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AT THE
LIBRARY TABLE

BY

ADRIAN HOFFMAN JOLINE

Author of “Meditations of an Autograph Collector” “The Diversions of a Book Lover” &c.

BOSTON

RICHARD G. BADGER

The Gorham Press

1910

Copyright, 1909, by A. H. Joline

All Rights Reserved

The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A.

PREPARATORY NOTE

Three of the papers in this volume have been privately printed. I have added, however, some new matter to the sketches of Ainsworth and James; and it has been suggested to me that those sketches should be published, although I have some misgivings about them. The other paper I am reprinting merely to please myself. Two men have confided to me that they have read it, and possibly two more may be persuaded to do the same thing.

November, 1909.

CONTENTS

AT THE LIBRARY TABLE

Whether there are many who take much interest in books about books is a matter of doubt. Multitudes of people like to think that they are fond of books merely as books, and derive great comfort from the innocent delusion that they delight in the possession of them. A neat and imposing library is an attractive ornament of the country house as well as of the city mansion, and if the volumes are bound in a becoming fashion, by Zaehnsdorf, Rivière, Lortic, or Cobden-Sanderson, they look well on the shelves and impart to the establishment an air of dignity and refinement. But it is a portentous question whether the majority of book-owners ever find occasion or opportunity to inquire within or to inform themselves about the contents of the tomes which line the walls of the comfortable library. The toilers who are absorbed in the drudgery of daily work have little leisure to expend on the inside of their books, and the merry idlers who devote their energies to sports, athletic or otherwise, amusements, and the varied diversions which occupy the minds of the members of our modern “society”, have still less. My dear friend, the average man, deserving as he is of admiration and respect, cannot have much interest in books which are purely bookish, and my dearer friend, the average woman, who now and again plunges calmly but despairingly into the depths of “literature”,—combining with others of her kind in so-called reading clubs, so as to share her afflictions with her fellows—secretly longs for the sweets of fiction while she pretends to be fond of such stupid performances as essays and dissertations. In the recesses of her personality she regards works of that description as bores to be avoided; and very likely she is not far wrong.

Mind, I am not talking of inhabitants of Boston, Massachusetts. It may be that my notions are derived wholly from my New York environment. A New Yorker appears to think that it is an evidence of weakness to allow any one to find out that books are dear to him, and seems to be as loath to confess the passion as he would be to proclaim at the club or upon the house-tops his fond attachment to the lady of his choice. In the goodly number of years during which I have trodden the pavements and availed of the facilities of transit afforded by the street-railways of the city whereof we are justly proud, I do not remember hearing the subject of books or of things pertaining to books discussed or even referred to by any of my neighbors. But recently in Boston, while walking on Boylston Street, I passed two lads who were still in their later teens, and distinctly heard one of them say, “the Latin derivation of that word is”—I lost the rest of it. In New York he would have been uttering something in the vulgar argot used by the youth of our times,—preserved and fostered by the newspaper—about “de cops” or “de Giants”, or the superiority of some novel brand of cigarettes. They would have blushed for shame to be discovered in the possession of any knowledge of such discreditable matters as “Latin” or “derivations” of any description. The gospel of “doing things” has been preached to them so strenuously that they have long since forgotten, if they ever knew, that there is any virtue in “knowing things”.

Sitting at the library table and letting my eyes wander with affection to the adjacent shelves, I try to fancy who buys the multitudinous books of memoirs and reminiscences, of literary, dramatic and political gossip, which are poured forth so profusely from the English presses. Now and then I encounter their titles in seductive catalogues and purchase them at large reductions from the original prices—“published at £3 10s and marked down to 7s 6d.” We have nothing quite like them in these United States, or very little, because they do not “pay”, as the phrase runs. I wonder whether these English books “pay” in England, but I am inclined to think that they must, for publishers are not usually actuated by motives of pure philanthropy; they do not print for pleasure only or for personal gratification in bringing out the screeds of ambitious authors. I like those English books; their type is large and legible; the paper has a substantial mellowness; and the simple bindings are well-fitted to be torn off and replaced by real bindings. They have the merit of what may be called “skippability”, for the writers are sadly given to deplorable diffuseness and degenerate frequently into tediousness for which I love them, as a fellow-sinner. They convey impressions of abundant leisure and unlimited vocabulary. Does an author ever become conscious that he is growing tedious? If he does, how he must revel in the thought that, despite his tediousness, some daring explorer will toil through his pages, and that in some library at least, be it that of the British Museum or of our own Congress, his book will stand triumphantly upon the shelves in the company of Lord Avebury’s One Hundred.

I do not believe that an ordinary American, at least in these days, would dream of publishing such a book as “Gossip From Paris”, the correspondence (1864–1869) of Anthony B. North Peat, which the Kegan Paul house brought out a few years ago. Some one may say that an American could not, and I will not deny the charge if it is made. North Peat, whose name sounds like that of a station on the Grand Trunk Railway, was not by any means a famous person, but he was a clever and an observant journalist and there is much of interest in the volume mingled with much that is of no present interest whatever. One passage has given me comfort, because it contains something rarely encountered—a good word for the collector of autographs. Usually when an author is feeling a little rancor about life generally, he will go far out of his way to kick an autograph collector. I purr slightly when I quote what North Peat wrote in September, 1866.

“I know one man in Paris who has an extensive library composed exclusively of works in one volume and of the same folio; but, perhaps, among the manifold phases of the collecting mania none is more excusable than that of gathering autographs.*** To read over the names and the tariff at which signatures or letters are quoted gives a most curious insight into the place held in public opinion by the generals, diplomatists, poets, literary men, composers, and even criminals whose handwritings are eagerly sought for by amateurs. Last month the prices ran thus: George Sand, 6f.; Seward, 10f.; Jefferson Davis, 15f.; Duke of Morny, 4f. 50c.; Michelet, 1f. 75c.; McClellan, 20f.; Verdi, 3f. 50c.; Prévost Paradol, 2f. 50c.; Champfleury, 2f. Gerard de Nerval is quoted 20f., thanks to a note attached to the letter, ‘correspondance amoreuse très passionée.’ A copybook of the King of Rome is quoted 20f. Rénan, the sceptic author of La Vie de Jèsus, keeps up in the market, and goes for 10f. A letter of Henri Latouche is to be sold for 2f. 50c.; it contains the following curious passage: ‘The only souvenirs of my literary life to which I look back with pride are, having edited André Chénier and having deterred George Sand from devoting her talents to water-colour drawing.’ A letter of Louis XVI is quoted at 2f. 50c., by which the King grants a sum of 2400f. (£100) to ‘La Dame Rousseau, cradle-rocker to the children of France’.”

I have quoted thus at length not only because of my pride in the compliment to autograph collectors but because the prices mentioned must bring a pang to the hearts of those who buy now-a-days and pay more than ten times as much for George Sands, Verdis, and Louis XVIs. I can imagine the sensations of a dealer of to-day if some innocent should offer fifty cents for that Louis XVI document—I am confident that it was not a letter. Mr. North Peat has overlooked the fact, as is common with those who do not belong to the inner brotherhood, that contents are of much consequence in establishing the market value of autograph letters, but his figures are not without significance. Some of us are glad to observe that even in 1866 McClellan’s autograph “fetched” twice as much as Seward’s and six times as much as Verdi’s.

Very unlike the reasonable remarks of North Peat is the autographic deliverance of that once celebrated “educator”, Mr. Horace Mann. This gem of wisdom, given to me by a Boston friend in a malicious spirit of kindly generosity, is lying on the library table. It reads thus:—

“I would rather perform one useful act for my fellow men than to be the possessor of all the autographs in the world.

Horace Mann.

“West Newton, April 23, ’50.”

It is an excellent specimen of the smug self-satisfaction, the Chadbandian cant, the affectation of altruism which marked the middle of the nineteenth century, particularly in the regions lying about West Newton. Cheap enough withal it seems to be, for as he could never by any chance become “the possessor of all the autographs in the world”, his expression of preference signifies nothing whatever. The formula is simple enough. Select something which sounds noble and unselfish and then say that you would rather do that thing than to have—all the diamonds, all the pictures, all the Caxtons, all the gold mines, all the puppy-dogs and all the tabby-cats in the universe. It is in contemporaneous vernacular, a safe “bluff”. If he had said that he would rather perform one useful act for his fellow men than to be the owner of a hundred shares of Standard Oil, it would have had some meaning, for one could then measure the precise extent of his devotion to the welfare of mankind. One may naturally inquire, why not have all the autographs in the world and do not one but many useful acts for one’s fellow men? There is no inherent incompatibility between the two ideas.

It may be suggested that the subject of books about books and the gathering of autographs are not cognate; that they have no relation to each other; that they are illegally joined together in defiance of the laws laid down in Day’s Praxis. I knew a dignified New England author, lawyer and soldier who was accustomed, when assailed by a proposition to which he did not assent, but which he was too polite to dispute, to close discussion by the sententious remark, “That indeed”. I never fully understood precisely what it meant, but it seemed to be conclusive for there was no more to be said. It was like some of the cryptic utterances of that model of concise expression, Mr. F’s aunt. But I maintain that the man who truly covets autographs, covets books likewise for the sake of the books themselves, irrespective of style or contents. It may be one of Mr. Crother’s One Hundred Worst Books, but all the more precious for that very reason. My point is easily demonstrated by a logical device not uncommonly adopted by those who manufacture our opinions for us in the public press. The man who—to continue the locution of Mr. Joseph Surface—does not feel a fondness for books of the bookish sort, derives no gratification from the ownership of autographs. I am not referring to the pseudo-collector with his album or to the encourager of profanity who besets the living great with requests for his signature. I allude, sir, as General Cyrus Choke said in regard to the British lion, to him who finds a charm in written words penned by the hand of a warrior, a statesman, or a scholar. It is a charm that may not be defined, for when you venture upon a definition it softly and suddenly vanishes away like the Baker who encountered the Snark that was a Boojum in the Carrollian fable.

I am not ashamed to acknowledge that there is something about the exterior of books which appeals to our warmest affections. We love to sit among them and enjoy the sight of them as many rejoice in the prospect of lake, valley and mountain. Dear old R. Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend had one darling wish, to possess at one time a complete new attire from boots to hat, but he never attained that glorious pinnacle. The late Sultan of Turkey, thirty years or more ago, had an enthusiasm for rifles, bought a lot of them at an enormous cost, and constructed for the storage of these treasures a kind of mausoleum of rifles, a grand edifice in which the muskets were arranged in serried ranks radiating from a centre where, upon a throne, the potentate who called himself Abdul Hamid Khan Sani, Sultan and Sovereign of the Ottoman Empire, was accustomed to sit in solemn and solitary state while he gloated over his acquisitions. In like spirit I would exult if I could have a library room where I could see all the books at once, reviewing the beloved brigades and cheerfully foregoing the reading of them. To marshal the regiments of books, the well-uniformed battalions, the heavy artillery of the folios, the light skirmishers of the duodecimos, would bring a joy akin to that which the pompous and patriotic soldier, the vainest of men, Brevet Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, used to feel when, sitting on his charger, he reviewed the valiant little army which conquered Mexico over sixty years ago. This recalls to me that in the innocent hours of childhood I supposed that the head which Salome demanded was brought to King Herod on just such a charger as the General bestrode according to the veracious picture which hung over the sofa in the “back parlor”, when I also firmly believed that the baskets in which the fragments were gathered after the miracle were the large, ordinary baskets used in our laundry.

Vain as he was, the old General was a good, sturdy warrior, and no one can read his egotistical memoirs without becoming aware of the fact, in spite of his enormous self conceit. When King Edward VII visited us as Prince of Wales in 1860, I saw the royal youth on the parade-ground at West Point. I remember him well, for as A. Ward observed, “I seldom forgit a person”. But the General was the man I longed to gaze upon, and I regret that a facetious uncle easily persuaded me that the gorgeous drum-major who led the band was the Great Scott himself. The materiality of this reminiscence lies in the fact that a volume of Scott’s Memoirs is usually to be found on the library table, a model of what an autobiography ought not to be. Soldiers in later days learned to write the story of their battles with more good taste and modesty. Perhaps General Benjamin F. Butler was an exception, but he was not a soldier, and his battles were very few; and those of us who loved and honored McClellan regret the publishing of his “Own Story”, a deed he would never have countenanced. A man should never be judged by what he writes to his wife.

It would not be amiss if some fair-minded and competent person would give us a candid and impartial history of some of the men who have been dealt with unjustly by the merciless masses in this country. McClellan is one of these victims, although students of military affairs have begun to comprehend the truth about him; but the great majority still believe that he was a timid, dilatory and inefficient commander who quarrelled with his President without a cause. General Arthur St. Clair, of revolutionary times, was even a greater sufferer, and he has been so long dead that his record may be judged calmly. Aaron Burr has had several defenders, and it is now well established that whatever sins he may have committed, treason was not one of them. Martin Van Buren, sorely maligned by partisan historians, has been ably vindicated by Edward Morse Shepard. James K. Polk, Chief Justice Taney, and Andrew Johnson also deserve to be relieved from many of the aspersions which have been plentifully bestowed upon them. Unfortunately there is a tendency on the part of most men who undertake a work of that character to become advocates rather than judges, and to impair the influence of their arguments by an excess of ardor.

Most of us find that as the number of our years increases we are apt to pass more and more of our time at the library table, within easy reach of the shelves. I have been charged with believing that books are “the chief things in life”; I admit that they are not and ought not to be that, but I see no reason why we should not be allowed to enjoy them as we would any other innocent pleasure, in due moderation. A good many young people might as well be accused of believing that sports were the chief things in human existence; and both in England and in this country I apprehend that sports engross the attention of the multitude to the exclusion of such minor things as books; but I find no fault with them because they choose pleasures different from mine.

Youth is a pleasure in itself, but one may be allowed to have misgivings as to whether its joys are not in some degree overrated. Certainly our young people seem to work very hard to get their fun out of life, and after they have had it they do not appear to be much the better for it. We often sigh for our lost youth, and if we are lucky enough to be able to remember so much of our Horace, we whisper to ourselves “Eheu fugaces” and the rest of it, while if we were confronted by a decree that we must go over it all again, Latin included, we would beg for mercy, or, if we happened to be lawyers, ask for an adjournment. It is “a wise dispensation of Providence”—if one may be permitted to refer to the mandates of Providence in that patronizing way—that the old have their pleasures too and that the boys and girls are not violating any congressional or legislative provisions against trusts by having a monopoly of enjoyment. Most of these pleasures are associated with books. Talleyrand’s sad, wistless old age is of no moment when compared with a sad bookless old age.

The accusation that the lover of books cares more for them than he does about life and its varied problems, is as unjust as the complaint, preferred—semi-jocosely, it must be owned—by that pertinacious bibliophile, Irving Browne, that “the book-worm does not care for nature”. He quotes the animal as saying:

“I feel no need of nature’s flowers,—

Of flowers of rhetoric I have store;

I do not miss the balmy showers—

When books are dry I o’er them pore.

No need that I should take the trouble

To go abroad to walk or ride,

For I can sit at home and double

Quite up with pain from Akenside.”

The punster is such a derelict, such a scoffed-at sinner, that he may not be taken very seriously. Others than Browne however, have gravely reproached the devotee of the library for his alleged lack of affection for the outer world and its beauties. But the man who knows his Gilbert White of Selborne, and his John Burroughs of the Hudson, cannot be wholly outside the ranks of nature-lovers. We may be uttering a truism when we say that as we grow older we come closer to mother earth, and as we strike off more and more years from our calendar all the sweet things of earth are nearer to us and the trees, the flowers, the fields, and the wide expanse of hill, river and valley take on a new meaning. A few days ago I “took a drive”, if one may avail of that wretched colloquial form of words, to the hamlet of Bedminster, name suggestive of Axminster with its carpets and Westminster with its monuments, as far as the site of the old church which was ruthlessly and needlessly destroyed by iconoclasts within a year or two. It was a delightful autumn drive, the joy of it tempered by the abominable automobile which infests our New Jersey roads with its hoots and stinks and cloudy mantle of dust: and the bookish associations surely did not detract from the pleasure. There is a good picture of the church in Melick’s “Story of an Old Farm”, a book containing a mine of information about a neighborhood filled with associations of the Revolution. When you pass by the graveyard which still remains, you cannot help thinking of the young English officer, wounded and captured at Princeton, who died on the journey to Morristown and was buried in that field where his monument remains at this day. Melick’s book is disorderly and needs condensing and arranging, but let no one tell me that the natural beauty of the country is lessened for me because I study it. It is one of those most often to be found on the library table in company with Ludwig Schumacher’s pretty story of the “Somerset Hills”.

Many of us may recall from our own experience examples of the peace and contentment, the grace and the dignity of book-lovers who have understood how to combine their pleasure with the active affairs of business. I remember affectionately one who had passed beyond the years of what Elisha Williams called “God Almighty’s statute of limitations”, and who went to his rest only a few months ago. Elbridge Goss, of Melrose, was a type of a New England gentleman, a man of business as well as a lover of literature and of historical pursuits, fond of his books and autographs, all in a mild, modest and unobtrusive way; a gentle, admirable man, deserving of esteem and honor. There was no pretense about him; he had a delightful simplicity, a true catholicity of sentiment; there was no envy, hatred or malice in his composition. His “Life of Paul Revere” has long been known favorably, and his other works, chiefly historical, were no less meritorious. His was a full, useful and well rounded life, and although his name may not be recorded among the famous, it will not be forgotten.

Some weeks before his death, he wrote to me thus: “As to your copy of Coleridge, has it the expunged verse from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’? The genial Longfellow once picked up his copy from his centre-table and read it to me as follows:

‘A gust of wind sterte up behind

And whistled thro’ his bones,

Thro’ the holes of his eyes and the hole of his mouth

Half whistles and half groans.’

When Coleridge saw it in print, he took his pencil, crossed it off, and wrote in the margin, ‘To be struck out. S. T. C.’ It did not appear in subsequent editions.” Coleridge did well to erase it for it is dangerously near to the ludicrous.

Whether the poet’s later emendations of his published verses are always improvements is problematical. We have been surfeited of late with examples of Tennyson’s amendments. He seems never to have been wholly satisfied with his work. In Buxton Forman’s “Keat’s Poetry and Prose”, one may perceive that a poet’s changes while sometimes making the lines smoother, almost invariably weaken the effect. It is so with Byron. The first thought and image, coming fresh from the brain, are usually more vigorous and poetic than the sober second-thoughts, and alterations appear to enfeeble the expression. It is Doctor Johnson’s “wit enough to keep it sweet” and the “putrefaction” amendment all over again. That, my friend who loves to ask “Why first editions?” is one of the reasons why.

The reference to Buxton Forman leads me to record an amusing bit of characteristic English newspaper wisdom. Some years ago in a book about autographs I ventured to make some remarks concerning Keats and Forman which drew down upon me the sneers of a London journal, the purport of which was that my observations were vulgar and peculiarly American. After I had recovered from the exaltation of spirit arising from being noticed at all by such an eminent authority, I permitted myself to indulge in justifiable mirth because it happened that I had stolen those very remarks from an old number of the London Athenæum in which my Keats letter had been copied and described: but according to the well known custom of plagiarists, I had accidentally omitted the quotation marks. I inferred that an English assertion becomes vulgar only when it is repeated by a despicable Yankee. Never again will I be guilty of petit larceny.

This matter of quotations is often a troublesome one. I am sorry now that I left out those neat little commas. The orator has an unfair advantage over the writer, because he is not obliged to use them, and in common justice he should be required to give some sign that the eloquent sentences he borrows are not his own: he might be compelled to hold up two fingers. A good, well rounded quotation is a great help when ideas grow so timid that they refuse to come at your call. I suppose that a lawyer who is asked to speak before assemblages, on some legal topic, almost always consults Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, where he finds little to aid him except that respectable old stand-by, “The seat of the law is the bosom of God; her voice, the harmony of the world”. It sounds well and it makes a sonorous finale, besides giving the impression that the quoter is accustomed to occupy himself with the works of fine old authors: although it always seemed to me that when applied to what we call “the law” in these times, it is rather highly colored. A friend who was an admirer of the sentiment once carefully prepared an “address” to be delivered before the Maryland Bar Association, and had it printed in advance, lugging in the famous lines at the close of his peroration. To his horror, the learned President of the Association, who spoke immediately before him, and who evidently had a Bartlett of his own, closed an admirable speech with the same old “seat” and “bosom” story. There was nothing to be done but to pour it forth again upon the heads of those helpless Marylanders, on whom it must have had a “punch brothers” effect; but that man will never trot out the “harmony” yarn again unless he is sure that he is to have the first chance at it.

