Part 1 (1/2)

De Libris: Prose and Verse.

by Austin Dobson.

_PROLOGUE_

_LECTOR BENEVOLE!_--FOR SO THEY USED TO CALL YOU, YEARS AGO,-- I CAN'T PRETEND TO MAKE YOU READ THE PAGES THAT TO THIS SUCCEED; NOR COULD I--IF I WOULD--EXCUSE THE WAYWARD PROMPTINGS OF THE MUSE AT WHOSE COMMAND I WROTE THEM DOWN.

I HAVE NO HOPE TO ”PLEASE THE TOWN.”

I DID BUT THINK SOME FRIENDLY SOUL (NOT ILL-ADVISED, UPON THE WHOLE!) MIGHT LIKE THEM; AND ”TO INTERPOSE A LITTLE EASE,” BETWEEN THE PROSE, SLIPPED IN THE Sc.r.a.pS OF VERSE, THAT THUS THINGS MIGHT BE LESS MONOTONOUS.

THEN, _LECTOR,_ BE _BENEVOLUS!_

ON SOME BOOKS AND THEIR a.s.sOCIATIONS

New books can have few a.s.sociations. They may reach us on the best deckle-edged Whatman paper, in the newest types of famous presses, with backs of embossed vellum, with tasteful ta.s.selled strings,--and yet be no more to us than the constrained and uneasy acquaintances of yesterday. Friends they may become to-morrow, the day after,--perhaps ”hunc in annum et plures” But for the time being they have neither part nor lot in our past of retrospect and suggestion. Of what we were, of what we like or liked, they know nothing; and we--if that be possible--know even less of them. Whether familiarity will breed contempt, or whether they will come home to our business and bosom,--these are things that lie on the lap of the Fates.

But it is to be observed that the a.s.sociations of old books, as of new books, are not always exclusively connected with their text or format,--are sometimes, as a matter of fact, independent of both. Often they are memorable to us by length of tenure, by propinquity,--even by their patience under neglect. We may never read them; and yet by reason of some wholly external and accidental characteristic, it would be a wrench to part with them if the moment of separation--the inevitable hour--should arrive at last. Here, to give an instance in point, is a stained and battered French folio, with patched corners,--Mons. N.

Renouard's translation of the _Metamorphoses d'Ovide_, 1637, ”_enrichies de figures a chacune Fable_” (very odd figures some of them are!) and to be bought ”_chez Pierre Billaine, rue Sainct Iacques, a la Bonne-Foy, deuant S. Yues_.” It has held no honoured place upon the shelves; it has even resided au rez-de-chaussee,--that is to say, upon the floor; but it is not less dear,--not less desirable. For at the back of the ”Dedication to the King” (Lewis XIII. to wit), is scrawled in a slanting, irregular hand: ”_Pour mademoiselle de mons Son tres humble et tres obeissant Serviteur St. Andre._” Between the fourth and fifth word, some one, in a smaller writing of later date, has added ”_par_” and after ”St. Andre,” the signature ”_Vandeuvre_.” In these irrelevant (and unsolicited) interpolations, I take no interest. But who was Mlle. de Mons? As Frederick Locker sings:

Did She live yesterday or ages back?

What colour were the eyes when bright and waking?

And were your ringlets fair, or brown, or black, Poor little Head! that long has done with aching![1]

”Ages back” she certainly did _not_ live, for the book is dated ”1637,”

and ”yesterday” is absurd. But that her eyes were bright,--nay, that they were particularly lively and vivacious, even as they are in the sanguine sketches of Antoine Watteau a hundred years afterwards, I am ”confidous”--as Mrs. Slipslop would say. For my theory (in reality a foregone conclusion which I shrink from dispersing by any practical resolvent) is, that Mile. de Mons was some delightful seventeenth--century French child, to whom the big volume had been presented as a picture-book. I can imagine the alert, strait-corseted little figure, with ribboned hair, eagerly craning across the tall folio; and following curiously with her finger the legends under the copper ”figures,”--”Narcisse en fleur,” ”Ascalaphe en hibou,” ”Jason endormant le dragon,”--and so forth, with much the same wonder that the Sinne-Beelden of Jacob Cats must have stirred in the little Dutchwomen of Middelburg. There can be no Mlle. de Mons but this,--and for me she can never grow old!

