pp. xi+ 2%9. Price, $1.50 net.
Learned Societies and English Literary Scholarship in Great Britain and the
United States. By Harrison Ross STEEVEs, Ph.D. Cloth, r2mo, pp.
xiv + 245. Price, $1.50 net. :
Gnomic Poetry in Anglo-Saxon. By BrancHE CoLtton WittiAms, Ph.D.
Cloth, 12mo. Frontispiece. In press. ‘
Aaron Hill. Poet, Dramatist, Projector. By DorotHy Brewster, Ph.D.
Cloth, r2mo. Portrait. In press.
Chaucer and the Roman de la Rose. By Dean Spruit~ FANSLER, Ph.D.
Cloth, 12mo. In press.
LEMCKE & BUECHNER, Agents
30-32 West 27th Street New York
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