Mr. James Ford Rhodes in an entertaining paper about Edward Gibbon, expresses his belief that the historian of Rome’s decline and fall thought with Thucydides “My history is an everlasting possession, not a prize composition which is heard and forgotten”. It is not a particularly novel observation, but a faded pamphlet lying before me is a reminder of the fact that “prize compositions”, “prize poems”, and “poems on occasions” are always much the same as they were in the time of Thucydides, feeble things, and the wonder is why men go on encouraging them and why sane people continue to produce them, unless there is a fond hope that some of them may turn out to be as good as “The Builders” of Henry Van Dyke or the great Commemoration Ode of James Russell Lowell. Even the devoted worshipers of the Autocrat must admit that as his college class drew nearer to the front rank of the Alumni processions, his reunion-verses grew quite tiresome; but no one could go on for some seventy years writing anniversary stanzas on the same theme without degenerating into the commonplace. The pamphlet is a little one of thirteen pages, entitled “Pompeii, A Poem which obtained the Chancellor’s Medal at the Cambridge Commencement, July, 1819; by Thomas Babington Macaulay, of Trinity College.” It was of this juvenile poem that the boyish author wrote to his father on February 5, 1819: “I have not, of course, had time to examine with attention all your criticism on ‘Pompeii’. I certainly am much obliged to you for withdrawing so much time from more important business to correct my expressions. Most of the remarks which I have examined are perfectly just; but as to the more momentous charge, the want of a moral, I think it might be a sufficient defence that, if a subject is given which admits of none, the man who writes without a moral is scarcely censurable.”[^[1]] Poets, whether young or old, seldom take kindly to criticism of their lines, but one cannot help feeling some sympathy with the youthful Thomas in his gentle rebellion against the unpoetic demand of his somewhat priggish parent for a “moral”, although the subject of “Pompeii” ought to be far more fruitful of “morals” than that which ten years later was inflicted upon Tennyson, whose “Timbuctoo” carried off the prize in 1829. The Laureate’s successful “piece” is less impressive than Thackeray’s biting burlesque—not of Tennyson but of everything produced on that absurd theme—beginning something like this:

“In Africa—a quarter of the world—

Men’s skins are black; their hair is crisped and curled,

And somewhere there, unknown to public view,

A mighty city lies, called Timbuctoo.”

Tennyson competed because his father wished him to, and “in place of preparing a new poem he furbished up an old one written in blank verse instead of the orthodox heroic couplet and sent it in.”[^[2]] Milnes wrote at the time, “Tennyson’s poem has made quite a sensation; it is certainly equal to most parts of Milton!” The future Lord Houghton was a cheerful, genial person, if he was guilty of the most abominable handwriting I ever encountered, for the celebrated scrawls of James Payn, Charles Darwin and Horace Greeley are copperplate script in comparison; and Milnes was only twenty then. I knew quite a number of Tennysons and Miltons, of the mute, inglorious sort, when I was enjoying the enthusiasms of that period of life, under the shadow of the Princeton elms; but somehow their chariots have all been transformed into motor-cars, although they have avoided the fate of Phaëthon, that mythological prototype of a chauffeur.

“Pompeii”, naturally enough, is a fair example of the stilted verse which a bright lad might well have written in 1819. He tells us, among other interesting details, how

“In vain Vesuvius groans with wrath supprest,

And mutter’d thunder in his burning breast,

Long since the Eagle from that flaming peak

Hath soar’d with screams a safer nest to seek.

Aw’d by th’ infernal beacon’s fitful glare

The howling fox hath left his wonted lair;

Nor dares the browzing goat in vent’rous leap

To spring, as erst, from dizzy steep to steep;”

the moral, which father Zachary failed to detect, being that these intelligent brutes had much more foresight than mere Man, and had wisely decided that a volcano in eruption was “no place for them”.

Poor as prize poems may be as poetry, some famous men have not disdained to enter into the competitions. Lord Selborne’s effort gained for him the Newdigate prize in 1832, and was deemed worthy of publication in Blackwood. The list of prize winners in the two great Universities might well be worth studying, even if the poetry came from the machine and not from inspiration. Byron’s Address on the opening of the new Drury Lane has not survived, but the “Rejected Addresses”, spontaneous and hors concours, will never be wholly forgotten. Indeed a grave personage is recorded as saying of them that he did not understand why they should have been rejected, as some of them were very good.

A book-lover may think that he has an affection for all books, but he surely must draw the line at law-books, books of theology and medical treatises. So many people who have a notion that a book is valuable to a collector merely because it is old, will insist on bringing to me, in the kindness of their hearts, ancient theological tomes, for example, which are in fact less desirable than old Directories and not for a moment to be compared with old Almanacs. I have a friend who is enamored of school-books and books on mathematics; a mania that has method in it and I can understand the merit of it better than I can the pursuit of first editions of Trollope. He has a remarkable collection and has printed a catalogue in two volumes, not only complete in all details but a handsome specimen of book-making. He showed me a copy once, and in a moment of hallucination I thought that he was going to give it to me, but he carried it away. I am not sure that I would be interested in the collection, and he cares as little for my autographs as I do for his arithmetics. I was silly enough to speak of my hobby while he was fussing with his catalogue and I saw his eyes assume that far-away look which meant that he heard me and that was all. When any one with feigned interest says, “I would like so much to see your autographs”, I smile inwardly, if such a feat is possible, and I know that it is only one of those polite fictions which go so far towards making life pleasant. Very few people, especially those with a pet hobby of their own, care a straw about other people’s collections, except perhaps in the matter of paintings, which, to use an abominable but familiar phrase, is “altogether a different proposition”. The other man’s collection seldom assumes importance until the auctioneer falls heir to it. For collectors seldom have much sympathy with collectors who occupy different fields from theirs: indeed I have found more true sympathy between collectors and non-collectors. Steele in one of the numbers of the Tatler deals with the mania of collecting and makes much poor fun of one Nicholas Gimcrack, an entomologist, who spent a fortune in accumulating insects; but entomologists have their uses and perhaps Gimcrack, if such a person ever lived, might have retorted that his spiders were as well worth having as Sir Richard’s unparalleled collection of unpaid bills. There are useful features of postage-stamp collecting; there are attractions about the hoards of numismatists; one can see why even game-chickens may be profitably “collected”; but I fancy that the hobby of a lady of my acquaintance—the collecting of pianos—might be attended with inconveniences. I fear that the hapless being who confesses that he is an autograph collector receives the most general condemnation. I once had a notion of bringing together what might be called the by-products of autograph-collecting,—a collection of all the ill-natured and abusive things ever written or printed about autograph collectors from the beginning of the world to the present day, but it would probably fill a book as big as my Boydell Shakespeare, which is so unwieldy that I have had serious thoughts of hiring the tower of the Metropolitan Life Building to hold it. Yet how kind some of our busiest and greatest men have been to the wretches who “write for autographs”; the record of their long-suffering patience would fill another large volume.

There are other manifestations of the autograph fever almost as troublesome as the familiar prayer for the signature of the person addressed; there is, for example, the begging of autographs of other people which the victim is supposed to possess. Hawthorne, when applied to in this manner, became quite fierce and intimated with some vigor that the letters of his friends were valuable to him and not to be parted with. The venerable Bishop White was more gentle, when beset by that pioneer of American collectors, Doctor William B. Sprague. There is a pleasant, old-fashioned dignity about the Bishop’s letter which tempts me to reproduce it from the original now lying on the library table. It is a model, and if I ever wrote to men soliciting gifts of that order—which heaven forbid!—it is just the sort of reply that I would like to receive. The Bishop’s portraits always make me think of what Aldrich said of Wordsworth—that he gave him the impression of wanting milk: with his benign placidity it is no wonder that he lived until his eighty-ninth year.

“Philad^a, Feb. 12, 1823.

Rev^d & dear Sir:—

I have received your Letter of ye 23d of January, & am disposed to take Measures for compliance with your Request. I suppose that I can furnish you with some signatures, which may be embraced in your design; but, as it will require considerable examination, to distinguish between interesting Letters of former correspondents, & others which I can have no particular Reason to retain, I must defer ye Work, until I have less of pressing Business on my Hands than at present.

In ye mean Time, I am, respectfully

Your very humble servant,

Wm: White.

Rev^d Wm: B. Sprague,

West Springfield,

Massachusetts.”

The Bishop was doubtless one of the last to transport into the nineteenth century the use of frequent capitals, the archaic “ye” and the quaint long “s’s” which are not “f’s” as many believe.

The subject of autographs is to me what King Charles’s head was to Mr. Dick. That I am not alone in my infirmity is proved by a letter of James Freeman Clarke, written in 1878, in which he acknowledges the receipt of a catalogue of a German collection, and says, naively, “Notwithstanding my professed indifference to any autographs except those of the Apostle Paul, Alfred, Charlemagne, Joan of Arc, Martin Luther and the like, I confess that my mouth watered at the sight of so many of them. It was a pleasure even to read the description and title”. These words, showing that his indifference was a mere pretense, were written by a serious and scholarly man, famous in his day as preacher, author and educator, and I am sure that even his little pretense would soon have been abandoned if I could only have been honored for a little while with his company at the library table.

Almost every one finds it hard to understand as he attains the period when juniors say to him, “Now, at your time of life”—a form of expression I have come to loathe—that he is really no longer—to use another wretched locution,—“up to date”. I am beginning to comprehend the feelings of some of the excellent bewigged old gentlemen of the seventeen hundreds whose lives lapped over that mysterious one-hundredth year which is just like any other year, but there is a weird something about it, indescribable, impossible of definition, which makes it different. I am certain that those of us who awoke on the morning of the first day of January in the year of grace 1900, had a consciousness of passing into a new age, although—not to revive the ancient controversy but merely to assert the indisputable fact—the new century did not begin until a year later. How painfully modern Mr. Wordsworth, Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Shelley must have seemed to the men who knew so well their Crabbe and their Cowper. It has always been my opinion that the unfortunates who happen to be born exactly in the middle of a century are taken at an unfair advantage by those who arrive in a century’s closing years or in its opening days. They grow old-fashioned so much sooner. In Comyn Carr’s book of reminiscences (published in 1908)—by no means one of those dull productions about which we were chatting a few pages back—he says heroically that he is not very gravely discouraged by occasionally finding himself ranked as a champion of an outworn fashion, but he groans over the revelation of a “cultivated young writer of the newer school” that ‘among men of culture Dickens is now never read after the age of fourteen!’ This cultivated young writer—we must take Mr. Carr’s word as to his culture, for otherwise one would be likely to consider him what Lord Dundreary called “wather an ass”—must have been trying to impose upon the credulous old gentlemen, who frankly owns that he was born in the misty mid-region of 1849. What pained me most was the meek and submissive acquiescence of Carr in his relegation to the category of back numbers at the surely not venerable age of fifty-nine. As Thomas Bailey Aldrich said the day after his birthday, “It is unpleasant to be fifty-nine, but it would be unpleasanter not to be, having got started!” I insist, however, that it is not enough to warrant the exile of any ordinary person from the realms of contemporaneous interest. Dickens, Thackeray, Hawthorne, Tennyson, Browning, all great Victorians, if an American may be reckoned in that class, are not, I venture to say, as obsolete as the cultivated infant would have us believe; if they were, there would not be so much said of them and written of them in this fast aging first decade of the twentieth century. Returning to Dickens, I prefer to the babe’s prattle of Carr’s young interlocutor, the dictum of Chesterton, when he tells us “that Dickens will have a high place in permanent literature there is, I imagine, no prig surviving to deny.”

In a time so remote that I shrink from mentioning the date precisely, I overheard a young prig say to the feminine companion whom he was escorting to her home after listening to a lecture by Charles Sumner, “he suits the masses”. It was a singularly inept remark as applied to the stilted and artificial oratory of the pompous Senator; but the fact that “he suits the masses” may well be cited to warrant the assurance of the lasting quality of Dickens’ fame. The lesser lights are growing pale and dim in comparison with his and with that of his illustrious compeer, who ranks higher perhaps in the estimation of the “cultured” but no higher in the favor of the general. Bulwer Lytton, Charlotte Bronté, Trollope, and George Eliot, if we may group together stars of such varying magnitude, shine more feebly than they did while they were in the full blaze of their glory. But when one takes from the shelf or from the library table a volume of Dickens or of Thackeray, he may well exclaim, as was said of the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, “This is no book; who touches this, touches a man.”

Many of us still retain an affection for Trollope, even if he was, as some recent compilers of literary hand-books say, “one of the most boisterous, tactless and unmetaphysical of writing men”—all the more precious to me because of his unmetaphysicality. In novels “à bas metaphysics!” If it be true, as these autocratic tyrants of taste aver, that he “keeps his nose close down, dog-like, to the prosaic texture of life,” he pursued the game to good purpose. To all lawyers, he must ever be dear because of his delightful Old Bailey character of Chaffanbrass; to all the clergy he must be a source of joy for his innumerable bishops, rectors and curates; and to all physicians a lovable man for Doctor Thorne. Was he not as much unlike Hawthorne as one novelist may be unlike another, yet did not Hawthorne say that Trollope’s work “suited” him? “They precisely suit my taste” wrote the author of the Scarlet Letter, “solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef, and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business and not suspecting that they were made a show of.” Yet in these days they cannot be expected to compete with such illuminating representations of real life as may be found in the pages of—let us say—Elinor Glyn, who manifestly aspires to be the Aphra Behn of modern literature.

It is some consolation to realize that we commencing patriarchs are able to get more satisfaction from our comfortable places at the library table than others get from the seats of the mighty at horse-shows, bridge tournaments, automobile contests, and golf competitions. An enthusiastic golfer once confided to me that the most charming adjunct of his sport was the shandygaff and the high ball which otherwise the stern decree of the medical man would have denied to him. Let us say it in all modesty and self-depreciation, we know so much more than is known by the modern smooth-faced devotee of the safety razor, who freely permits the unattractive contour of his mouth to betray the imperfections of his character. I am convinced that if the customary motor-car fiend would shroud his expression in hirsute concealment he would appear far less fierce and domineering. If language was given to us to conceal thought, surely beards were meant to hide brutality. Even these young people will come in time to the consciousness of their present ignorance and the realization of the truth that men learn by experience. Aldrich—not Nelson, the tariff-king, but Thomas, a king of modern American letters—said “I often feel sorry for actresses who are always too old to play Juliet by the time they have learned how to do it. I know how to play Hamlet and Romeo now, but my figure doesn’t fit the parts.” Sad it is to reflect that our figures are unfitted for the roles we would so hugely enjoy. Possibly it would be better for us if we ventured more in the outer world and spent less time at the library table; but we cannot always bestride the galloping horse or trifle with the fascinating brassie. It will be only a few years before riders and golfers alike will meet us in the fields where we will all be reduced to socialistic uniformity, as I am taught to believe. Then, perhaps, I may not regret that I yielded, willingly and lovingly, to the temptations of the library table.

THE DELIBERATIONS OF A DOFOB

In the neighboring city of Chicago they have a club which boasts the name of “The Dofobs”. It is not a pretty name, but it means much to the members. Every two or three years it produces a Year Book and it has printed “The Love Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne”, a copy of which now and then appears at the auction block and is sold for a fabulous price. Aside from such occasional diversions, these people indulge in pure Dofobery, which is not really as bad as it sounds. It signifies a peculiar relation towards books and bookish things; not a mania for books, but a comfortable enjoyment of them; not a craving for them solely because they happen to be old, or rare, or famous, but a delight in them and in the associations which cluster about them, in talking about them, in scribbling about them, in amusing oneself with them. It does not require much sagacity to read between the letters of the name; for most people know what “d.f.” stands for, and “d.o.f.” is only a variation.

A Dofob does not trouble himself much about what others think of him or of his favorite pursuits, because he has what may be fairly styled the true Dofobian spirit and lives up to the immortal definition of an honest man as enunciated by the philosopher Timothy Toodles. The honest man, according to the dictum of that profound observer, was one who did not care a small Indian copper coin of trifling value—that is to say, a dam; although I think the philosopher added some superfluous words about not caring that for what sort of coat a man wore as long as his heart was in the right place. This sartorial and physiological supplement is immaterial, for the truth of the characterization lies in the primary expression: perhaps the word “continental” prefixed to the name of the coin would impart to the definition a distinctively American flavor.

Mr. Growoll in his interesting account of American Book Clubs tells of a number of these associations, whose laudable purposes are grave, serious and edifying; wrapped in a mantle of dignity which is most becoming but which arouses emotions of awe rather than of sympathy. The Dofob is not as serious as the Grolierite or the Caxtonian. The fact that many of his fellow-beings look upon him as an individual of imperfect intelligence because of his inordinate interest in books, he considers to be equivalent to a patent of nobility; for if he loves a particular book with a passion transcending all others, he is thereby raised, in his own estimation, far above the ordinary level of mankind and looks down from empyrean heights on those who are not sufficiently endowed with intellect or with intuition to comprehend that the veritable Dofob is the only person who possesses the power of recognizing at sight the very best and worthiest of all the books ever printed since the days of Fust and Gutenberg. With a superb self-appreciation and yet with the greatest affection and respect for my companions in Dofobishness, I own that in the depths of my being I consider no individual Dofob to be quite as praiseworthy, deserving and omniscient as I am. I regard myself as preeminently a D.O.F. and all that those letters imply, happy in the contentment which usually results from absolute self conceit. Our chief pleasure is in being regarded as confirmed and irresponsible cranks, defying the contumely of the world, hugging to our bosoms our pet delusions and willing to let other Dofobs hug theirs as closely. I might however be jealous if any one of them should hug too long and affectionately my own sweetheart book, for lovely books are as delightful but often as untrustworthy as lovely women. They are apt to run off with some millionaire. I am sadly conscious of the fact that the much prized Davenant folio or my Beaumont and Fletcher would be as happy in the arms of another as they are in my own. I think that I may as well abandon the metaphor here and now, for I may be unwittingly led into something which is described in the catalogues as “curious” or “facetious”. The man who was arrested for stealing a folio Shakespeare which he was lugging home after the fashion of Charles Lamb and who pleaded that it was a joke, was justly reminded by the wise magistrate that he was carrying the joke too far. (Cf. Joseph Miller’s Reports, passim). There is such a thing as carrying an analogy a little too far.

Parenthetically, one is moved to inquire why it is that we Dofobs who write about books are accustomed to adopt a style of labored facetiousness, for books are serious things. It is like the fashion of those who relate the history of old New York and who assume the tone of “Knickerbocker”: or of the delineator of life in the far west who cannot help imitating Bret Harte as the novelist of adventure in knighthood days imitates Sir Walter Scott. Books ought to be worthy of pure Johnsonese, the only dialect of dignity enough to deal with so solemn a subject.

A Dofob would not assert with offensive pride that the majority of people in this prosperous country are devoid of a real affection for books, but he is sorry for some of those who fondly imagine that they are bookish, occasionally reveal their inmost thoughts about books, and unconsciously disclose their sad incapacity to understand the essential nature of book-loving. In the matter of bindings, for example, there is commonly a lamentable ignorance. A few years ago I fortunately discovered a book printed in the latter part of the eighteenth century, produced in New York, and bound in the fine old calf of the period: a little dilapidated by the ravages of time and the bookseller’s shelves, but by no means in a state of ruin. That very binding made it cost me a goodly sum, for the contents were of no general interest; the book itself, the entity, binding and all, gave it value. I honored that book and after petting it properly, gladly gave it to a dear old gentleman, the only man in the city who knew anything about the subject dealt with in the book. A few weeks later he proudly brought it back to me in order that I might inscribe a few words on the fly leaf, and he said with considerable satisfaction, “You see, sir, that I have it neatly rebound!” And so he had, to my horror. The splendid old calf—I am referring to the binding—in which a Dofob would have rejoiced greatly, had been replaced by smug, cheap and modern cloth. Then it was that I grieved because my vocabulary was limited to the few thousand words which the devotee of statistics allows to the average man. All the languages of Mezzofanti could not have done justice to the situation; but the heroic self-restraint of a Dofob came into play and I suffered in silence. The honest but misguided friend will never know the full extent of the crime, and as the book is more to his liking in its present garb than it was in what he was pleased to call its “shabby” dress, it would have been needlessly cruel to undeceive him; and, after all, the matter was beyond remedy.