Note:

[1] This quatrain has the distinction of having been touched upon by Thackeray. When Mr. Locker's ma.n.u.script went to the Cornhill Magazine in 1860, it ran thus:

Did she live yesterday, or ages sped?

What colour were the eyes when bright and waking?

And were your ringlets fair? Poor little head!

--Poor little heart! that long has done with aching.

Sometimes it comes to pa.s.s that the a.s.sociation is of a more far-fetched and fanciful kind. In the great Ovid it lies in an inscription: in my next case it is ”another-guess” matter. The folio this time is the _Sylva Sylvarum_ of the ”Right Hon. Francis Lo. Verulam. Viscount St.

Alban,” of whom some people still prefer to speak as Lord Bacon. 'Tis only the ”sixt Edition”; but it was to be bought at the Great Turk's Head, ”next to the Mytre Tauerne” (not the modern pretender, be it observed!), which is in itself a feature of interest. A former possessor, from his notes, appears to have been largely preoccupied with that ign.o.ble clinging to life which so exercised Matthew Arnold, for they relate chiefly to laxative simples for medicine; and he comforts himself, in April, 1695, by transcribing Bacon's reflection that ”a Life led in _Religion_ and in _Holy Exercises_” conduces to longevity,--an aphorism which, however useful as an argument for length of days, is a rather remote reason for religion. But what to me is always most seductive in the book is, that to this edition (not copy, of course) of 1651 Master Izaak Walton, when he came, in his _Compleat Angler_ of 1653, to discuss such abstract questions as the transmission of sound under water, and the ages of carp and pike, must probably have referred.

He often mentions ”Sir Francis Bacon's” _History of Life and Death_, which is included in the volume. No doubt it would be more reasonable and more ”congruous” that Bacon's book should suggest Bacon. But there it is. That illogical ”succession of ideas” which puzzled my Uncle Toby, invariably recalls to me, not the imposing folio to be purchased ”next to the Mytre Tauerne” in Fleet Street, but the unpretentious eighteenpenny octavo which, two years later, was on sale at Richard Marriot's in St. Dunstan's churchyard hard by, and did no more than borrow its erudition from the riches of the Baconian storehouse.

Life, and its prolongation, is again the theme of the next book (also mentioned, by the way, in Walton) which I take up, though unhappily it has no inscription. It is a little old calf-clad copy of Lewis Cornaro's _Sure and Certain Methods of attaining a Long and Healthful Life_, 4th ed., 24mo, 1727; and was bought at the Bewick sale of February, 1884, as having once belonged to Robert Elliot Bewick, only son of the famous old Newcastle wood-engraver. As will be shown later, it is easy to be misled in these matters, but I cannot help believing that this volume, which looks as if it had been re-bound, is the one Thomas Bewick mentions in his _Memoir_ as having been his companion in those speculative wanderings over the Town Moor or the Elswick Fields, when, as an apprentice, he planned his future _a la_ Franklin, and devised schemes for his conduct in life. In attaining Cornaro's tale of years he did not succeed; though he seems to have faithfully practised the periods of abstinence enjoined (but probably not observed) by another of the ”n.o.ble Venetian's” professed admirers, Mr. Addison of the _Spectator_.

If I have admitted a momentary misgiving as to the authenticity of the foregoing relic of the ”father of white line,” there can be none about the next item to which I now come. Once, on a Westminster bookstall, long since disappeared, I found a copy of a seventh edition of the _Pursuits of Literature_ of T.J. Mathias, Queen Charlotte's Treasurer's Clerk. Brutally cut down by the binder, that _durus arator_ had unexpectedly spared a solitary page for its ma.n.u.script comment, which was thoughtfully turned up and folded in. It was a note to this couplet in Mathias, his Dialogue II.:--

From Bewick's magick wood throw borrow'd rays O'er many a page in gorgeous Bulmer's blaze,--