The kind friend who understands the intricacies of the stock-market and who tells me much that I care not for, about my garden, where I should buy my clothes, and what I should have in my library; who enlightens me, as many of our merciless fellow-beings love to do, about all questions of religion or of politics; the dear creature who is fond of saying “Now, what you ought to do is”—whatever in the plentitude of his self-contentment he ardently believes to be what every one else should do, because he does it; this one, I say, seldom knows anything about bindings. “I buy books to read”, he brags, as if one could not read comfortably a well-bound book. If you mention Tout, or Rivière, or Hayley, or Zaehnsdorf, to say nothing of Lortic, Prideaux, De Sauty or Cobden-Sanderson, he stares at you with glassy eyes of indifference and perhaps he calls your attention to a Barrie “edition de looks”, or to some of the paralyzing productions which the simple-minded are deluded into purchasing by the influence of alluring advertisements and insinuating circulars designed to mislead the ambitious but unwary buyers of books in the market-place.

I plead guilty to the charge of being a dreary old fool over books, but chiefly over old books, for they have a settled and permanent character which no one may impeach. We may be tolerably sure about them; they are generally what they seem to be, with their broad margins, their solid, substantial type, and their charming air of dignity. Most of the books of our day are unworthy of absolute confidence, and their paper, their binding, and their typography are a source of grief to the judicious. The man whose literary pabulum is sufficiently supplied by his daily newspaper may ask why an old book, with aged and decayed covers, is better than a new one with that outward adornment of gilt which some publishers delight to lavish upon us. The sagacious Dofob will not undertake the task of breaking his way into the solid density of such a mind or of explaining to him the reason, for the game is not worth the candle. When I was a boy I rashly attempted to convince a likely colored lad that slavery was right and should never be abolished, but to my fervid eloquence he invariably responded “Well, I doan’ know ’bout that”. It was an effective rejoinder and I now believe that he was fairly entitled to his name of Solomon. The smart individual of these times is beyond the reach of argument, and all one can do is to say to him, “Go to your newspaper, buy subscription editions of ‘standard authors’, fill your shelves with ‘the best sellers’, and be as happy as you may”.

But notwithstanding what I have just said, it is a favorite fallacy quite prevalent among the uninitiated that a book must be old in order to attract the bibliolater. True, as Emily Dickinson, with a magnificent disregard of rhyme, sings:

“A precious mouldering pleasure ’tis

To meet an antique book,

In just the dress his century wore:

A privilege, I think.”

A Dofob, however, does not restrict himself to such dolorous delights as “mouldering pleasures”, and sees no good reason why he should not be fascinated by something fresh from a good press as well as by what writers about books are addicted to calling “musty tomes”. A “tome”, I believe has come to mean “a large book”, but a Dofob does not necessarily prize it above a slender duodecimo, any more than he would prefer a fat friend to a thin one; and while gray hairs may be held dear, blond locks and jetty curls may be just as winning. A thoughtful physician once told me that he never read a book that was less than ten years old; he was not and could never be a Dofob. The rule may be well enough when applied to fiction, and a rigid observance of it would save some valuable time; but why should a man living in the earliest quarter of the last century have delayed for a decade the reading of Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound”, or “Rob Roy”, or “The Heart of Midlothian,” or the two precious volumes of “Charles Lamb’s works”, then given to the world? A Dofob cannot be persuaded that any book should be neglected because it is old or condemned merely because it is new. The passion for rare relics of antiquity is one not difficult to comprehend, but it is not exclusive of a passion for the best of modern books. Whether the date upon the title be that of the reign of Elizabeth or of the time of Victoria or Edward, “a book’s a book for a’ that”.

There is a good deal of sameness in the praises of books by book-lovers. In his Anthology called “Book Song”, Mr. Gleeson White says: “friends that never tire, that cannot be scorned or dallied with, is an idea that recurs constantly”, and in regard to those eulogies of special volumes with which most of us are familiar, he remarks justly, “at times the pride of ownership becomes a little irritating and seems deliberately worded to provoke jealousy”. It is a characteristic of Dofobishness that the Dofob does not indulge in panegyrics upon his own property, although he may do a little private bragging among intimates. He may dote upon the book of another, and borrow it too, giving no credence to the common delusion that a borrowed book is never returned. That is where he shows his superiority over the ordinary man. Nor does he glorify his books as “friends who never tire”. I would not care much for any friend who was so devoid of human qualities as not to be tiresome now and then. A companion who was always entertaining would be a cloying sort of person, and even his perfections would grow wearisome in time. The book has an advantage over a friend in this, that it may be thrown in a corner, or thrust in a cabinet, or banished to the back-rows when its allurements begin to pall, and if it experiences any sense of resentment or mortification at such a summary dismissal, it gives no outward or visible signs of dissatisfaction. Moreover books are immensely superior to human friends for they never “call one up” on the telephone, that imperious invader of peace and comfort, a modern affliction more dreadful even than the motor-cycle, that Moloch of the highways, because it has a wider field of operation. One may have some respect for the automobile, king of our roads, but for the vulgar, snorting tyrant, the degradation of a graceful, noiseless bicycle, naught but disgust and horror. No self-respecting horse can meet it without justifiable rebellion. I have found it the Juggernaut of New Jersey.

Few comprehend fully the bookishness of a book, its deserving dignity, and its peculiar sensitiveness. This man will deliberately turn down the corner of a leaf, and that man will cut the sheets with rude, iconoclastic finger or ruthlessly bend open the tender volume until its back is well-nigh broken. There ought to be a constitutional provision against cruel and unusual punishments of books, for surely they are fellow-citizens of worth and as much entitled to protection as the red men of the West who have recently been added to the number of our masters, or the voluble and dagger-loving emigrant from Italy who comes to us with droves of his kind and cheerfully stabs his women or his rivals in our public streets. I shudder when I remember how often I have beheld the shocking spectacle of a Philistine actually pulling a book from the shelf by the top, or wetting his fingers as he turned the pages of a sacred first edition. But it is better not to dwell upon such harrowing subjects.

However boastful, arrogant and censorious these deliberations may appear, I protest that I am not quite as conceited as I pretend to be. The bravado is assumed. I am really humble, conscious of my limitations, and profoundly deferential towards the experts who are masters of book-history and are able to “collate”, while I am, by natural incapacity, utterly unable to share in the collation. I admire these mighty men afar off, and am devoured by envy of their learning. Let me however disclose the miserable truth that I find old Dibdin stupid, that I am dreadfully bored by the tedious catalogues given to us from time to time by some of our non-Dofobian book clubs, and that in fact I abhor all catalogues of things which I can never hope to call my own. It may be a mark of genuine Dofobery to scorn scientific book-description; it always makes me uneasy and discontented. It affects me much in the same way as the formal phrases of what the companion of my childhood, (bookishly speaking) Captain Mayne Reid, used to call “the closet naturalists”—now known as “nature fakirs”—must affect men who pursue the tremendous teddy-bear and the bodacious bob-cat in their native wilds. I am so much in love with my own few books that I would no more dream of regarding them from the cataloguer’s point of view than I would of measuring my Dulcinea’s features in order to ascertain whether or not she comes up to the standard of beauty prescribed by the dull and pedantic persons who reduce everything to formulas.

Candidly, anything hereinbefore contained to the contrary notwithstanding, I believe that in our beloved country there are more enthusiastic lovers of books than may be found in any other land. Yet, if I am not sadly mistaken, England is the paradise of Dofobs. She ought to be; she is so much older than we are; she was bookish when we were busy in building an empire and boasted more bears than books. It makes my heart palpitate when I glance over the fascinating lists of Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge, and see what the libraries of the well-to-do Britons disgorge without ostentation,—treasures which make the book-lover’s soul thrill with the indescribable tremor which only a long-desired book can bring. I find myself wondering whether it will go on forever, if the resources of the innumerable “gentleman’s libraries” in England will be exhausted in our own time at least. I trust not, although I fear that the insatiable demands of American buyers may ultimately absorb the supply. I am not by any means an Anglomaniac, for our English cousins are fast becoming too socialistic for my taste, but surely their auction-sales are more attractive than ours, and what is more delectable than one of their best “book shops”? Why cannot we have such palaces of joy as those which may be found on the Strand, or in Piccadilly, or in the regions adjacent to the British Museum, or indeed in other places than London, where a Dofob may discover almost everything necessary to sate his appetite. I am affectionately reminiscent of Maggs’s. I am not trying to advertise Maggs’s; the name is not beautiful, euphonious, or seductive; it reminds one of the nomenclature of Dickens. But the shop is a dream, the managers are tactful and considerate, and there one may browse undisturbed and uninterrupted, with no sorrow but that which comes from the fact that while the prices are low when compared with ours, the purse of a plutocrat could never suffice to give us all the jewels preserved in the coffers of those polite and kindly vendors of dainties. I do not know what may be in Chicago, but in New York we have scarcely anything as alluring or as charming. Why are we denied such luxuries? When I am daring enough to enter the precincts of a New York “book-store”—it is never a “shop”—I approach the majestic salesman with fear and trembling, having already left my pocket-book with the gentle cabman. Does the nobleman lead me smilingly to a quiet recess, place a chair and a table at my disposal, and with tender solicitude submit to me the latest acquisition, the first edition, the extra-illustrated treasure, the autograph letter or manuscript which has just “come in” and has not yet been advertised or catalogued? By no means; he regards me with the same contemptuous hauteur which is displayed by the clerk of a popular hotel when I register my name and plead for “a room with bath”. I depart from the chilly halls feeling that I ought to be ashamed for having disturbed the lofty serenity of the supercilious magnate. They do these things better in France and in England: better in almost every other country as those who have had experience well know. They are content, these foreigners, with moderate profits. It is true that an American bookseller is obliged to pay higher rent and is subjected to heavier expenses because of the extravagant exactions of almost every one in this free land of ours—except, of course, the modest and diffident lawyers. Patriotism does not require one to acquiesce uncomplainingly in the exorbitant prices of our own book dealers. Let me however be fair and qualify my sweeping assertions: I know a few very decent book-vendors in New York and in Boston who want to be reasonable and are “not so bad”. I am grateful to them for many favors. In the words of Heron-Allen’s “Ballade of Olde Books”,

“I’ve haunted Brentano and John Delay,

And toyed with their stories of France so free,

At Putnam’s and Scribner’s from day to day

I’ve flirted with Saltus and Roe (E. P.):

But weary of all, I have turned with glee

To Bouton’s murk shelves with their wealth untold,

Yearning for Quaritch in Piccadilly

Where the second-hand books are bought and sold.”

This would be more accurate if some of the names were changed. I plead not guilty to Saltus and Roe, and I may perhaps be forgiven for not remembering at the moment who John Delay was or is.

Why do we allow such sordid considerations as prices to influence us in any way? Most of us Dofobs are devoid of a surplus of funds, but we value our possessions all the more because we may have had to make some sacrifices to secure them. If we were indifferent about cost, we would lose much of the pleasure of ownership. I well remember the time when I abstained from luncheon in order to buy a second-hand, shabby volume at Leggatt’s. I do not have to deny now my appetite for midday food, but whenever I come upon one of those old books in my peregrinations about the library, I have the pleasant little throb of the heart which brings back to me the ardor of youth, and those cheap treasures take to themselves a halo which transcends the brilliancy of even an illuminated missal or a noble Caxton. Those long cherished companions speak to me in eloquence scarcely to be comprehended by one who is not a Dofob to the core.

We are grateful to the kindly dealers who send to us catalogues full of temptations for those who are so ready to be tempted. With James Freeman Clarke already quoted, we repeat that “it is a pleasure even to read the description and the title”, and often like Eugene Field of blessed memory we mark the items which are too bewitching to resist as if we were going to acquire them and then either forget about them or resolve that our purse cannot afford the luxury, afterwards confident that we bought them and searching for them in vain in the entrancing regions of the book-cases.

Then what an insane joy there is in arranging the volumes, sometimes lamenting because the shelves are not exactly adapted to the association of fellow-books so that we fear that they will not be as friendly one to another as we would like to have them. If any one needs occupation for a rainy day, what more agreeable work may he find than that of assorting the books, so that not only will their sky-line be less jagged than that of lower New York, but that their contents may be of a nature to make them as sociable as they ought to be: while it must be borne in mind that the colors of their bindings should not be too glaringly inharmonious. And after all have been arranged, it is the joy of the genuine Dofob to arrange them all over again. There are times when the shelves overflow, and then comes the question of a new book-case and a still graver question as to where it shall be placed, leading to a further question about the enlargement of the house, which should be constructed on the Globe-Wernicke principle, for the main use of a house is to store books in it.

But there comes to every Dofob the thought that it will not be long before he must leave them. What is to become of them? No one will ever worship them as he has done all his life. They are interwoven with his existence and it is pitiful to think that he must be parted from them. I fear that in the world of the hereafter there may be no books, but it is not easy for me to imagine a heaven where books are not. I do not mean to be irreverent and I do not know whether I may attain even a bookless heaven, but I am unorthodox enough to own that I might prefer a bookish Hades.

IN A LIBRARY CORNER

I hate an orderly library. It has a formal air which repels familiarity; one cannot ramble in it, stroll aimlessly about it, come upon unexpected “finds”, or pluck a blossom here and there without fear of consequences. It is as devoid of charm as the stiff, uncompromising gardens of the eighteenth century which arouse ill temper by their arrogant right-angles. The card-catalogue itself is an encourager of angry passions; and glass doors are odiously inhospitable. What care I if dust accumulate? It is a blessed privilege to brush it off. What need have I of a card-index, when in hunting for what I want I may discover treasures hitherto lost to memory? When I encounter glass doors, those grudging guardians of the sanctuary, I long to fracture the panes with one mighty kick, for they are offensive with their noli me tangere exclusiveness. I want my books where I need not open a door to get at them or climb a ladder to reach them.

Not that I am averse to a certain method of arrangement, or to a well-defined color-scheme in the matter of bindings. No one wishes to put a tiny 16mo by the side of a towering quarto, or to fill the lower shelves with duodecimos and the upper ones with folios; nor does any one desire to fret his eyes by massing together colors which scream at each other and disturb the peace. I would not have Petroleum V. Nasby or the Orpheus C. Kerr Papers elbowing the “voluminous pages” of Gibbon or the serious dignity of Grote; but Boswell and Trevelyan need not be aggrieved by a close proximity to such inferior productions as Collingwood’s Life of Lewis Carroll or Hallam Tennyson’s disappointing Memoir of his illustrious father. “There are few duller biographies”, says Augustine Birrell, “than those written by wives, secretaries, or other domesticated creatures. Neither the purr of the hearth-rug nor the unemancipated admiration of the private secretary should be allowed to dominate a biography”. True, Trevelyan was Macaulay’s nephew, but he was barely of age when his uncle died, and had not yet been wholly “domesticated”.

It is almost needless to say that these wise utterances are not intended to apply to public libraries, those mausoleums of books, where one may “consult volumes” but never really read them; for how is it possible for anybody who is not endowed with a power of phenomenal self-absorption, to forget that the custodians, although unseen, are perpetually on guard, while the enforced silence of the place is a constant temptation, well-nigh irresistible, to arouse the echoes with defiant yells. In one of those halls of grandeur miscalled “reading rooms”, I am always reminded of “study hour” in school, and am in momentary expectation of hearing some one ask of the grim presiding functionary the old, familiar question, “Please, sir, may I go out?”

In every true library, there are sacred corners. In their cosy precincts you do not usually come upon the dress-parade volumes, imposing in their garb of polished calf or of velvety morocco, addressing you in solemn accents, reminding you of the aristocracy of their long descent, forbidding you to disturb them by casual pullings-down or thoughtless turning of their chilly pages. Their glacial aspect appals the ardent lover and freezes the founts of affection. These are seldom to be found in corners; they demand the showy places on the shelves where they may intimidate the beholder and turn him away abashed at their impressive array. They are as much shut off from the admirer’s fond touch as are the alleged crown-jewels in the Tower or the priceless manuscripts in the British Museum. My ideal library is composed chiefly of corners where one may linger in morning-jacket and slippers, and not be conscious of the need of attiring himself in the evening garments which conventionality decrees to be necessary for those who take part in stately functions. I often long to disarrange the symmetry of some “gentleman’s library”, just as when reading Johnson, or Gibbon, or Hamilton W. Mabie I have a fiendish propensity to split an infinitive or to end a sentence with a preposition.

Now if I were bent on making a foolish pretense of what is known as “good taste”, which I have no right or disposition to boast of, I would assert untruthfully, but no one could disprove it, that in these snug retreats I feast upon “The Proficience and Advancement of Learning”, or Evelyn’s Diary, or Pepys, or Sir Thomas Browne, or Elia. Every one who affects a literary “pose” is given to praising Elia; and there are few more precious books in the world. Yet if those immortal essays should appear to-day for the first time, they would have only what the newspapers style a “limited circulation”. A dinosaurus would have just as much popularity in the annual Horse Show, for they belong to the era of the stage-coach when people did not “do the Lake Country” in an escorted tour on a Hodgman car, and the Venetian gondola had not been crowded out of the Grand Canal by snorting motor-boats; when there were great men; poets, novelists, essayists, historians and statesmen. To the question, “Why have we no great men?” Mr. Chesterton rejects the answer that it is because of “advertisement, cigarette smoking, the decay of religion, the decay of agriculture, too much humanitarianism, too little humanitarianism, the fact that people are educated insufficiently, the fact that they are educated at all”. But his own answer, “We have no great men chiefly because we are always looking for them”, may be smart, but it is not convincing. The fact is that we do not have great men chiefly because we think we have no need of them.

The craze for equality has so possessed our minds that if one of us is presumptuous enough to thrust his head above the struggling mob that surrounds him, we set to work with one accord to pull him down, for who is he, forsooth, that he should assume to know more than we do or to be more than we are? In the days when the ignorant and the mediocre had not come to understand the might of their power, there were leaders; but however greatly they may need wise leaders now, they have become the leaders themselves and the ambitious are only astute and adroit followers. The state of the times is reflected in our literature; and as every man has arrived at the belief that he is an infallible judge upon questions of politics and of government, so he fancies that he is divinely endowed as a judge of all things literary. Thus it has come to pass that the guerdon of fame is bestowed, not upon the best book but upon the best seller. It has also come to pass that the only individual who is allowed to dominate his race is the editor of a newspaper. Great is the power of humbug; there is but one god, which is “the people”,—and the editor is his prophet. Every one from the cardinal to the curate, from the President to the postmaster, trembles before the majesty of a malicious monkey who by some mischance has contrived to get hold of a printing-press; for his penny compendium of slander and of crimes reaches the sons of manual toil who go to their work in the early morning, filled with envy of the well-to-do, grumbling at the fate which condemns them to labor while men whom they regard as no better than themselves enjoy sports and luxuries denied to them, ready to drink in the flattery addressed to them and rejoicing in the bitterest of assaults upon wealth and vested interests. No one is great to them except the crafty demagogue who ministers to their self-importance.

The mild and gentle Thomas Bailey Aldrich said in a moment of unusual irritation: “American newspapers are fearfully and wonderfully made. If about twenty thousand of them could be suppressed, the average decency of the world would be increased from twenty-five to fifty per cent.” This is no new cry; but it does not avail much to us soured old sufferers from their multitudinous lies and libels, to retire to our library corners and scold at them. In spite of our complaints, we think it a hardship if we cannot peer at them through our glasses over the matutinal coffee and enjoy their lies—about other people.

Great is the power of humbug, I repeat, with an air of imparting a new and important truth. I have just been reading—in a corner—a sketch of James Kent by Mr. James Brown Scott. He says of Charles Sumner that he, said Sumner, was “an ornament of the bar as he later was an ornament of the Senate”. But Sumner was not a real lawyer; he was not fitted for the conflicts of the bar. There is nothing like the battles of the law to take the vanity and pomposity out of a man. I do not wish to be understood as saying that there are no vain or pompous members of the legal profession, but they seldom win much respect or distinction. I doubt even if Sumner can justly be called “an ornament of the Senate”. He never did anything, he never originated anything; he only “orated”, so that in a sense he may have been ornamental; surely not useful. His speeches were carefully prepared and rehearsed; he was weak in debate. If any one cares to waste time upon the speech for which he was caned by Preston Brooks, he will be amazed at the scurrility of the language and the indecency of the vituperation. It is hard to believe that a man of his stalwart frame could be permanently injured by the blows of a light stick such as the one which Brooks used that day. The assault was a wicked performance, but Washington laughed in its sleeve over the outcry which the castigated one made about it. In those days the anti-slavery speakers were hunting for martyrdom, and Sumner made the most of his beating. In course of time, he was supplanted, as a martyr, by the deified horse-thief and murderer, John Brown. When the Senator assumed to dictate to Grant, he found his well-merited fate, and he has passed into oblivion. His useful, modest, hard-working colleague, Henry Wilson, as earnest and enthusiastic an opponent of slavery as Sumner was, is far better entitled to be called “an ornament of the Senate” than his more cultured but less effective associate.

Down in a quiet corner hides an humble cloth-clad little book which scarcely any one cares for except myself, and its interest to me comes less from its mild satire than from my affection for its author. “Salander and the Dragon, by Frederick William Shelton, M.A. Rector of St. John’s Church, Huntington, N. Y.”, with its Goodman, its Duke d’Envy, its Gudneiburud, Drownthort, and all the other parodies of Bunyan’s nomenclature, makes dull reading for the present generation, and it may be that my liking for it is only a form of perverse vanity. As I glance over the faded leaves, they bring before me the gentle, scholarly Shelton, who had been my father’s class-mate at Princeton—delightfully old-fashioned in the time when I had a boyish acquaintance with him. He was quite like his books, small, decorous, with a gleam of the humorous mingled with reflective sadness. I can fancy his shudder of dismay over most of our present-day sensational, highly-colored “literature” falsely so-called. I never knew more than two persons who had ever read “Salander”. But it aroused my indignation a year or two ago to read in a flippant review published in one of our magazines, a contemptuous reference to Doctor Shelton, whose nature and whose style were too sweet and pure for the taste of the pert, feminine scribbler.

Near the unoffending duodecimo is the well-beloved “Squibob Papers”, not as good as the immortal “Phoenixiana” which George Derby’s friends induced him to publish in the middle fifties, a famous precursor of our later and more elaborate “books of American humor”. My copy is not of the issue of 1859, but one which was printed by Carleton in 1865, after the author’s death. As most people know, poor Derby, who died at thirty-eight, was an officer of the Corps of Topographical Engineers, or, in his own words, “a Topographical Engineer who constantly wears a citizen’s dress, for fear some one will find it out.” Comparing them with the Engineers, he remarked that “the Corps of Topographical Engineers was only formed in 1838, while the Engineers date from the time when Noah, sick of the sea, landed and threw up a field-work on Mount Ararat”. It was an odd training school for a humorist, but Derby did not need much training.

His “great railroad project” of “The Belvidere and Behrings’ Straits Union Railroad”, with its branches to the North Pole “to get the ice trade”, to Kamchatka “to secure the seal trade for the Calcutta market”, and to Cochin China “to secure the fowl trade”, reads very much like the prospectus of an exceedingly modern enterprise. His “Sewing Machine with Feline Attachment”, by which a cat, induced by a suspended mouse, operates the mechanism, is an ingenious device, and he records that he “has seen one cat (a tortoise-shell) of so ardent and unwearying disposition, that she made eighteen pairs of men’s pantaloons, two dozen shirts, and seven stitched shirts, before she lay down exhausted”. The Fourth of July Oration, commemorating our forefathers who “planted corn and built houses, killed the Indians, hung the Quakers and Baptists, burned the witches and were very happy and comfortable indeed, and fought the battle named ‘the battle of Bunker Hill’, on account of its not having occurred on a hill of that name”, should never be forgotten if only for the story of the boy who picked his nose on the Fourth of July because it was Independence Day. Not very refined fun, you may say, but food for laughter, and with no taint of a peculiar kind of vulgarity which mars the fun of certain more classic fooling.

Among the tenants of the corner is a cheap and shabby American edition, in two fat, awkward volumes, of my pet novel, “Ten Thousand a Year”, much pawed over and alas! dog’s eared; while the first English edition, in three volumes, (Blackwood, 1841, “original cloth”), is seldom aroused from its serene repose on a conspicuous shelf. Ten thousand pounds a year then stood for colossal wealth; and when my boyish mind first applied itself to the study of the fitful fortunes of Tittlebat Titmouse, that income still appeared to represent riches beyond the dreams of avarice. When I began the study of law, I was one day toiling over Kent’s Commentaries, and the senior partner, bluff and kindly Aaron J. Vanderpoel, came upon me suddenly, crying out “What are you reading, young man?” I confessed, with the conscious pride which one feels when detected in doing something supposed to be virtuous, that I was reading Kent. “Don’t read Kent!” he shouted, “read ‘Ten Thousand a Year’”. Perhaps his advice was good; at all events I took it, and I did not tell him that I knew it already from cover to cover.

It is the best “lawyer’s novel” ever written, even if it is full of doubtful law. For the hundredth time you will follow with eager interest the progress of the great suit of Doe ex dem. Titmouse vs. Jolter, and await in breathless suspense the momentous decision of Lord Widdrington upon the question of the admission of that famous deed with the erasure, however well you may know that he is sure to exclude it; a ruling undeniably wrong, but if his lordship had held otherwise the story must have come to a sudden and ignominious close at the end of the first volume. This would have been a calamity, although the Aubreys and their woes become quite fatiguing and Oily Gammon turns out to be “more kinds of a villain” than is to be met with in actual life. He deserved a different fate; he ought to have married Kate Aubrey, and lived unhappily ever afterwards. I refuse to believe that he was guilty of the meaner crimes attributed to him in the account of his dying moments; but Warren probably thought that as Gammon had to die, he might as well depart this life in the odor of perfect villainy. He, Gammon, was a liar, thief, perjurer, forger—almost a murderer; but his crowning act of infamy was to devise an elaborate method of suicide to defraud a life-insurance company. If he had lived a little longer, he might have been found giving a rebate or riding on a Third Avenue car without paying his fare.

Warren had about all the worst faults chargeable against a novelist, yet the book has life. It may not be found in the drawing room or on my lady’s table, or in the languid hands of those who continually do recline on the sunny side of transatlantic steamers, but it endures. The account of the election in which, to my secret satisfaction, Titmouse defeats Mr. Delamere, is far better than Dickens’s attempt to describe the Eatanswill contest and fully as good as Trollope’s effort in the same field. Mr. Delamere, one of those impeccable figureheads created chiefly for the purpose of providing a husband for the equally impeccable young female angel who is so transcendently pure that she blushes deeply at the mere thought of a lover, oblivious of the fact that her adored parents must at some time have surrendered shamelessly to the sway of Cupid, is almost too noble for words; and as for Charles Aubrey, did not Thackeray pronounce him to be the greatest of all snobs? But he is such a precious snob.

Yet after we leave the nobility and gentry we find an abundance of humanity in the numerous “characters” who throng the pages, particularly among the lawyers. They would be just as well off without their impossible names which give them an air of unreality. But at that time it was a favorite custom of fiction-writers to label their personages with tags, and if Dickens may be pardoned for his Verisophts and his Gradgrinds, and Thackeray for Mr. Deuceace, Warren may surely be forgiven for Quicksilver, Subtle, Tag-rag and Going-Gone; and the world will continue to apply the name of “Quirk, Gammon and Snap” to attorneys’ firms as long as we have those useful adjuncts of civilization. In my time I have known several Quirks, not a few Gammons, and many Snaps. Snap is a sort of lawyer whom only a lawyer could conceive of; and Gammon, stripped of the basest of his qualities, may be encountered a dozen times a day between the Court House and the Battery.

Not far removed from the company of Titmouse and Gammon, is “Trilby”; the copy with the autograph letter of Du Maurier to Osgood, not the elaborately bound assemblage of the original Harper chapters, whose illustrations are so much more attractive than those in the later-published book, with the cancelled pages about Lorrimer and Joe Sibley which so offended the shrinking, diffident Whistler that they were remorselessly cut out—Whistler, who never hurt the feelings of a friend or learned “the gentle art of making enemies”. Then there are “The Bab Ballads”, and Lear’s “Nonsense Book,” and Alice, my Lady of Wonderland, and my Lady of Looking Glass country, whom so many adore and so many fail to comprehend. For there are myriads who, like the little Scotch lad, can see nothing in Carroll’s playful extravagances except that they contain “a great deal of feection”.

It is sad that the modern disposition to overdo everything should have so trampled upon such a delicious thing as “Trilby”; made it so common; worn it threadbare; and when it was no longer fresh, thrown it aside like a shattered toy. It is a manifestation of the childishness of the multitude which goes wild over some temporary hero and then lets him fall into the limbo of the forgotten when there are none so poor to do him reverence. There must be some magical elixir in “Pinafore”, for although thirty years have gone by since it sprang into universal favor, it still survives, is laughed at and admired, and is even quoted in after-dinner speeches. The mention of these speeches, without which no public or semi-public dinner is considered to be worth eating, brings painful reflections. We seem to be losing the art; perhaps we are approaching the heaviness and prosiness of our English cousins on such occasions. It is a melancholy thought that some reformers have introduced the plan of hearing the speeches first and devouring the dinner afterwards; and very lately diners were encouraged by the engraved announcement on the cards of invitation, that there would be “only six speeches, strictly limited to ten minutes each”. Yet, as a rule, the speakers are not burning for an opportunity to talk; they may truly say, as a beloved college president was wont to remark to a disorderly class, disturbing his lecture with horse-play, “Young men, this may be a bore to you but it is infinitely more of a bore to me.” There is difficulty in adjusting a speech to the tastes of the present-day dinner crowds; the time of the unending stream of anecdotes has passed, with its everlasting “that reminds me”, and it seems to be succeeded by an epidemic of the serious, which is not easily dealt with in the presence of a mob flushed with champagne and shrouded in tobacco-smoke. Some resort to epigram, but in fifteen minutes the epigram begins to degenerate into jerky twaddle and palls upon the jaded appetite. Now and again the orator exhibits an inclination to do what our newspapers are forever howling about—to “probe” something or somebody; but probing is always a painful operation and frequently does much more harm than good. It is not given to many to be really entertaining in discourse, so that our few entertainers are sadly overworked. This unhappy condition of affairs has brought us to the latest stage of infamy, when post-prandial talkers demand pay for their performances: and we may expect to see the day or the night, when the star of the evening will refuse to rise in his place and do his act until the pecuniary reward has been tendered to him in specie, bills, or certified cheque. Fancy the toast-master’s emotions if as he begins the familiar “We have with us to-night” he is interrupted by a cry from the hired guest, “You’re a saxpence short!”

Much unlike the books of which we have been speaking, but in its own way as attractive, is Mr. Atlay’s “Victorian Chancellors”, a collection of model biographies, of interest not only to lawyers but to lovers of history. Atlay makes no claim that his undertaking is to be regarded as a continuation of Lord Campbell’s “Lives”, and his methods are absolutely different from those of Campbell, who is amusing but so palpably unfair and often inaccurate that full faith and credit cannot be given to him. I regret that the “Lives of the Chief Justices of the Supreme Court” have not been written by some competent lawyer of our time, with sufficient leisure and a taste for authorship, as fair and free from personal prejudice as Atlay’s work proves him to be. The “Lives” that have hitherto appeared are by no means satisfactory. Flanders, Van Santvoord, and Tyler, the biographer of Roger Brooke Taney, are painstaking enough and undoubtedly conscientious, but they are of the old school, dull in style, with little or no sense of historical perspective. The biographies of Jay and of Marshall are not adequate; they do not reveal the men to us with that distinctness which is necessary to hold the reader’s attention. The “Lives” of Chase are weak and flimsy. Some of the great Associate Justices might be included in the series—Story, Curtis, Nelson, Miller; and perhaps others—famous for long and faithful judicial service if not for surpassing legal ability. Somehow our modern writers are not at their best in biography; those of sufficient skill and industry, like Henry Adams and James Ford Rhodes, are led to devote themselves to general history which affords a broader field. Moreover, a Justice of the Supreme Court is not as closely identified with politics and the administration of the government as an English Chancellor usually is, and the dry technical details of the career of a mere lawyer are not tempting to the man of letters.

There is a different corner, in a darker part of the library, where one may well linger when the wind is in the east and teeth are in need of gnashing. One of the discomforts of advanced years is that you are unable to do any gnashing without inflicting more pain upon the gnasher than is actually worth while. In this corner are gathered together some of the few books which cannot be loved; wall-flowers of literature, which never made the bookman’s heart palpitate with any fond emotion.

Here let us approach with hesitation and timidity, for however dry and disagreeable a book may be, still it is a book. “Somebody loved it”. The man who evolved it, who brought it forth, who labored over it, who corrected the proofs, was pleased with it; deformed and misshapen though it may be in the eyes of others, it was beautiful to him. Moreover, much may after all be learned from the poorest of books; and the food from which I would turn in scorn, may to another be palatable. Therefore I wish it to be clearly understood that in making what are called “derogatory” remarks about any book, I am guiltless of the offence of setting up my own judgment and preference against the view and opinion of any one else whomsoever; I am merely expressing my own personal feelings. If it be asserted by some one who chances not to agree with me, that these feelings are of no importance to any one but to myself, I may reply that I admit it and that no one is obliged to read what I have written; and should he complain that he has paid “very hard cash” for my book and has a right to full consideration, I will answer, as Mr. Lang answered somebody,—that he should read Mazzini, and learn that man has no rights worth mentioning, only duties. Moreover I would say to him that if he can prove that he paid for the volume its full price, and did not pick it up at a discount in some second-hand book shop, that refuge of lame, halt and blind books, or at a bargain counter in a department store, I will cheerfully refund his money, provided he will furnish me with a sworn affidavit declaring solemnly that he sincerely admires the book which I detest. But even the omnivorous reader must like some books better than others. If, as was truly said, no cigars are bad, some are certainly more smokeable than others, and some pretty women are prettier than other pretty women. If the books I do not like were the only books in the world, I suppose that I would be fond of them as Frederick was of Ruth until he beheld the loveliness of Major-General Stanley’s numerous daughters.

One of the black sheep of my flock is called “Random Reminiscences: by Charles H. E. Brookfield”, published in 1902. The author is the son of Thackeray’s Brookfield, and his portrait shows what manner of man he must be. How any rational human being could write out or cause to be published such a flat, stale and unprofitable mess, passes understanding. The most wretched of anecdotes are retailed, and if he chances upon a fairly good one he spoils it in the telling. “I am not aware”, he says in his preface, “that I have included in this volume anything which appears to me of importance; I trust that I have not either committed the impertinence of expressing any views.” This may have been meant in a facetious way, but it is obviously so true that one is impelled to ask why on earth he wrote it. He is so proud of his pointless stories that he makes one long to go out and kill something, thus creating a counter-irritant. How can any one fail to give way to inextinguishable laughter over this final outburst of glee: “Thanks to Dr. Walther and his treatment, I put on nearly 2 stone weight in a little over two months. I was 10 stone 4 before I went, and 12 stone 2 when I left. And I am over 12 stone to-day, three years later”. From his humor I should think that he was heavier. I have been waiting patiently for a second edition to ascertain whether he has grown to any extent, but none has appeared. No wonder that he finished his autobiography with a quotation from a newspaper which said of him, on his supposed decease: “But, after all, it is at his club that he will be most missed”. Jolly dog, how he must have warmed the cockles of their hearts with his merry jests!

In the same corner with the jovial Brookfield and his “twelve stone” are gathered together the various biographies whose titles begin with “The True” or “The Real”. I confess that I have not read through “The True Thomas Jefferson”, although I am burdened with two copies, but I have ploughed through “The True Abraham Lincoln”, and found it an ordinary piece of hack-work, marred by blunders. The calm assumption which leads a writer to proclaim that he alone portrays “the true” and “the real”, as if all other accounts were false, is condemnatory at the outset. As for Jeaffreson’s lot,—“The Real Lord Byron” and “The Real Shelley”,—they are monuments of dullness, the subjects overloaded with petty details of no value to any one. Mr. John Cordy Jeaffreson, who was always publishing “Books About” something or somebody, has presented to mankind his “Recollections”, conspicuous chiefly for its covert sneers at Thackeray, whom he hated, and studied disparagement of the personal character of that giant who towered so far above Jeaffresonian pigmies. Jeaffreson’s books belong to the Sawdust School of literature. He has not even the brightness of Percy Fitzgerald, who has so long made the most of his stock in trade, a certain friendship and association with Dickens, and who in his two volumes of “Memories of an Author” is almost as bad as Jeaffreson at his best. It is true that Dickens had a personal liking for Fitzgerald, when the latter was a contributor to “All The Year Round”, but I believe that Charles Dickens the Younger not many years ago expressed some doubts as to the intimacy of the two men.

Jeaffreson was a weak and self-important person, jealous of his betters. George Somes Layard says, in his interesting “Life of Shirley Brooks”,[^[3]] that Jeaffreson in his “Book of Recollections” wrote “with ill concealed envy of a far abler and more successful man than himself” a silly fling at Brooks concerning the name “Shirley”; and elsewhere refers to the “Recollections” as a “querulous and pawky book”. The characterization is undeniably just; plainly in accord with the opinion of the reading public; and the two pawky volumes rest peacefully in the trash corner.

In company with Jeaffreson will be found everything written by Mr. William Carew Hazlitt, who, in a long life of devotion to the accumulation of miscellaneous information of doubtful value and to the parading of the name of Hazlitt, has caused a vast number of pages to be covered with typographical records of his diligence and of his unfailing capacity for making blunders. Full forty years ago he was unlucky enough to come into close contact with the keen lance of one James Russell Lowell, who riddled his editions of Webster and of Lovelace, included in John Russell Smith’s “Library of Old Authors”. Lowell wrote that “of all Mr. Smith’s editors, Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt is the worst. He is at times positively incredible, worse even than Mr. Halliwell, and that is saying a good deal.”[^[4]] Whether Hazlitt was worth flaying as Lowell flayed him, may be questioned. But Hazlitt still goes on, in his Boeotian way; always inept; sometimes so offensive that, as in the case of his “Four Generations of a Literary Family” it has been necessary to withdraw the work from circulation.[^[5]] An example of his “foolish notions” may be seen in one of his latest books, “The Book-Collector” (1904) which has a sub-title composed of fifty-one words. Mr. Hazlitt announces the astonishing generalization that the autograph collector does not care for books or for manuscripts beyond the extent of a fly leaf or inscribed title-page, and that he is a modern and inexcusable Bagford who tears out the inscription and throws away the book. He cites the case of “a copy of Donne’s Sermons, with a brilliant portrait of the author—and a long inscription by Izaak Walton presenting the volume to his aunt. It was in the pristine English calf binding, as clean as when it left Walton’s hands en route to his kinswoman, and such a delightful signature. What has become of it? It is sad even to commit to paper the story—one among many. An American gentleman acquired it, tore the portrait and leaf of inscription out, and threw the rest away”.

I believe him—to use the language of a mighty hunter—to be a meticulous prevaricator. If the tale be true, and I should like to have Mr. William Carew Hazlitt under cross-examination for a while, it only shows that there may be a few vandals in the tribe of autograph collectors, but no true collector would ever be guilty of such a wanton crime. Bagford tore out title-pages, but that affords no evidence that book-lovers are habitually given to the folly of tearing out title-pages. As for the case being “one of many”, I deny it; if he had known of another instance he would have gloried in the description of it. But he never knew law, logic or truth, and upon his indictment for silliness it would be necessary only to offer in evidence his books,—and rest.

But why should I get so very cross about poor old Hazlitt? The wisest thing I can do is to recite to him the touching verses of “You are old, Father William” and remonstrate gently with him in regard to his pernicious habit of incessantly standing upon his head. It will be a good plan to return to the favorite corner and soothe my ruffled spirits by reading Percy Greg’s comical “History of the United States”, or better still, the dear little story which Roswell Field wrote about “The Bondage of Ballinger”.

Whether so famous a poem as Young’s Night Thoughts is entitled to the privileges of the pit of Acheron, may be matter for dispute; but as Goldsmith said of those gloomy lucubrations, a reader speaks of them with exaggerated applause or contempt as his disposition “is either turned to mirth or melancholy”. We have preserved “tired nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep”, and “procrastination is the thief of time,” but we know that the didactic parson’s famous poem is “hardly ever read now except under compulsion.” My chief grievance against the man who was compelled to

“Torture his invention

To flatter knaves or lose his pension,”

is not, however, founded upon his lugubrious pentameters.

The man who turns down the corner of the leaf of a book is not only fit for treason, stratagems and spoils, but is well qualified to commit any mean crime in the calendar. If his memory is so poor that he cannot remember page or passage, let him make a small pencil note on the margin. Such a note may readily be removed by an eraser, but a “dog’s ear” can never be wholly removed. Its blight continues during the life of the book. Now Boswell records this sickening fact: “I have seen volumes of Dr. Young’s copy of The Rambler, in which he has marked the passages which he thought particularly excellent, by folding down a corner of the page, and such as he rated in a supereminent degree are marked by double folds. I am sorry that some of the volumes are lost.” I do not share in this sorrow; it is well that the testimony of such brutality should be effaced. Double folds! Insatiate archer, would not one suffice? Perhaps Johnson himself, Virginius-like, destroyed his offspring thus shamelessly violated.

It is often difficult to get out of corners; but before I escape, let me give to the dog’s-earing, nocturnally reflecting Young full credit for a single utterance—“Joy flies monopolists,”—which proves that it was not wholly in vain that he burned the midnight oil; for although he speaks in the present tense, it is manifest that the spirit of prophecy was strong within him. He looked ahead for more than a century and foresaw the day when “grafters” might be glorified and exalted, debauchees acclaimed us apostles of the people, and murderers feasted and honored, but monopolists hated, shunned and abhorred as miscreants whose sins can never be forgiven. Joyless indeed are those who dare to deprive their fellow beings of the inborn right to equality in everything; for we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created free and equal,—that is to say, with the right to do just as they please, to till the soil, to mine the earth, to invent the telegraph and the telephone, to manufacture steel, and to construct railways, but not to do it so well as to prevent any of the great people from doing the same thing. The abandoned wretch who, by his despicable brains, his virtuous life, and his pernicious industry, seeks to impair those rights in any degree, however trifling, must be prepared to bid farewell to happiness and contentment. If he is able to avoid the jail, it will be well for him to seek refuge in some secluded spot; let us say, in a peaceful library corner.

OF THE OLD FASHION

Speaking appreciatively a few nights ago at the club, concerning a recent magazine article on “Prescott, the Man,” I was reminded by a youthful university graduate of only twenty-five years standing, that “Prescott is an old-fashioned historian.”

There is much that is amusing in the attitude of the self-sufficient present towards the things of the past and there is also an element of the pathetic. I am often called an “old fogy,” an epithet whose origin and derivation are uncertain, but whose meaning is reasonably plain. Nobody who ever had the name applied to him was oppressed by any doubt about its signification. Some authorities tell us that it comes from the Swedish fogde—one who has charge of a garrison,—but I question it despite the confident assertion of the Century Dictionary. It is not altogether inappropriate, because old fogies are compelled to hold the fort against all manner of abominations. They are the brakes on the electric cars of modern pseudo-progress. Thackeray speaks of “old Livermore, old Soy, old Chutney the East India director, old Cutler the surgeon,—that society of old fogies, in fine, who give each other dinners sound and round and dine for the mere purpose of guttling.”

So the term is always associated with the stupid and the ridiculous, used with regard to “elderly persons who have no sympathy with the amusements and pursuits of the young.” Nobody ever refers to a young fogy, although most of us know many exceedingly dull-witted young people who have no sympathy with the amusements and pursuits of the aged or even of the middle-aged. One class is no more worthy of contempt than the other. The adolescents who find their highest form of entertainment in “bridge” are at least as deserving of pity as the semi-centenarian who prefers to pass his evenings among his books and his pictures or to devote them to Shakespeare and the musical glasses. There are some delights about the library fireside which compare favorably with those of the corridors of our most popular hostelry.

Certain kindly critics have insisted that my own literary tastes were acquired in the year 1850. I am not sure that the despised tastes formed in those commonplace, mid-century days are to be esteemed more highly than the tastes of our own self-satisfied times, but a good deal may be said in their favor. Perhaps the past is not always inferior to the present. There are varying opinions on the subject, from the familiar saying of Alfonso of Aragon, quoted by Melchior, immortalized by Bacon, and paraphrased by Goldsmith—that saying about old wood, old wine, old friends, and old authors—to the dogmatic declaration of Whittier that “still the new transcends the old.” It may occur to antiquated minds that there are some elements of excellence about old plays compared with the dramatic works of this careless, insouciant time; that Wordsworth has some merits which are superior to those of the worthy gentleman who now fills the office of Laureate, and that possibly the poetry of the last few years is not entitled to boast itself greatly beside that of the early nineteenth century—the poetry of Scott, of Byron, of Shelley and of Keats. But we have the telephone and the trolley-car, the automobile, the aeroplane, and the operation for appendicitis; and we admire our progress, the wonderful growth of the material, the mechanical, and the million-airy, while a few may pause to ask whether good taste and good manners have grown as greatly. Some of our older buildings for example are assuredly far better to look at than the lofty structures of steel which tower in lower New York and make of our streets darksome canons where the light of day scarcely penetrates and where the winds of winter roar wildly about our devoted heads as we struggle, hat-clutching, to our office doorways. May we not cite the City Hall and the Assay Office as honorable specimens of dignified architecture? There was something impressive too about the old “Tombs,”—replaced not long ago by a monstrosity;—a structure which a lady recently told me was once referred to by an English friend who had never been in New York, as “the Westminster Abbey of America.”

It is delightful to be young and to indulge in the illusions of youth—a truism which it is safe to utter, for nobody will dispute it. “Youth is a blunder, manhood a struggle, old age a regret,” said the strange, semi-oriental personage, an enigma in politics and a problem in literature, Benjamin Disraeli. Everybody knows the rude saying of old George Chapman, which it is almost an impertinence to quote, but every one does not remember whence it came—that young men think the old men are fools but old men know young men are fools. It is certain that we have cherished that idea in our minds for many centuries. Pope, in his epigrammatic way, remarked that “in youth and beauty wisdom is but rare,” but we cannot give him credit for originality in the utterance. We will go on with our regrets, our reproofs and our hesitancies, and in the course of time those who sneer at us now as cumbersome relics, laudatores temporis acti, mere maunderers enamored of an effete past, will take their turn, fill our places, and endure the pitying and condescending smiles of the succeeding generation. There is nothing new under the sun, and the man of to-day may well pause in his arrogant career to remember that he will quickly pass into the category of the obsolete.

Some of us who are beginning to descend that downward slope of life which soon becomes sadly precipitous, but who retain a vivid recollection of the long ago, are fond of recalling a period of New York which in this era of lavish expenditures, indiscriminating profuseness, and careless prodigality seems strangely simple. Those were the days when in sedate Second Avenue and Stuyvesant Square were the homes of dignified wealth, whose owners rather looked down upon Fifth Avenue as parvenu; and Forty-second Street was almost an outpost of civilization. We revelled in the delights of the ancient Philharmonic concerts and believed that Carl Bergmann was the last evolution of a conductor; later we recognized Theodore Thomas as the man who did more to develop a taste for good orchestral music in this country than any other one man who ever lived. We thronged the stalls of old Wallack’s, with its most excellent of stock-companies—something which has wholly disappeared—and we rejoiced in Dion Boucicault and Agnes Robertson. A little later we haunted the upper gallery of the Academy of Music in Fourteenth Street,—at least I did, because of a confirmed stringency in the money market,—and cheered the magical top-notes of the ponderous but melodious Wachtel and the generous tones of that most inspiring of singers, the splendid Parepa-Rosa. We hailed with loud acclaims the manly and dignified Santley—more in his element in oratorio than in opera—and the royal contralto, Adelaide Phillips, long since forgotten except by the Old Guard who afterwards transferred their allegiance to Annie Louise Cary. It may have been a provincial time, but we did not think so; it was a good time, and we enjoyed it.

It seems but yesterday when all over the land flashed the news of Lincoln’s death, and the black draperies suddenly shrouded the streets while the triumphant note of Easter Sunday died away in a cry of lamentation. I was in old St. Bartholomew’s in Lafayette Place that Sunday, and the recollection of it will never be lost. Nor shall I forget the grief and alarm of a small band of Southerners, secessionists of the strongest type, domiciled in the same house with me, as they lamented that in the death of Abraham Lincoln the South had been deprived of its best friend, the man who would have made reconstruction a blessing instead of an affliction. They had been rebels, it is true, but they were conscious of the loftiness of the soul of that noble citizen who, with faults which are often the accompaniments of greatness, stood for all that was just and magnanimous in our national life.

Some of us have a clear recollection of the camping of soldiers in City Hall Park, the cheering of the multitude as the regiments of volunteers swung down Broadway on their march to Virginia, when we were striving to preserve the republic and the horror of civil war was present with us every hour. We were less cynical, less ambitious, less strenuous in those days, and I think we were more serene and sincere. We had serious imperfections, but we did not carry ourselves quite as mightily, and on the whole we had some creditable characteristics. There is no good reason why we should be ashamed of ourselves.

Were we so very stupid in the fifties? Was there not some true and honorable life in our social and literary world of that generation? Surely our newspapers were as worthy of respect as some of our contemporary journals with their blazing capitals, their columns of crime, their pages of the sensational, and their provoking condensed headlines which exasperate me by their airy flippancy. I sometimes wonder that nobody except myself utters a protest against those dreadful headlines. They reduce almost everything to vulgarity, and the affection of condensation is distinctly irritating. Most objectionable of all are the headlines followed by interrogation points, because they are misleading. If, for example, they say in capitals “Mr. Smith strikes his mother?” the average reader—and there is more of that sort than of any other—glancing over the pages misses the query and goes to his grave with the firm conviction that poor Smith was the most unmanly of brutes. I am not sure that the interrogation mark protects the proprietors against a libel suit.

It is true that in the fifties our art may have been of the tame and tidy sort, timorously clinging to the conventional; our financial enterprises were conducted on so small a scale that a million was a sum which made the banker’s heart palpitate with apprehensive emotion; our politics were concerned chiefly with the colored man and his relations to the State; in architecture our awful brown stone fronts were oppressing in a domineering way all the town in and above Fourteenth Street. But there was a certain dignity about it all, an absence of tawdriness, a savor of respectability.

Fourteenth Street! It must be difficult for the New Yorkers of to-day who have not passed the half-century mark to realize that only fifty years ago it was really “up-town.” It is easier to imagine the present Thomas Street as it was in 1815, a spot to be reached only after a bucolic journey through country lanes which my grandfather used to traverse on his way to the New York Hospital where he studied medicine. We think of that condition of things in about the same state of mind as that in which we contemplate the Roman Forum or the stony avenues of Pompeii. It amuses me to recall the period of the fifties and early sixties when the Hudson River Railroad had its terminus in Thirtieth Street near Tenth Avenue, but sent its cars, horse-drawn, to Chambers Streets and College Place just opposite old Ridley’s, whose pictures were on those familiar inverted cones of never-to-be-forgotten candies, the virtues whereof have been proclaimed sonorously on railway trains from time immemorial, and that Chambers Street station will always live in the memory of old-fashioned people who used to “go to town” from rural neighborhoods. My aforesaid grandfather took me often, much to my joy, to visit his son in West Nineteenth Street, and the conservative old gentleman, who served as a surgeon under Commodore Charles Stewart on the good ship “Franklin,” always went to Chambers Street and thence by the Sixth Avenue horse-railway to Nineteenth Street, which caused the pilgrimage to be unduly protracted, but we always reached our destination sooner or later—generally later. I remember that an idiotic notion possessed me that we were confined to traveling on West Broadway because country people were not allowed to encumber the real, the glorious Broadway, of whose omnibus-crowded splendors I caught but furtive glimpses by peering up the cross-streets. Another gentleman of the old school, whom I loved sincerely, invariably proceeded from Thirtieth Street—and after the genesis of the Grand Central Station, from Forty-second Street—to the Astor House, from which venerable house of cheer he wended his way serenely to Union Square, or to Madison Square, or to any quarter where his business or his pleasure led him, however remote it might be from City Hall Park. To him the Astor House was practically the hub of the metropolis. These details may seem to be trivial, but they are characteristic of the old-fashioned men of half a century ago who still clung to the swallow-tailed coat as a garment to be worn by daylight. It never occurred to them to “take a cab,” possibly because there was no cab which a decent person would willingly occupy unless it had been ordered in advance from a livery stable. There are many reasons why this land of freedom—modified freedom—is preferable to any other land; but when we come to cabs, we must, in all fairness, admit the superiority of the London hansom over a New York “growler,” the hansoms now vanishing, we learn, before the all-conquering horde of motor-cars.

The old-fashioned magazines—how few ever turn their pages now, and yet how much in them is of interest, even to a casual reader. Far be it from me to whisper the slightest word of disparagement about our gorgeous and innumerable “monthlies,” with their pomp and pride of illustration, extending from text to the copious advertisements, those soul-stirring and lucrative adjuncts to a magazine of the present. Do not tell me that a man who buys the thick, paper-covered book does not read the advertisements; he pretends that he does not, but he does. According to my experience he follows them from soap to steam-yachts, from refrigerators to railway routes, but he would rather die than confess it. Much as I admire these products of our later civilization, I nevertheless maintain that there is more charm in an ancient number of any worthy periodical than is to be found in the latest issue. Time seems to add a mellow flavor to the good things of the past. There is not much to say in praise of the solemn Whig Review or of O’Sullivan’s portentous Democratic Review, but take from the shelf a shabbily bound volume of Graham’s Magazine of Literature and Art, published in the forties, and there will be discovered a wilderness of delights. The fashion-plates alone are dreams of comical beauty, and the steel plates of “The Shepherd’s Love,” “The Proffered Kiss,” and “Lace Pattern with Embossed View” far surpass—in a sense—the boasted work of Pyle and of Abbey. What soul will decline to be thrilled at the lovely skit entitled “Born to Love Pigs and Chickens” by that butterfly of literature, Nathaniel Parker Willis, which you will find in the number of February, 1843. Consider the portrait of Charles Fenno Hoffman, with his exquisite coatlet, his wonderful legs attired in what appear to be tights, and his mild but intellectual countenance beaming upon us as he sits, bare-headed, upon a convenient stage rock, holding in one hand an object which may be a pie, a boxing-glove or a hat, according to the imagination of the beholder. Contemplate the list of contributors, including Bryant, Cooper, Longfellow, Lowell, and “Edgar A. Poe, Esq.,” the “Esq.” adding a delicious dignity to each of the illustrious names. It was only “sixty years since,” but can any magazine of to-day rival that catalogue? Almost every one knows that Poe was editor of Graham for a year and that The Murders in the Rue Morgue as well as Longfellow’s Spanish Student first appeared in that magazine. Coming to a later day, recall the Harper of the fifties. No pleasure of the present can equal that which we felt when we revelled in Abbott’s Napoleon, which turned us lads into enthusiastic admirers of the great Emperor; or when we enjoyed the jovial Porte Crayon, whose drawing was consistently as bad as Thackeray’s, but whose fascinating humor had a quality peculiarly its own. Not long ago Mr. Janvier, to the gratification of the surviving members of the brotherhood of early Harper readers, gave to Strother the tribute of his judicious praise.

One may not gossip lightly about the Atlantic, but the Knickerbocker is distinctly old-fashioned. Longfellow’s Psalm of Life first saw the light in its pages; immortal, even if Barrett Wendell does truthfully say that it is full not only of outworn metaphor but of superficial literary allusion. Old New York, adds Professor Wendell, expressed itself in our first school of renascent writing, which withered away with the Knickerbocker Magazine. But there was a Knickerbocker school, and the brothers Willis and Gaylord Clark helped to sustain its glories. The magazine began in 1832, faded in 1857 and died in 1864; and out of it sprang many of the authors whose names are inseparably associated with a golden period of our literature.

It was only a short time ago that one of the men of those by-gone times departed this life, and the scanty mention of him in the public press compelled a sad recognition of the familiar truth that in order to retain popular attraction one must pose perpetually under the lime-light. Parke Godwin, who belonged to the order of scholarly, high-minded Americans, had outlived his fame, except among the Centurions of West Forty-third Street and a few old people of the same class. Perhaps he did not concentrate his powers sufficiently. Editor, writer of political essays, author of Vala, a Mythological Tale, biographer of his father-in-law, William Cullen Bryant, and by virtue of his History of France, historian,—but he published only one volume more than forty years ago and then abandoned the task—he had that broad culture which sometimes disperses itself and fails to win for its possessor the highest place in the literary hierarchy. He was a delightful example of what we now regard as the old-fashioned, and his address on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Century Club is a mine of good things for one who is interested in the past of New York. “I have stood once more” said he “beside the easel of Cole as he poured his ideal visions of the Voyage of Life and the Course of Empire in gorgeous colors upon the canvas. I have seen the boyish Kensett trying to infuse his own refinement and sweetness into the wild woods of the wold. I have watched the stately Gifford as he brought the City of the Sea out of its waters, in a style that Cavaletto and Ziem would envy and with a brilliancy of color that outshone even its native Italian skies. I have stood beside the burly Leutze as he portrayed our Washington among the ice of the Delaware, or depicted the multitudinous tramp of immigrants making their western way through the wilderness to the shores of the Oregon, that ‘hears no sound save its own dashings.’ All have come back for a moment, but they are gone, oh whither? Into the silent land, says Von Salis; yet how silent it is! We speak to them, but they answer us not again.” He brought back to us the beginning of things, when he told us of the incipient conditions of the Academy of Design. “They took a room—was it suggestive?—in the old Alms House in the Park, and they worked under a wick dipped in whale-oil which gave out more smoke than light.” He spoke of Halleck, of Gulian Verplanck, of Bryant, of Charles Fenno Hoffman, of Robert C. Sands, and of old Tristam Burges, “who had swallowed Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary;” and he closed with a brief flight of eloquence such as in these days of new-fashioned chilliness it is seldom vouchsafed to us to hear.

Of the same order was William Allen Butler, the friend of Halleck and of Duyckinck, of Andrew Jackson and of Martin Van Buren, who knew Samuel Rogers and visited him in London. He was nine years the junior of Godwin. He might have won the highest eminence in the world of books if he had not made the law his chief occupation and literature only his recreation. The bar does not among its rewards number that of enduring fame, unless occasionally some great political or criminal trial perpetuates the name of the advocate chiefly concerned in it. Of course, Mr. Butler’s early essay in verse, “Nothing to Wear,” will never be entirely forgotten. A humorous skit as it was, its enduring merit is shown by the fact that in spite of the old-fashioned terms descriptive of woman’s dress and of the fashionable life of fifty years ago, in its general tone it is curiously contemporaneous. Scarcely less witty and amusing were his poems, “General Average” and “The Sexton and the Thermometer,” the former being more highly esteemed by many than its popular predecessor. I suppose that he left it out of the later collection of his poems because, with his gentle and kindly nature, he feared that a few of its passages might give offense to some of his friends of the Jewish faith whom he esteemed and respected. His translations of Uhland are marked by graceful and poetic fervor, and his prose style was lucidity itself. His humor, always attractive and appropriate, lightened even his most serious work, from an address on Statutory Law to an argument in the Supreme Court in Washington City. It was well said of him by a jurist now living, that “no man of his time, either in England or America, held an equally high rank both as a lawyer and a literary man.”

Another of the old-fashioned literary men, who was, however, considerably the senior of both Godwin and Butler, was George Perkins Morris, who died in 1864. He was at once a general of militia, an editor, a favorite song-writer, and the composer of an opera libretto. His title to immortality rests mainly upon the sentimental verses known as “Woodman, Spare that Tree,” which had a flavor about them very dear to our grandparents. To look at his manly countenance in the portrait engraved by Hollyer (who at the present writing is still extant and vigorous) after the Elliott painting, we can scarcely imagine him as the author of such lines as “Near the Lake Where Drooped the Willow,” “We Were Boys Together,” “Land-Ho,” “Long Time Ago” and “Whip-poor-will.” But James Grant Wilson says that for above a score of years he could, any day, exchange one of his songs unread for a fifty dollar cheque, when some of literati of New York (possibly Poe) could not sell anything for the one-fifth part of that sum. In the presence of Morris, I confess I cannot quite give myself up to adoring admiration of the taste of our predecessors. This stanza indicates his ordinary quality:

The star of love now shines above,

Cool zephyrs crisp the sea;

Among the leaves, the wind-harp weaves

Its serenade for thee.

Notwithstanding this rather trifling vein, admirably satirized by Orpheus C. Kerr, and a certain tone of commonplace, Morris had a genuine lyrical quality in his verse, although it was devoid of startling bursts of inspiration, and English literature affords many examples of less deserving poesy. Morris was an industrious editor, appreciative of others, and he had a personal charm which endeared him to those who had the good fortune to come within the pale of his friendship, and particularly to those who were permitted to enjoy the generous hospitality of his sweet and dignified home at Undercliff opposite West Point. Smile as we may at his little conceits and his obvious rhymes, we must recognize the sincere and genial nature of the kindly General, so long conspicuous in the social and literary life of old New York.

These men, it may be said, do not prove the permanent value of the literature of the fifties. Godwin and Morris were editors and Butler a busy lawyer, none of them able to give their undivided attention to authorship. I suppose that Irving and Emerson, Bryant, Longfellow, Hawthorne and Bayard Taylor were more distinctly the ornaments of the time, and there are other names which more judicious and discriminating men might substitute for some of those I have chosen. Bayard Taylor’s greatest work was done in later years, but he had already won his first fame—not a giant, but a poet with “the spontaneity of a born singer,” as Stedman said. Irving, the most charming and amiable of writers, had not the most forceful intellect, but he was calm and graceful, with a gentle and bewitching humor and a strong appreciation of the beautiful—a good man, beloved and honored at home and abroad. His fame is paler now than it was forty years gone by, but he has the immortality of a classic. Emerson had a powerful influence over the minds of men, but, viewed in the perspective of time, he does not loom so largely now. I am not competent to venture far into the territory of criticism, having only the equipment of a general reader who timidly expresses his personal feelings and leaves to trained and experienced judges the task of scientific analysis; but we general readers are the jury, after all.

As time slips by there is a tendency to merge the decades of the past, and to the young people of 1909 the period of 1850–1860 is every bit as remote as the period of 1830–1840. The university undergraduate does not differentiate between the alumnus of 1870 and him of 1855, as I know by experience. A melancholy illustration of this well-known fact was afforded of late in a popular play, the scene of which was laid in a time supposed to be exceedingly far distant, and the programme announced it as “the early eighties.” The representation was enlivened by such antiquated melodies as “Old Zip Coon,” “Maryland, My Maryland,” and “Old Dan Tucker,” as well as “Pretty as a Picture,” “Ye Merry Birds,” and “How Fair Art Thou,” all as appropriate to the early eighties as Dr. Arne’s “Where the Bee Sucks” and “Rule Britannia.” It was almost as abominably anachronistic as the naive declaration of a pseudo-Princetonian who asserted a membership in the Class of 1879 and assured me that he had been, while in college, a devoted disciple of Doctor Eliphalet Nott. If I have mingled my old-fashioned decades unduly, it has been because of that tendency to merger which no Sherman Act can suppress.

Few there are who cling with affection to the memory of the old-fashioned. Most of us prefer to spin with the world down the ringing grooves of change, to borrow the shadow of a phrase which has itself become old-fashioned. The flaming sword of the Civil War severed the latest century of America in two unequal parts, and its fiery blade divided the old and the new as surely and as cleanly as the guillotine cleft apart the France of the old monarchy from the France of modern days. To stray back in recollection to the land of fifty years ago is almost like treading the streets of some mediæval town. But for some of us there is a melancholy pleasure in the retrospect and a lingering fondness for the life which we thought so earnest and so vigorous then, but which now seems so placid and so drowsy.

WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH

Reviewers, critics and students of literature are inclined to resent the assertion with respect to a writer once eminent, that he is substantially forgotten. But it is safe to say that if we regard the millions of readers in this country whose literary nutriment is made up chiefly of works of fiction or of biography of the lighter sort, as “the reading public of America”, the name of William Harrison Ainsworth is by no means familiar in the United States. There are many book-owners who keep his “Works” upon their shelves, and know the backs of the volumes, and some of the omnivorous have doubtless read “Jack Sheppard”, “Crichton”, “The Tower of London”, and perhaps “Rookwood”; yet thousands who are well acquainted with their Scott, their Dickens and their Thackeray would be sorely puzzled if they were asked to tell us who Ainsworth was, and exactly when he lived, or to give a synopsis of the plot of a single one of his numerous stories; and he has been dead not quite thirty years.

Allibone gives him but fourteen lines of biography, mostly bitter censure, with a few words of qualified praise for such historical tales as “St. Paul’s” and “The Tower”. The indifference to him is not limited to general readers or to America. Chamber’s Encyclopædia of English Literature begrudges him twenty-nine lines of depreciative comment, conceding to him dramatic art and power, but denying to him “originality or felicity of humor or character”. He is not even mentioned in Mr. Edmund Gosse’s Modern English Literature, and Taine does not condescend to give his name. In the History of Nicoll and Seccombe no reference to him can be found. In the pretentious volumes of the History of English Literature edited by Garnett and Gosse a portrait of him is given with a rough draft of a Cruikshank drawing; and this is what is said of him: “A very popular exponent of the grotesque and the sensational in historical romance was William Harrison Ainsworth (1805–1882), a Manchester solicitor, who wrote Rookwood, 1834, Jack Sheppard, 1839, and The Tower of London, 1840. He was a sort of Cruikshank of the pen, delighting in violent and lurid scenes, crowded with animated figures”. This is rather an absurd mess of misinformation. One would scarcely believe that there was a time when he was esteemed to be a worthy rival of Charles Dickens, and when in the eyes of the critics and of the public he far outshone Edward Lytton Bulwer.

In a note to the sketch in the Dictionary of National Biography, Mr. W. E. A. Axon says that “no biography of Ainsworth has appeared or is likely to be published.” The fact is correctly stated, but the prediction may not be fulfilled. In 1902, Mr. Axon himself expanded the Dictionary article and made it into an excellent memoir of forty-three pages, but only a few copies were printed. It contains five portraits. A devoted admirer of Ainsworth has been for some years engaged in the preparation of an extended biography. I do not give his name, for he probably prefers to make the announcement at his own time and in his own way. A few years ago I became the possessor of a considerable number of autographic relics of Ainsworth, including a memorandum book and a manuscript volume containing an account of his travels in Italy in 1830, dedicated to his wife, with a poem; some letters to him from Cruikshank; thirty-six pages of the draft of “Jack Sheppard”, and more than two hundred of his own letters. It is gratifying to know that my friend who is at work on the “Life” has been aided by this little collection.

The only published records of Ainsworth’s life, other than those to which I have referred, are, as far as I have been able to discover, a brief memoir by Laman Blanchard which appeared in the Mirror in 1842 and was reproduced in later editions of “Rookwood”; a chapter in Madden’s Life of Lady Blessington; a sketch by James Crossley contributed to the Routledge edition of the Ballads in 1855; and an account of him by William Bates, accompanying a semi-caricature portrait in the Maclise Portrait Gallery.

Ainsworth was born in his father’s house on King Street, Manchester, February 4, 1805. His family was “respectable” in the English sense, for his grandfather on his mother’s side was a Unitarian minister, and his father a prosperous solicitor. It was from the mother that he inherited in 1842 some “landed property” to use another distinctively English phrase, and it is amusing to observe the pride of Madden when he boasts that Ainsworth’s name appears in Burke’s Landed Gentry. He attended the Free Grammar School in Manchester, where it is said that he was proficient in Latin and Greek, and as he was expected to succeed to his father’s practice, he became an articled clerk in the office of Mr. Alexander Kay, at the age of sixteen. He was a handsome boy, full of ambition, but his ambition did not lead him in the dull and dusty paths which solicitors tread. He had already written a drama, for private production, which was printed in Arliss’s Magazine, and a number of sketches, translations and minor papers for a serial called The Manchester Iris, and he subsequently conducted a periodical styled The Boeotian, which had a short existence of six months. Before he was nineteen, he was a regular contributor to the London Magazine and the Edinburgh Magazine. Some of these youthful efforts were collected in “December Tales” (1823), which also contained sketches by James Crossley and John Partington Aston. In 1822 he issued a pamphlet of “Poems, by Cheviot Tichborn”, which as Mr. Axon informs us, is quite distinct from another pamphlet called “The Works of Cheviot Tichborn”, printed in 1825, apparently for private circulation.

The Tichborn book of verses was dedicated to Charles Lamb. The author was a devoted admirer of Elia, and as early as 1822 Lamb had lent him a copy of Cyril Tourneur’s play or plays. On May 7, 1822, Lamb wrote to him a letter, (printed in The Lambs, by William Carew Hazlitt, 1897) referring to the book and saying, among other things, “I have read your poetry with pleasure. The tales are pretty and prettily told. It is only sometimes a little careless, I mean as to redundancy.” The letter mentions the proposed dedication deprecatingly and modestly.

Talfourd, Canon Ainger and Fitzgerald in their collections give two other letters, written respectively on December 9 and December 29, 1823, one thanking Ainsworth for “books and compliments,” and the other giving Lamb-like excuses for not leaving beloved London to pay a visit to Manchester.[^[6]] It was something of an honor for a lad of seventeen to receive the praise of Charles Lamb, who appears to have discovered one of his young correspondent’s besetting sins—redundancy. But it may not have meant much, for in those days they exchanged compliments more profusely than is customary at the present time.

All these excursions in the field of authorship were fatal to the grave study of the law, for which he had no taste, and although when his father died in 1824 he went to London to finish his term with Mr. Jacob Phillips of the Inner Temple, it was a foregone conclusion that, whatever his career might be, it would not be that of a solicitor. About 1826, one John Ebers, a publisher in Bond Street, and also manager of the Opera House, brought out a novel called “Sir John Chiverton,” which received the favor of Sir Walter Scott, who said of it in his diary (October 17, 1826), that he had read it with interest, and that it was “a clever book,” at the same time asserting that he himself was the originator of the style in which it was written. For many years it was supposed that Ainsworth was its sole author, but it was claimed in 1877 by Mr. John Partington Aston, a lawyer, who had been a fellow-clerk of Ainsworth’s in Mr. Kay’s office, and the book was probably the result of collaboration. The dedicatory verses are supposed to have been addressed to Anne Frances Ebers, John Ebers’ daughter, whom Ainsworth married on October 11, 1826. Soon afterwards he seems to have been occupied in editing one of those absurd “Annuals” so common in those days, for we find Tom Moore recording in his journal in 1827, that he had been asked to edit the Forget-Me-Not to begin with the second number, “as the present editor is Mr. Ainsworth (I think), the son-in-law of Ebers.” The compensation offered to Moore was £500, which indicates that such work was paid for liberally, but it is not likely that Ainsworth received as much. A year or so after the marriage—within a year in fact—he followed his father-in-law’s advice and became himself a publisher and a bookseller; but at the end of eighteen months he decided to abandon the business.

If we may judge by one of the letters in my collection, it is not surprising that he was not overwhelmingly successful. He writes to Thomas Hill for a notice in the Chronicle of a book the copyright of which he had recently purchased, adding, “the work is really a most scientific one—indeed the only distinct treatise on Confectionery extant.” Perhaps this was the work of Ude, the cook, whose publisher he was; but he also “brought out” Caroline Norton as an author, of whom he writes to Charles Ollier, in his graceful, rather lady-like chirography:

“Is it not possible [to] get me a short notice of the enclosed into the new Monthly? By so doing you will infinitely oblige one of the most beautiful women in the world—the Hon. Mrs. Norton, the granddaughter of Richard Brinsley Sheridan.”

In 1827 he published for Thomas Hood two volumes of “National Tales,” which are said to be the poorest books written by Hood. Christopher North said of them: “I am glad to see that they are published by Mr. Ainsworth to whom I wish all success in his new profession. He is himself a young gentleman of talents, and his Sir John Chiverton is a spirited and romantic performance.”[^[7]]

It was for an annual issued by him that Sir Walter Scott wrote the “Bonnets of Bonnie Dundee,” and the story is told by Mr. Axon that Sir Walter received twenty guineas for it, but laughingly handed them over to the little daughter of Lockhart, at whose house he and Ainsworth met. He wrote some fragmentary and miscellaneous prose and verse, not of much importance; and in 1828 he travelled through Belgium and up the Rhine, going to Switzerland and Italy in 1830. The manuscript note-books which lie before me, the paper foxed and the ink faded, comprise a diary of the Italian part of the journey. I have toiled over the one hundred and sixty-eight pages, not always easily decipherable, but have found little which exceeds in value the ordinary guide-book of our own time. It was, we must remember, written only for his wife—whom he considerately left at home—and the dedicatory poem to her, consisting of fifty-eight unrhymed lines, written in Venice in September, 1830, is quite as commonplace as might be expected from a man of twenty-five, with little poetic inspiration but endowed with much verbal fluency, who was not writing for publication.

Soon after his return from the Continent, Ainsworth began the work from which he was to derive his chief title to fame—the composing of novels. It has been said that he was inspired by Mrs. Radcliffe, whose gloomy mysteries, weird scenes, and supernatural machinery once made her a favorite with fiction-lovers, and that he sought to adapt old legends to English soil. Others have ascribed his impulse to the influence of the French dramatic romancers, Eugène Sue, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas. I question whether he owed his inspiration to any particular source, although all these writers may have affected his temperament. Perhaps he unconsciously divined the needs of the reading public, of which his editorial experience may have taught him much. The inane, fashionable novel had become tiresome. Moreover, it was a time, in the early thirties, when the nation of England was absorbed in the growth of her material prosperity, and when a country is engrossed in commerce and manufactures, in the production of wealth, tales of adventure seem necessary to stimulate flagging imagination. We have seen the evidence of it in our own land during the past ten years, when casting aside the metaphysical, the psychological, the long drawn-out analyses of character, the public eagerly devoured story after story of fights and wars, and daring deeds, whose lucky authors bore off rewards of fabulous amount and grew rich upon the royalties earned by their hundreds of thousands of copies.

We are told by Mr. Axon that “the inspiration came to him when on a visit to Chesterfield in 1831”. He had visited Cuckfield Place, thought by Shelley to be “like bits of Mrs. Radcliffe”, and it occurred to Ainsworth that he might make something of an English story constructed upon similar lines. Begun in 1831, his “Rookwood” was published in 1834. It has generally been considered by critics to be a powerful but uneven story, and it leaped at once into popularity, carrying with it the youthful author. “The Romany Chant” and “Dick Turpin’s Ride to York” were the chief features; but the Ride was the thing, like the chariot race in Ben-Hur. It was actually dashed off in the glow of enthusiasm, the white heat of imagination. It was, says George Augustus Sala, “a piece of word painting rarely if ever surpassed in the prose of the Victorian Era,”[^[8]] and he said this sixty years after the novel appeared. Ainsworth has told us the circumstances. “I wrote it” he said “in twenty-four hours of continuous work. I had previously arranged the meeting at Kilburn Wells, and the death of Tom King—a work of some little time—but from the moment I got Turpin on the high road, I wrote on and on till I landed him at York. I performed this literary feat, as you are pleased to call it, without the slightest sense of effort. I began in the morning, wrote all day, and as night wore on, my subject had completely mastered me, and I had no power to leave Turpin on the high road. I was swept away by the curious excitement and novelty of the situation; and being personally a good horseman, passionately fond of horses, and possessed moreover of accurate knowledge of a great part of the country, I was thoroughly at home with my work, and galloped on with my pet highwayman merrily enough. I must, however, confess that when my work was in proof, I went over the ground between London and York to verify the distances and localities, and was not a little surprised at my accuracy.” This tour de force—the composition of a hundred novel pages in so short a time, was performed at “The Elms,” a house at Kilburn where he was then living. It brings to mind the familiar story of Beckford, writing Vathek in French, in a single sitting of three days and two nights, which is more or less apocryphal.

It is a proof of the merit and of the success of this chapter that, like many other successful literary efforts, it was “claimed” by some one else. Mr. Bates refers rather indignantly to an assertion of R. Shelton Mackenzie, made upon the authority of Dr. Kenealy, and contained in the fifth volume of an American edition of the Noctes Ambrosianæ, that Doctor William Maginn, of convivial fame, wrote the “Ride” as well as all the slang songs in “Rookwood.” But Maginn was seldom sober and doubtless he bragged in his cups. Kenealy believed in Arthur Orton, the Tichborne “claimant,” and was capable of believing in any claimant, particularly if he was an Irishman; while Mackenzie was not celebrated for acumen or accuracy. Sala says of the absurd tale: “As to the truth or falsehood of this allegation I am wholly incompetent to pronounce; but looking at Ainsworth’s striking and powerful pictures of the Plague and the Fire in his ‘Old St. Paul’s,’ and the numerous studies of Tudor life in his ‘Tower of London,’ I should say that ‘Turpin’s Ride to York’ was a performance altogether within the compass of his capacity.”

In the light of later years, it is interesting to observe the comparisons made between Bulwer and Ainsworth. In Fraser’s Magazine for June, 1834, there is a review of “Rookwood” in which the author is praised far beyond the writer of Eugene Aram and Paul Clifford. Bulwer, according to Sala, was fated “to be beaten on his own ground by another writer of fiction very much his inferior in genius; but who was nevertheless endowed with a considerable amount of melodramatic power, and who had acquired a conspicuous facility for dramatic description.” It may be that the defeat drove Bulwer to those other fields in which he won the reputation which has preserved his name while that of his conqueror of seventy years ago has faded sadly.

It was erroneously believed by many that Ainsworth must have had some personal acquaintance with low life in London because of the ease with which he dealt with the thieves’ jargon, but his knowledge of it was but second-hand for he obtained it from the autobiography of James Hardy Vaux.[^[9]] A second edition of “Rookwood” illustrated by George Cruikshank, appeared in 1836.

Ainsworth was now a conspicuous man, and his celebrity as an author, combined with his personal attractions, made him a welcome guest at many houses, notably at Gore House, where Lady Blessington so long held sway—“jolly old girl”, he calls her in one of my letters, written in 1836. The beauty at forty-seven was as fascinating as ever. “Everybody goes to Lady Blessington’s”, says Haydon in his Diary. The effervescent Sala tells of meeting Ainsworth there in a later time. “I think”, he says, “that on the evening in question there were present, among others, Daniel Maclise, the painter, and Ainsworth, the novelist. The author of “Jack Sheppard” was then a young man of about thirty, very handsome, but somewhat of the curled and oiled and glossy-whiskered D’Orsay type”. The D’Orsay type was by no means distasteful to my lady. Sala relates at second-hand the anecdote about Lady Blessington placing herself between D’Orsay and Ainsworth, and saying that she had for supporters the two handsomest men in London.

He was a favorite contributor to Fraser’s Magazine, and his portrait appears among “The Fraserians”, indeed a goodly company, for there are Coleridge, Southey, James Hogg, Lockhart, D’Orsay, Thackeray, Carlyle, Washington Irving, Sir David Brewster, and Theodore Hook, with many others. In the letter-press which accompanied the portrait,—supposed to have been written by Maginn—the Magazine says: “May he turn out many novels better, none worse, than ‘Rookwood’; may he, as far as is consistent with the frailty of humanity, penetrate puffery, and avoid the three insatiables of Solomon, King of Israel.”

In 1837, “Crichton” was published, the hero being James Crichton, the “Admirable”, about whose name has grown so much that is fabulous, but who was nevertheless a real person. The story was illustrated by Hablôt K. Browne. It was fairly successful; some regard it as in many respects his best novel; but while it did not add materially to his fame, it did not diminish it. It was well done; the author spared no pains and as usual with him was careful in his researches. In the introductory essay and in the appendices, which Sidney Lee pronounces “very interesting”, he reprinted, with translations in verse, Crichton’s Elegy on Borromeo and the eulogy on Visconti. Madden intimates that D’Orsay occasionally figured as the model of the accomplished hero. The author received £350 for the book—more than for “Rookwood”. He had become a figure in the literary world and his name was something with which to conjure.

In January, 1837, Richard Bentley began the publication of Bentley’s Miscellany under the editorship of Charles Dickens. There is a familiar story that the name originally proposed was “The Wit’s Miscellany,” and that when the change was mentioned in the presence of “Ingoldsby” Barham (not Douglus Jerrold, as often supposed), he remarked “Why go to the other extreme?” In January, 1839, Dickens turned over the office of editor to Ainsworth, with “a familiar epistle from a parent to his child”.[^[10]] Oliver Twist had just been the feature of the Miscellany, and now Ainsworth made his second and most celebrated venture in what Sala calls “felonious fiction”—the immortal “Jack Sheppard.”

There are some conflicting statements about dates. Madden says, in one place, “In 1841 he [Ainsworth] became the editor of ‘Bentley’s Miscellany’,” and on the next page, “In the spring of 1839 he replaced Dickens in the editorship of ‘Bentley’s Miscellany,’ and continued as editor till 1841.”[^[11]] He also says that in 1839 the novel, to be called “Thames Darrell,” was advertised to appear periodically in the Miscellany, then edited by Charles Dickens.[^[12]] Robert Harrison in the Dictionary of National Biography (title Bentley) says that Dickens retired from the post of editor in January, 1839. Mr. Axon tells us in the Dictionary that Ainsworth became the editor in March, 1840, but in the “Memoir” he assigns the event to the year 1838. Forster puts the date 1839, which seems to be correct, and the discrepancies are no doubt susceptible of explanation. The first number of “Jack Sheppard” appeared in the number for January, 1839.

The success of “Rookwood” and Oliver Twist led to the new essay in the series which the sanctimonious Allibone says might be very appropriately published under the title of the “Tyburn Plutarch”—not a very sane or witty remark in my opinion. Ainsworth cast over the scamp Jack Sheppard the mantle of romance, and made him “a dashing young blood of illicitly noble descent, who dressed sumptuously and lived luxuriously”—whose escapes from Newgate and other adventures were described with a charm and vigor which took the public captive. The sale exceeded even that of Oliver Twist, and no fewer than eight versions were produced upon the London stage. Mr. Keeley achieved great notoriety as the hero, and Paul Bedford first made his mark in the character of Blueskin.

It was not until these dramatic productions appeared that the sedate and fastidious began the outcry against the so-called criminal school of romance; an outcry perpetuated in Chambers’ Encyclopædia and in Allibone’s Dictionary. The author and the novel were bitterly attacked. The main ground of denunciation seems to have been the belief that the lower orders might be aroused to emulate the brilliant robber, all of which is sheer nonsense. I am tempted to quote at length from a letter of Miss Mitford, the personification of an old maid, because it contains an epitome of the adverse criticism as well as a little biographical note which I have not encountered elsewhere.

“I have been reading ‘Jack Sheppard,’” she writes to Miss Barrett,[^[13]] “and have been struck by the great danger in these times, of representing authorities so constantly and fearfully in the wrong; so tyrannous, so devilish, as the author has been pleased to portray it in ‘Jack Sheppard,’ for he does not seem so much a man or even an incarnate fiend, as a representation of power—government or law, call it as you may—the ruling power. Of course, Mr. Ainsworth had no such design, but such is the effect; and as the millions who see it represented at the minor theatres will not distinguish between now and a hundred years back, all the Chartists in the land are less dangerous than this nightmare of a book, and I, Radical as I am, lament any additional temptations to outbreak, with all its train of horrors. Seriously, what things these are—the Jack Sheppards, and Squeers’s, and Oliver Twists, and Michael Armstrongs—all the worse for the power which except the last, the others contain! Grievously the worse! My friend, Mr. Hughes, speaks well of Mr. Ainsworth. His father was a collector of these old robber stories, and used to repeat the local ballads upon Turpin, etc., to his son as he sat upon his knee; and this has perhaps been at the bottom of the matter. A good antiquarian I believe him to be, but what a use to make of the picturesque old knowledge! Well, one comfort is that it will wear itself out; and then it will be cast aside like an old fashion.”

The latter part of the prophecy has come very near to fulfillment; but we have no proof that the awful novel caused any marked increase of crime. The real utility and value of stories like “Jack Sheppard” may well be questioned, for they surely do not belong to the highest and best in literature, but that any one became a thief or a highway robber because of them is yet to be demonstrated.

It was said, and Ainsworth believed it, that the fact that “Jack Sheppard” had a better sale than Oliver Twist was the cause of some falling-off in the friendship which had existed between him and John Forster, who adored Dickens; and it is true that the Examiner, of which paper Forster was the chief literary critic, made an attack on the book. It is odd that Forster should have met Dickens for the first time at Ainsworth’s house.[^[14]] There was some sort of friction among the three friends about the time when “Jack Sheppard” was in the full tide of favor and Dickens was closing the troublesome negotiations with Bentley about the copyright of the unpublished Barnaby Rudge. A letter of Dickens to Ainsworth in my collection throws some light upon the matter. As it has never been printed, to the best of my knowledge, and as it cannot fail to be of interest to Dickens-lovers, I may be pardoned for giving it in full:

“Doughty Street,

Tuesday morning, March 26th, 1839.

My dear Ainsworth:

If the subject of this letter or anything contained in it, should eventually become the occasion of any disagreement between you and me, it would cause me very deep and sincere regret. But with this contingency—even this—before me, I feel that I must speak out without reserve and that every manly, honest and just consideration compels me to do so.

By some means—by what means in the first instance I scarcely know—the late negotiations between yourself, myself and Mr. Bentley have placed a mutual friend of ours in a false position and one in which he has no right to stand; and exposed him to an accusation—very rife and current indeed just now—equally untrue and undeserved, namely that he, who a short time before had pledged himself to Mr. Bentley (in the presence of Mr. Follett) to see my last agreement with that person executed and carried out, counselled me to break it and in fact entangled and entrapped the innocent and unsuspecting bookseller—who being all honesty himself had a child-like confidence in others—into taking such steps as led to that result.

Now I wish to remind you—for a purpose which I will tell you presently—that even by me no agreement whatever was broken; that I demanded a postponement of my agreement for the term of six months—that Forster (to whom I have been alluding of course) expressly and positively said when you pressed upon me the hardship of my relations with that noblest work of God, in New Burlington Street, that he could not and would not be any party to a new disruption between us—that he was bound to see the old agreement performed—that he wrote to Mr. Bentley warning him of my dissatisfaction—that he saw Mr. Bentley for a full hour, in his own rooms (a man must be in earnest to do that)—read to him a letter of mine in which I had expressed my feelings on the subject, and strongly urged upon him the necessity and propriety of some concession—that Mr. Bentley went away thanking him and appointing to call again—that he never called again—that he wrote me an insulting letter dictated by his lawyers—that Forster then washed his hands of any further interference between us—that Mr. Bentley then went out to you at Kensal Green—and that you and he, between you, and without any previous consultation or advising with Forster settled upon certain terms and conditions which were afterwards proposed to me through you, and communicated to Forster, for the first time and to his unbounded astonishment, by both of us.

I remind you of all this because Mr. Bentley is going about town stating in every quarter what may or may not be his real impression of Forster’s course—because Mr. Bentley does not appeal as an authority to you—because you do countenance Mr. Bentley in these proceedings by hearing him express his opinion of Forster and not contradicting him—and have aggravated him, indeed, by such thoughtless acts as first procuring an unfavorable notice of the Miscellany in the Examiner (by dint of urgent solicitations) and then shewing it to him with assumed vexation and displeasure. I remind you of all this, because Forster must and shall be set right—not with Mr. Bentley but with the men to whom these stories are carried and his friends as well as foes—because there are but two persons who can set him right—and because I wish to know distinctly from you who shall do so, without the delay of an instant—you or I.

There is another reason which renders this absolutely necessary. Forster, acting for Mr. Savage Landor, arranged with Mr. Bentley for the publication of two tragedies by that gentleman, which were proceeding rapidly through the press when these matters occurred, and have since been taken from the printers by Mr. Bentley—not published, though the time agreed upon is long past; not advertised, though they should have been long ago—their existence not recognized in anyway—and all this as a means of annoyance and revenge against Forster who is placed in the most painful situation with regard to Mr. Landor that it is possible to conceive. Mr. Landor who holds such men as Mr. Bentley in as little consideration as the mud of the streets, and who is violent and reckless when exasperated, is as certain by some public act to punish the bookseller for this treatment (if he be not prevented by an immediate atonement) as the sun is to rise to-morrow. This would entail upon me the immediate necessity, in explanation of the circumstances which led to it, of laying a full history of these proceedings before the public, and the consequence would be that we and our private affairs would be dragged into newspaper notoriety and involved in controversy and discussion, for the pain of which nothing could ever compensate.

But however painful it will be to me to put myself in communication once again with Mr. Bentley, and openly appeal to you to confirm what I shall tell him, I have no alternative unless you will frankly and openly and for the sake of your old friend as well as my intimate and valued one, avow to Mr. Bentley yourself that he is not to blame, that you heard him again and again refuse to interfere although deeply impressed with the hardship of my case—and that you proposed concessions which he—feeling the position in which he stood—could not have suggested. Believe me, Ainsworth, that for your sake no less than on Forster’s account, this should be done. You do not see it I know, you do not mean it I am persuaded, but he is impressed with the idea, and nine men out of ten would be (if these matters were stated by anybody but you) that to enable yourself to gain your object and stand in your present relations towards Mr. Bentley, you have used him as an instrument by suppressing that which would have shewn his conduct in the best and truest light, and have shrunk from the friendly and manly avowal of feeling which your own impulses and freer and less worldly considerations so generously prompted.

Once more let me say that I do not mean to hurt or offend you by anything I have said, and that I should be truly grieved to find I have done so. But I must speak strongly because I feel strongly, and because I have a misgiving that even now I have been silent too long.

My dear Ainsworth, I am

Faithfully yours,

Charles Dickens.

William Ainsworth Esquire.”

The little quarrel, if it was a quarrel, must have been composed amicably, for Forster in his Life of Dickens refers several times to Ainsworth in a kind and appreciative way.

In 1840 Ainsworth and George Cruikshank brought out the “Tower of London” in monthly numbers, and were equal partners in the enterprise. It has always been regarded as a work of merit. In 1841 the author received £1000 from the Sunday Times for “Old St. Paul’s”, and it was later one of Cruikshank’s grievances that he was not associated in this production, the idea of which he insisted was his own. Among my letters is one written by Cruikshank to Ainsworth on the subject, which has not, as far as I know, been published, and I give it because it reveals the relations of the two men quite distinctly.

“Amwell St., March 4, 1841.

My Dear Ainsworth:—

Mr. Pettigrew called here yesterday and stated your proposition. Had that proposal been made any time between last December up to about a fortnight back I should have been happy, most happy, to have accepted the offer—but now I am sorry to say, but I cannot—no, I have so far committed myself with various parties that if I were to withdraw my projected publication I am sure that I should be a laughing stock to some and what is worse—I fear that with others I should lose all title to honor or integrity. I do assure you, my dear Ainsworth, I sincerely regret—that I cannot join you in this work, but what was I to think—what conclusion was I to come to but that you had cut me. At the latter end of last year you announced that we were preparing a “new work!” in the early part of December last. I saw by an advertisement that your “new work” was to be published in the “Sunday Times.” You do not come to me or send for me nor send me any explanations. I meet you at Dickens’s on “New Year’s Eve.” You tell me then that you will see me in a few days and explain everything to my satisfaction. I hear nothing from you. In your various notes about the “Guy Fawkes” you do not even advert to the subject. I purposely keep myself disengaged refusing many advantageous offers of work—still I hear nothing from you. At lenth (sic) you announce a New Work as a companion to the “Tower”! without my name. I then conclude that you do not intend to join me in any “New Work” and therefore determine to do something for myself—indeed I could hold out no longer—to show that others besides myself considered that you had left me, I was applied to by Chapman & Hall to join with them and Mr. Dickens in a speculation which indeed I promised to do should the one with Mr. Felt be abandoned. However I have still to hope that when you are disengaged from Mr. Bentley that some arrangements may be made which may tend to our material benefit.

I remain, my dear Ainsworth, yours very truly,

Geo. Cruikshank.”

In 1841, Ainsworth published the “Guy Fawkes” mentioned in Cruikshank’s letter. About this time he seems to have become involved in disagreements with Bentley. On June 22, 1841, he wrote to Ollier:

“I am scarcely surprised to learn from you that Mr. Bentley states that I promised Mr. Barham to write two separate stories for the November and December numbers of the Miscellany, because it is only one of those misstatements to which that gentleman, in all the negotiations I have had with him, has invariably had recourse. Nothing of the sort was either expressed or implied, and I cannot believe Mr. Barham made any such statement, because it is entirely foreign to the spirit of the whole arrangement. I will thank you however to give Mr. Bentley distinctly to understand that I will not write any such story or stories, and that if he does not think fit to enter into the proposed arrangement, I shall adhere to the original agreement and finish Guy Fawkes in February next. I beg you will also give him to understand that I will not allow Mr. Leech or any other artist than Mr. Cruikshank to illustrate any portion of the work; and that I insist upon a clause to that effect being inserted in the mem. of agreement.”

The remark about Cruikshank is significant when read in connection with the artist’s letter of three months before, and with his subsequent conduct. For although it is clear that the trouble about the publication of “St. Paul’s” had been healed, through the efforts of Mr. Pettigrew, he rehashed the old grievance thirty years later.

A rupture with Bentley was imminent and it came very soon. Ainsworth left the Miscellany in 1841, and in February, 1842, the first number of “Ainsworth’s Magazine” made its appearance. At first he was both editor and proprietor, and later he sold the magazine to his publishers—another of Cruikshank’s grievances; but he afterwards bought it back, and he continued it until 1854 when he purchased Bentley’s Miscellany and merged both magazines into one. In 1845 he had bought for £2,500 Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine, of which serial he had been an editor for a short time in 1836. In a few months he discontinued the consolidated magazine and sold the New Monthly to his cousin, Dr. W. F. Ainsworth, closing his editorial career. For “Ainsworth’s Magazine” he wrote “The Miser’s Daughter”, a work of considerable power, which was long years afterward dramatized by Andrew Halliday and produced at the Adelphi Theatre. In 1843 followed “Windsor Castle”, an historical romance with the scene laid in the reign of Henry VIII; and in 1844 his active pen busied itself with another story of the same class, “St. James’s or the Court of Queen Anne”.

During the period between 1836 and 1844, Ainsworth as we have seen, was closely associated with Cruikshank, who was destined to become a thorn in his side. The second issue of “Rookwood” was illustrated by Cruikshank, who furnished also the designs for “Jack Sheppard,” “The Tower of London,” “Guy Fawkes,” “The Miser’s Daughter,” “Windsor Castle” (in part), and “St. James’s.”

Whatever may be said of Cruikshank as an artist, he was beyond question a vain, self-centred and disagreeable person. “He had a tendency,” says Blanchard Jerrold, “to quarrel with all persons with whom he had business relations, and when he did quarrel, his words knew no bounds.”[^[15]] He came to that stage of boundless conceit when he regarded himself as the creator of all the works for which he supplied the illustrations and reduced the writer to the level of an ordinary amanuensis.

All the world knows his absurd pretensions to the origination of Oliver Twist. He also asserted his claim to everything that was good in “Jack Sheppard,” “The Miser’s Daughter,” and “The Tower of London.” But he claimed Egan’s Life in London and even a poem of Laman Blanchard’s which he had illustrated for the Omnibus—as well as the pattern of the hat worn by Russian soldiers! Blanchard Jerrold says in the Life that the controversies about Dickens and Ainsworth “arose from Cruikshank’s habit of exaggeration in all things,” which is a biographer’s euphemism, signifying in plain English that the man was an unmitigated liar.

If any one is curious about the history of the controversies, he will find a full, fair and dispassionate account in Chapters VIII and IX of Jerrold’s book. The biographer prints in full Ainsworth’s dignified rejoinder to Cruikshank’s assault, and justly ridicules the utterances of the eccentric designer. Austin Dobson, a competent and impartial judge, has recently added his condemnation of Cruikshank’s arrogance.[^[16]] “He was not exempt” says Mr. Dobson “from a certain ‘Roman infirmity’ of exaggerating the importance of his own performances—an infirmity which did not decrease with years. Whatever the amount of assistance he gave to Dickens and to Ainsworth, it is clear that it was not rated by them at the value he placed upon it. That he did make suggestions, relevant or irrelevant, can hardly be doubted, for it was part of his inventive and ever projecting habit of mind. It must also be conceded that he most signally seconded the text by his graphic interpretations; but that this aid or these suggestions were of such a nature as to transfer the credit of the ‘Miser’s Daughter’ and ‘Oliver Twist’ from the authors to himself is more than can reasonably be allowed.”

Mr. Frith, a friend of Cruikshank, says in his Autobiography:[^[17]] “Cruikshank labored under a strange delusion regarding the works of Dickens and Ainsworth. I heard him announce to a large company assembled at dinner at Glasgow that he was the writer of ‘Oliver Twist.’*** He also wrote the ‘Tower of London,’ erroneously credited to Ainsworth, as well as other works commonly understood to have been written by that author. My intimacy with Cruikshank enables me to declare that I do not believe he would be guilty of the least deviation from truth, and to this day I can see no way of accounting for what was a most absurd delusion.” In fact, there is only one way, if we concede truthfulness to the deluded person; he was not of sound mind.

That Cruikshank was pertinaciously suggestive may be readily admitted. “He was excessively troublesome and obtrusive in his suggestions” says Ainsworth. “Mr. Dickens declared to me that he could not stand it and should send him printed matter in future.” He adds, in a kindly spirit which must appeal to every reader, considering the grossness of the unjustifiable attack upon him, “It would be unjust, however, to deny that there was not (sic) wonderful cleverness and quickness about Cruikshank, and I am indebted to him for many valuable hints and suggestions.” Ainsworth’s appreciation is further shown by an unpublished letter in my possession, written on December 23, 1838, to Mr. Jones.

“Bentley” he says “will forward you the introductory chapters and illustrations of Jack Sheppard with this note. As it is of the utmost consequence to me to produce a favourable impression upon the public by this work, I venture to hope that you will lend me a helping hand at starting.*** Cruikshank’s illustrations are, in my opinion, astonishingly fine. The scene in the loft throws into shade all his former efforts in this line.”

This letter also reveals what appears abundantly in the pages of my collection,—that Ainsworth was given to calling on all his friends of journalistic and magazine associations to praise his books. He was not at all backward in urging them to puff the new works; and when Mr. Ebers was the manager of the opera, he artfully threw in suggestions of “free tickets,” which was perhaps justifiable but scarcely consistent with dignity.

As an example of the way in which Cruikshank took pains to inflict upon his author the details of his designs, it may not be amiss to quote a letter which is also among my possessions, and which has not been published, to the best of my knowledge. It is addressed to Ainsworth and is dated “Saturday evening, 5 o’clock.

“Jonathan Wild has hold of Jack’s left arm with his left hand, and grasps the collar with his right. The Jew has both his arms round Jack’s right arm and Quilt Arnold has hold of the right side of Jack’s coat. This fellow in making his spring at Sheppard may upset the gravedigger who nearly falls into the grave. I should advise the approach of the attacking party to be thus. The Jew and some other fellow go round the north of the church and lurk there and Qt. Arnold in that road at the N. W. corner—Wild himself to come along the south side so as to take Jack in the rear. Darrell is about to draw his sword. In the other subject I have given Jonathan a stout walking stick. I have only time to add that I am yours very truly. The cheque all safe, many thanks.”

Cruikshank first put forth his claim publicly in 1872, by means of a pamphlet called The Artist and the Author, just after the publication of the first volume of Forster’s Dickens. It is likely that he was encouraged in his folly by the flattery of foolish friends. Jerrold lays much blame on Thackeray, from whom he quotes a long passage exalting the artist far beyond the author. “With regard to the modern romance of ‘Jack Sheppard’,” remarks Thackeray, “it seems to us that Mr. Cruikshank really created the tale, and that Mr. Ainsworth, as it were, only put words to it. Let any reader of the novel think over it for awhile, now that it is some months since he had perused and laid it down—let him think, and tell us what he remembers of the tale. George Cruikshank’s pictures—always George Cruikshank’s pictures.” But Thackeray had such a poor opinion of the book that it is strange he should have ascribed any merit to Cruikshank for having “created it”. He called it “a book quite absurd and unreal, and infinitely more immoral than anything Fielding even wrote,” if, as is generally supposed Thackeray was the author of the article on Fielding in the Times of September 2, 1840, reprinted in “Stray Papers” of Thackeray, edited by Lewis Melville and published in 1901. Thackeray wrote to his mother: “I read your views about ‘Jack Sheppard’, and, such is the difference of taste, thought it poor stuff and much below the mark.”[^[18]] Mr. Jerrold expresses the opinion that Thackeray was always unjust to Ainsworth. “He caricatured him unmercifully in Punch, and never lost an opportunity of being amusing at his expense.” I am not inclined to agree with Mr. Jerrold’s views. The long and cordial intimacy of the two men is evidence against the truth of the theory. I find no record of any resentment on Ainsworth’s part against the author of Vanity Fair, and Ainsworth was by no means timid in self-defense or averse to a sturdy combat with those who assailed him. Thackeray—who never got over the conviction that he himself was an “artist”—a picture maker—naturally gave to the illustrator an undue meed of praise; and at the risk of denunciation by all the scribblers who succumb to the “disease of admiration” and find it easy to glorify a famous man as if he were perfect and infallible, I venture to say that in grotesqueness and faulty drawing, the great Snob and the great Cruikshank were not very dissimilar. Yet Thackeray’s comments were wisdom itself when compared with the silly utterance of Mr. Walter Thornbury, who thus delivers himself: “Even Dickens had his fine gold jewelled by Cruikshank. Ainsworth’s tawdry rubbish—now all but forgotten, and soon to sink deep in the mud-pool of oblivion,—was illuminated with a false splendor by the great humorist,”[^[19]] A critical person might be disposed to inquire why the “great humorist” should lower himself by illuminating anything with a “false splendor.” It is not complimentary to the great humorist, but Mr. Thornbury unconsciously told the truth; his hero was falseness personified.

In his “Few Words about George Cruikshank,” Ainsworth said: “For myself, I desire to state emphatically that not a single line—not a word—in any of my novels was written by their illustrator, Cruikshank. In no instance did he even see a proof. The subjects were arranged with him early in the month, and about the fifteenth he used to send me tracings of the plates. That was all.” He adds: “Ne sutor ultra crepidam. Had Cruikshank been capable of constructing a story, why did he not exercise his talent when he had no connection with Mr. Dickens or myself? But I never heard of such a tale being published.” Of course, it may be said that Cruikshank did not pretend that he had written the books—only that he had furnished the leading ideas; that is an easy thing to assert, a hard thing to disprove, and an impossible thing to demonstrate.

It is fairly manifest that if there had been any real foundation for the claims of Cruikshank, he would not have waited for thirty years before setting up his title. He sought to account for the delay by asseverating that he had frequently in private asserted his claim, which anybody possessed of ordinary intelligence will see in a moment was a puerile make-shift; no sufficient reason or explanation. As nobody whose opinion is worth accepting has ever given credence to the tale of the old artist, it may be a waste of time to give it further attention; but it may be permitted to show that Cruikshank needed a good deal of instruction himself.

The fact is shown by the letter of Dickens, produced in facsimile by Forster,[^[20]] and it is confirmed by several of Ainsworth’s letters now lying before me. In March, 1836, while Cruikshank was engaged on the designs for the second edition of “Rookwood,” Ainsworth wrote to Macrone, the publisher, “I have seen some of George Cruikshank’s designs, and it was because I thought them so sketchy that I write to you. They are anything but full subjects and appear to be chosen as much as possible for light work. He shirked the inauguration scene, for instance, because it was too crowded. I quite agree with you that a few good designs are better than many meagre sketches, and all I want is that you should make George understand this. He has evidently two styles—and one can scarcely recognize in some of his ‘Bozzes’ the hand of the designer of the Comic Almanack.*** Do, I pray of you, see George Cruikshank, and don’t let him put us off so badly.” Again, in writing to Macrone in 1836, he makes several recommendations for designs, and adds: “Another suggestion—and this refers to George. In addition to the figures I suggested, I wish him to introduce as entering my old gentleman’s chamber, Thomas Hill, Esq. (in propria persona), or as I shall call him, Tom Vale. If George has not seen him, you can get the sketch from Frazer’s Mag. but introduced he must be, as I mean to carry him throughout and to make him play the part of Mr. Weller in my story; I wish George therefore to give the portrait, easily done, as exact as possible.” In a later letter to Cruikshank himself, while they were at work together on “The Tower,” he writes: “Pray, when you are at the Tower, sketch the gateway of the Bloody Tower from the south; the chamber where the princes were murdered; the basement chamber at the right of the gateway of the Bloody Tower, near the Round Tower.” All this furnishes competent testimony that Cruikshank was a mere illustrator, directed and controlled by the author.

From the time of “Jack Sheppard” until 1881, a period of over forty years, Ainsworth was a busy man, producing book after book at regular intervals and until 1855 closely occupied with editorial labors. After “St. James’s” he began “Auriol,” which was by no means successful. It dealt with a London alchemist of the sixteenth century, but the plot was defective and it was not published in book form until near the close of the author’s life. In 1848 he wrote “Lancashire Witches” for the Sunday Times, receiving £1,000. It was dedicated to his old friend James Crossley, President of the Chetham Society, which published many volumes, including Potts’s Discovery of Witches and the Journals of Nicolas Assheton, both furnishing much of the material for the story. In 1854, “Star Chamber” and “The Flitch of Bacon, or the Custom of Dunmow” appeared. The “Flitch” treated of the ancient Essex custom of giving a “Gamon of Bacon” to a married pair “who had taken an oath, pursuant to the ancient ‘Custom of Confession,’ if ever—

“—You either married man or wife

By household brawles or contentious strife,

Or otherwise, in bed or at board,

Did offend each other in deed or word,

Or, since the Parish clerk said Amen,

You wish’t yourselves unmarried agen,

Or in a twelve months time and a day,

Repented not in thought, any way;

But continued true and just in desire

As when you joyn’d hands in the holy quire.”

In 1851 “the lord of the manor declined to give the flitch, but the claimants obtained one from a public subscription, and a concourse of some three thousand people assembled in Easton Park in their honour.”[^[21]] In 1855 Ainsworth himself offered to give the flitch. The candidates were Mr. James Barlow and his wife, of Chipping Ongar, and the Chevalier de Chatelain and his wife, the last named being well known in literary circles. They were old friends of Ainsworth. I have thirteen letters from Ainsworth to the Chevalier and his wife, of the most intimate character, dating from 1845 to 1880. In one of them, written at Brighton on October 22, 1854, he says:

“My dear Chevalier: Thanks for your charming little volume, full of graceful translations. You have done me the favor I find to include the ‘Custom of Dunmow’ in your collection. Within the last few days I have received another version in French of the same ballad by Jacques Desrosiers. The Tale has been translated under the title of ‘Un An et un Jour’, and published at Bruxelles. You will be glad to hear that a worthy personage has announced his intention of bequeathing a sum sufficient for the perpetual maintenance of the good old custom.”

On January 5, 1855, he writes to Madame de Chatelain:

“I need scarcely say, I hope, that I shall be most happy to entertain your claim for the Flitch—and though I believe a prior claim has been made, I will gladly give a second prize rather than you should experience any disappointment.” On July 19, 1855, she received the flitch of bacon in the Windmill Field, Dunmore.

In 1856 “Spendthrift” appeared, and in 1857 “Merwyn Clitheroe” which he had begun in 1851 but had abandoned after a few weekly numbers. In 1860 he published “Ovingdean Grange, a Tale of the South Downs.” The two books last mentioned were partly autobiographical.

It is unnecessary to do more than to enumerate his later productions, for although they showed the scrupulous care which he exercised in respect to details and the pains he took to be accurate in historical references, they were never as popular as his earlier works. The list is quite imposing: “Constable of the Tower,” 1861; “The Lord Mayor of London,” 1862; “Cardinal Pole,” 1863; “John Law, the Projector,” 1864; “The Spanish Match, or Charles Stuart in Madrid,” 1865; “Myddleton Pomfret,” 1865; “The Constable de Bourbon,” 1866; “Old Court,” 1867; “The South Sea Bubble,” 1868; “Hilary St. Ives,” 1869; “Talbot Harland,” 1870; “Tower Hill,” 1871; “Boscobel,” 1872; “The Manchester Rebels, or the Fatal ’45.” 1873; “Merry England,” 1874; “The Goldsmith’s Wife,” 1874; “Preston Fight, or the Insurrection of 1715,” 1875; “Chetwynd Calverley,” 1876; “The Leaguer of Lathom, a Tale of the Civil War in Lancashire,” 1876; “The Fall of Somerset,” 1877; “Beatrice Tyldesley,” 1878; “Beau Nash,” 1879; “Auriol and other tales,” 1880; and “Stanley Brereton,” 1881. Not a single one of this long catalogue is now remembered. Percy Fitzgerald in an article in Belgravia (November, 1881), said that the description of Ainsworth’s books in the Catalogue of the British Museum filled no fewer than forty pages. Mr. Axon reduces the number of pages to twenty-three, but that is very extensive. In addition to the prose works whose titles are given above, he published in 1855 “Ballads, Romantic, Fantastical and Humorous,” which was illustrated by Sir John Gilbert and which contains some spirited and picturesque verses; and in 1859 “The Combat of the Thirty,” a translation of a Breton lay of the middle ages, which was included in the later editions of the “Ballads.”

In 1881 Ainsworth was nearly seventy-seven, and approaching the end of his career. On September 15 in that year, the Mayor of Manchester, Sir Thomas Baker, gave a banquet in his honor at the town hall. In proposing the health of the guest, the Mayor said that in the Manchester public free libraries there were two hundred and fifty volumes of his works. “During the last twelve months”, said the Mayor, “those volumes have been read seven thousand six hundred and sixty times, mostly by the artisan class of readers. And this means that twenty volumes of his works are being perused in Manchester by readers of the free libraries every day all the year through.”

A report of this banquet is given as an introduction to “Stanley Brereton”, which was dedicated to the Mayor. I have a copy of the “official” report, a pamphlet of twenty-nine pages, whereof forty copies were printed “for private circulation only”. The speeches are characteristic of English dinners, and some of them are funny without any intention on the part of the speakers. The Mayor rather astonishes us by saying that the six of the most popular works, in the order in which they were most read, were “The Tower of London”, “The Lancashire Witches”, “Old St. Paul’s”, “Windsor Castle”, “The Miser’s Daughter”, and “The Manchester Rebels”. But this was in Manchester. Ainsworth’s response was modest and graceful, and he dwelt upon his delight in being styled “the Lancashire novelist”. His old friend Crossley and Edmund Yates were among the orators of the occasion, the latter responding to the toast of “The Press”, and saying of “after-dinner Manchester” that “even in the midst of enjoyment he would hazard the friendly criticism that though it was eloquent it was not concise.” The account ends with these significant words: “This concluded the list of toasts, and the company shortly afterwards broke up.” One who reads the story of the feast is not surprised at this, for the speeches were enough to break up any company; but the tribute to Ainsworth was well-meant and sincere.

My English friend, the prospective biographer of Ainsworth, takes issue with me on my assertion that his favorite is an author who has fallen into oblivion and whose books are not read by the present generation. He refers of course to English readers, and assures me that the stories are still popular in England. “Routledge”, he says, “issues a vast number of cheap editions of his works, and in addition many other publishing firms have recently issued editions of the better known novels. This has been done by Methuen, Newnes, Gibbings, Mudie, Treherne, and Grant Richards, to mention a few that I recollect at the minute.” It is doubtless true that there is a demand for the tales among the less cultivated English readers, but it can not, I think, be maintained successfully that the author has a permanent and enduring literary fame. Perhaps I am influenced in my opinion by the American lack of acquaintance with Ainsworth and his works.

Contemporaneous memoirs and records are full of testimony to the personal popularity of Ainsworth in the social life of the day. He entertained freely, and was a favorite guest. Dickens and Thackeray were both fond of him, although Blanchard Jerrold, as we have seen, doubted Thackeray’s friendship. Forster says in his Dickens, referring to the period circa 1838, “A friend now especially welcome, too, was the novelist, Mr. Ainsworth, who shared with us incessantly for the three following years in the companionship which began at his house; with whom we visited, during two of these years, friends of arts and letters in his native Manchester, from among whom Dickens brought away his Brothers Cheeryble, and to whose sympathy in tastes and pursuits, accomplishments in literature, open-hearted, generous ways, and cordial hospitality, many of the pleasures of later years are due.” I have a little note of his, addressed to Dickens, saying: “Don’t forget your engagement to dine with me on Tuesday next. I shall send a refresher to Forster the unpunctual.” There is also this letter from Dickens—strangely enough in black ink and not the blue which he employed in later days.

“Devonshire Terrace,

Fifth February, 1841.

My Dear Ainsworth—

Will you tell me where that Punch is to be bought, what one is to ask for, and what the cost is. It has made me very uneasy in my mind.

Mind—I deny the beer. It is very excellent; but that it surpasses that meeker, and gentler, and brighter ale of mine (oh how bright it is!) I never will admit. My gauntlet lies upon the earth.

Yours, in defiance,

Charles Dickens.”

One of my Thackeray letters is addressed to Ainsworth, dated in 1844, inviting him to dine at the Garrick, with the characteristic remark, “I want to ask 3 or 4 of the littery purfession.” Tom Moore in his Journal (November 21, 1838) mentions a dinner at Bentley’s where the company was “all the very haut ton of the literature of the day,” including himself (named first), Jerdan, Ainsworth, Lever, Dickens, Campbell, and Luttrell. We read in Mackay’s “Breakfasts with Rogers” of a breakfast where he met Sydney Smith, Daniel O’Connell, Sir Augustus D’Este and Ainsworth. These references might be multiplied almost indefinitely. According to Hazlitt, Ainsworth had one rule, as a host, which in these days of studied unpunctuality might be considered unduly vigorous; when he had friends to dinner he locked his outside gate at the stroke of the clock, and no late comer was admitted.

It is not to be denied that he had his foibles and that he also had his quarrels—few men of any force or strength of will and character can escape quarrels. That he fell out with Cruikshank and Bentley is not to be wondered at, for almost everybody did that, sooner or later. His passage at arms with Francis Mahony—the Father Prout of “Bells of Shandon” fame—is more to be regretted, but he was in no way to blame. He behaved very well under trying conditions. The trouble dated from Ainsworth’s secession from Bentley’s Miscellany—what Mr. Bates calls his “dis-Bentleyfication,” and, ignoring their past intimacy and cordial companionship, Mahony sneered at the man “who left the tale of Crichton half told, and had taken up with ‘Blueskin,’ ‘Jack Sheppard,’ ‘Flitches of Bacon,’ and ‘Lancashire Witches,’ and thought such things were ‘literature,’”—following it up with some rather poor and clumsy verse-libels, flat, stale and unprofitable—utterly unworthy of a moment’s time. Ainsworth replied most courteously in a parody of Prout, called “The Magpie of Marwood; an humble Ballade,” which none could condemn as either coarse or brutal. When Mahony came back at his former friend with quotations from private letters asking eulogistic notices and literary aid, and when he said “Has he forgotten that he was fed at the table of Lady Blessington? not merely for the sake of companionship, for a duller dog never sat at a convivial board,” he showed himself a despicable cad, a perfidious creature, well deserving the name of “Jesuit scribe,” which was about all the retort which Ainsworth thought fit to make.

The kindly and forgiving nature of Ainsworth is shown by a letter in my collection, written on February 24, 1880, to Charles Kent. He says: “I always regret the misunderstanding that occurred between myself and Mahony, but any offence that was given him on my part was unintentional, and I cannot help thinking he was incited to the attack he made upon me by Bentley. Be this as it may, I have long ceased to think about it, and now only dwell upon the agreeable parts of his character. He was an admirable scholar, a wit, a charming poet, and generally—not always—a very genial companion.” These pleasant remarks about the man who had grossly insulted him, are quite characteristic and demonstrate the sweet reasonableness with which he treated men like Cruikshank and Father Prout.

As Blanchard Jerrold says, Punch was often quite severe on Ainsworth. Spielmann in his History of Punch confirms the statement:

“Harrison Ainsworth, as much for his good looks and his literary vanity, as for his tendency to reprint his romances in such journals as came under his editorship, was the object of constant banter. An epigram put the case very neatly:

“Says Ainsworth to Colburn,

‘A plan in my pate is,

To give my romance as

A supplement, gratis.’

Says Colburn to Ainsworth,

‘Twill do very nicely,

For that will be charging

It’s value precisely.’

“Harrison Ainsworth could not have his portrait painted, nor write a novel of crime and sensation, without being regarded as a convenient peg for pleasantry.”

There seems to have been, unluckily, a shadow of a difference with William Jerdan, of the Literary Gazette, whose diffuse and often tedious Autobiography was published in 1853. “Among incipient authors,” says Jerdan, “whom (to use a common phrase) it was in my power to ‘take by the hand’ and pull up the steep, few had heartier help than Mr. William Harrison Ainsworth, whose literary propensities were strong in youth, and who has since made so wide a noise in the world of fictitious and periodical literature. From some cause or another, which I cannot comprehend, he has given a notice to my publishers, to forbid the use of any of his correspondence in these Memoirs, though on looking over a number of his letters I can discover nothing discreditable to him, or aught of which he has reason to be ashamed.” I think it is not difficult to understand what Jerdan seemed unable to comprehend. Ainsworth did not care to have his confidential requests for good notices go out to the public. It was a weakness of his to beg for complimentary reviews and Father Prout had made the most of it; small wonder that he dreaded a repetition of the experience. Jerdan gives, however, a very kindly estimate of Ainsworth.[^[22]]

In Mr. Axon’s memoir, he says that an engraving by W. C. Edwards of a portrait of Ainsworth by Maclise appeared on the frontispiece of Laman Blanchard’s biographical sketch in the first number of “Ainsworth’s Magazine”. A second portrait by the same artist, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1844, was the frontispiece of the fifth volume of the magazine. A portrait by Count D’Orsay dated November 21, 1844, appeared in the seventh volume. To this period belong the full-length portrait by the elder Pickersgill, the property of Chetham’s Hospital, but now in the Manchester Reference Library, and a portrait by R. J. Lane. The good looks of Ainsworth have been referred to several times; they were the good looks of the days of William IV, but the Maclise and Pickersgill portraits as well as the later Fry photograph have a dandified appearance which in our modern eyes detracts from true dignity. The sketch in the Maclise Gallery shows him at his best, in his Fraser days, a fine and gallant figure, without the hideous whiskers of the type beloved by Tittlebat Titmouse. “This delicately drawn portrait of the novelist” comments Mr. Bates, “just at the time that he had achieved his reputation,’—hair curled and oiled as that of an Assyrian bull, the gothic arch coat-collar, the high neckcloth, and the tightly strapped trousers—exhibits as fine an example as we could wish for, of the dandy of the D’Orsay type and pre-Victorian epoch.”

He lived at one time at the “Elms” at Kilburn, and later at Kensal Manor House on the Harrow Road. Afterwards he lived at Brighton and at Tunbridge Wells. When he grew old he resided with his oldest daughter, Fannie, at Hurstpierpoint. He had also a residence at St. Mary’s Road, Reigate, Surrey, and there he died, on Sunday, January 3d, 1882. On January 9th, he was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, with a quiet and simple ceremonial as he wished. His widow and three daughters by his first marriage survived him.

Ainsworth had no power to portray character or to analyze motives; his genius was purely descriptive. He had a strong literary bent, and he was a man of letters in the true sense. He did not possess the spark which gives immortality, but he toiled faithfully and his work was well done even if he did not reach the standard of the greatest of his contemporaries.

Perhaps his merits were characterized rather too ornately in the Sun of August 2, 1852, where a reviewer said:

“His romances yield evidence, in a thousand particulars, that his temperament is exquisitely sensitive, not less of the horrible than of the beautiful. We have it in those landscapes variously coloured with the glow of Claude and the gloom of Salvator Rosa—in those lyrics grave as the songs of the Tyrol, or ghastly as the incantations of the Brocken; but still more in those creations, peopling the one and chaunting the other, namely, some of them as the models of Ostade, and others wild as the wildest dreams of Fuseli. Everywhere, however, in these romances a preference for the grimlier moods of imagination renders itself apparent. The author’s purpose, so to speak, gravitates towards the preternatural. Had he been a painter instead of a romancist, he could have portrayed the agonies of Ugolino, as Da Vinci portrayed the ‘rotello del fico,’ in lines the most haggard and lines the most cadaverous. As a writer of fiction, his place among his contemporaries may, we conceive, be very readily indicated. He occupies the same position in the present that Radcliffe occupied in a former generation.”

Mr. Axon’s estimate is less gorgeous but more convincing. “The essence of his power was that same faculty by which the Eastern story-teller holds spellbound a crowd of hearers in the street of Cairo. It is this fascination which enables Ainsworth, at his best, to compel the reader’s attention, and hurries him forward from the first page to the last of some tale of ‘daring-do’, of crime, adventure, sorrow and love. The reader who has listened to the beginning does not willingly turn aside until the story is completed and he has seen all the puppets play their part with that skilful semblance of truth that seems more real than reality itself.”

It is to be hoped that the forthcoming biography will do ample justice to the memory of this charming literary personage, and may revive the fading interest in him and in his works.

GEORGE PAYNE RAINSFORD JAMES

In a vainglorious mood I said not long ago to a well-dressed and apparently intelligent gentleman whom I met in the house of an accomplished lawyer in Washington City, that I had just had the privilege of conversing with the extremely modern novelist, Mr. Henry James. He smiled amiably and remarked airily, “Oh, the two horsemen fellow”.

The remark was not without significance, because it betrayed the fact that my casual acquaintance, who might well be presumed to represent what is called “the average citizen” of this enlightened country; who was fairly well educated; who had read enough to know of the famous horsemen and of their habitual appearance in the opening chapter; who assuredly had skimmed the book-notices in our wonderful newspapers; was, after all, more distinctly impressed by the writer of sixty years ago than by the contemporaneous author whose volumes bid fair to rival in number those of his namesake—an author whose style defies definition and bewilders the simple-minded searcher after a good story.