ON SOME BOOKS AND THEIR ASSOCIATIONS

Sometimes it comes to pass that the association is of a more far-fetched and fanciful kind. In the great Ovid it lies in an inscription: in my next case it is "another-guess" matter. The folio this time is the Sylva Sylvarum of the "Right Hon. Francis Lo. Verulam. Viscount St. Alban," of whom some people still prefer to speak as Lord Bacon. 'Tis only the "sixt Edition"; but it was to be bought at the Great Turk's Head, "next to the Mytre Tauerne" (not the modern pretender, be it observed!), which is in itself a feature of interest. A former possessor, from his notes, appears to have been largely preoccupied with that ignoble clinging to life which so exercised Matthew Arnold, for they relate chiefly to laxative simples for medicine; and he comforts himself, in April, 1695, by transcribing Bacon's reflection that "a Life led in Religion and in Holy Exercises" conduces to longevity,—an aphorism which, however useful as an argument for length of days, is a rather remote reason for religion. But what to me is always most

seductive in the book is, that to this edition (not copy, of course) of 1651 Master Izaak Walton, when he came, in his Compleat Angler of 1653, to discuss such abstract questions as the transmission of sound under water, and the ages of carp and pike, must probably have referred. He often mentions "Sir Francis Bacon's" History of Life and Death, which is included in the volume. No doubt it would be more reasonable and more "congruous" that Bacon's book should suggest Bacon. But there it is. That illogical "succession of ideas" which puzzled my Uncle Toby, invariably recalls to me, not the imposing folio to be purchased "next to the Mytre Tauerne" in Fleet Street, but the unpretentious eighteenpenny octavo which, two years later, was on sale at Richard Marriot's in St. Dunstan's churchyard hard by, and did no more than borrow its erudition from the riches of the Baconian storehouse.

Life, and its prolongation, is again the theme of the next book (also mentioned, by the way, in Walton) which I take up, though unhappily it has no inscription. It is a little old calf-clad copy of Lewis Cornaro's Sure and Certain Methods of attaining a Long and Healthful Life, 4th ed., 24mo, 1727; and was bought at the Bewick sale of February, 1884, as having once belonged to Robert Elliot Bewick, only son of the famous old Newcastle wood-engraver. As will be shown later, it is easy to be misled in these matters, but I cannot help believing that this volume, which looks as if it had been re-bound, is the one Thomas Bewick mentions in his Memoir as having been his companion in those speculative wanderings over the Town Moor or the Elswick Fields, when, as an

apprentice, he planned his future à la Franklin, and devised schemes for his conduct in life. In attaining Cornaro's tale of years he did not succeed; though he seems to have faithfully practised the periods of abstinence enjoined (but probably not observed) by another of the "noble Venetian's" professed admirers, Mr. Addison of the Spectator.

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

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

"gorgeous Bulmer" (the epithet is over-coloured!) being the William Bulmer who, in 1795, issued the Poems of Goldsmith and Parnell. "I" (says the writer of the note) "was chiefly instrumental to this ingenious artist's [Bewick's] excellence in this art. I first initiated his master, Mr. Ra. Beilby (of Newcastle) into the art, and his first essay was the execution of the cuts in my Treatise on Mensuration, printed in 4to, 1770. Soon after I recommended the same artist to execute the cuts to Dr. Horsley's edition of the works of Newton. Accordingly Mr. B. had the job, who put them into the hands of his assistant, Mr. Bewick, who executed them as his first work in wood, and that in a most elegant manner, tho' spoiled in the printing by John Nichols, the Black-letter printer. C.H. 1798."

"C.H." is Dr. Charles Hutton, the Woolwich mathematician. His note is a little in the vaunting vein of that "founder of fortun's," the excellent Uncle Pumblechook of Great Expectations, for his services scarcely amounted to "initiating" Bewick or his master into the art of engraving on wood. Moreover, his memory must have failed him, for Bewick, and not Beilby, did the majority of the cuts to the Mensuration, including a much-praised diagram of the tower of St. Nicholas Church at Newcastle, afterwards a familiar object in the younger man's designs and tail-pieces. Be this as it may, Dr. Hutton's note was surely worth rescuing from the ruthless binder's plough.

Between the work of Thomas Bewick and the work of Samuel Pepys, it is idle to attempt any ingenious connecting link, save the fact that they both wrote autobiographically. The "Pepys" in question here, however, is not the famous Diary, but the Secretary to the Admiralty's "only other acknowledged work," namely, the privately printed Memoires Relating to the State of the Royal Navy of England, for Ten Years, 1690; and this copy may undoubtedly lay claim to exceptional interest. For not only does it comprise those manuscript corrections in the author's handwriting, which Dr. Tanner reproduced in his excellent Clarendon Press reprint of last year, but it includes the two portrait plates by Robert White after Kneller. The larger is bound in as a frontispiece; the smaller (the ex-libris) is inserted at the beginning. The main attraction of the book to me, however, is its previous owners—one especially. My immediate predecessor was a well-known collector, Professor Edward Solly, at whose sale in 1886 I bought it; and he in his

turn had acquired it in 1877, at Dr. Rimbault's sale. Probably what drew us all to the little volume was not so much its disclosure of the lamentable state of the Caroline navy, and of the monstrous toadstools that flourished so freely in the ill-ventilated holds of His Majesty's ships-of-war, as the fact that it had once belonged to that brave old philanthropist, Captain Thomas Coram of the Foundling Hospital. To him it was presented in March, 1724, by one C. Jackson; and he afterwards handed it on to a Mr. Mills. Pasted at the end is Coram's autograph letter, dated "June 10th, 1746." "To Mr. Mills These. Worthy Sir I happend to find among my few Books, Mr. Pepys his memoires, w'ch I thought might be acceptable to you & therefore pray you to accept of it. I am w'th much Respect Sir your most humble Ser't. THOMAS CORAM."

At the Foundling Hospital is a magnificent full-length of Coram, with curling white locks and kindly, weather-beaten face, from the brush of his friend and admirer, William Hogarth. It is to Hogarth and his fellow-Governor at the Foundling, John Wilkes, that my next jotting relates. These strange colleagues in charity afterwards—as is well known— quarrelled bitterly over politics. Hogarth caricatured Wilkes in the Times: Wilkes replied by a North Briton article (No. 17) so scurrilous and malignant that Hogarth was stung into rejoining with that famous squint-eyed semblance of his former crony, which has handed him down to posterity more securely than the portraits of Zoffany and Earlom. Wilkes's action upon this was to reprint his article with the addition of a bulbous-nosed woodcut of Hogarth "from the Life." These facts lent interest to an entry which for years had been familiar to me in the Sale Catalogue of Mr. H.P. Standly, and which ran thus: "The NORTH BRITON, No. 17, with a PORTRAIT of HOGARTH in WOOD; and a severe

critique on some of his works: in Ireland's handwriting is the following—'This paper was given to me by Mrs. Hogarth, Aug. 1782, and is the identical North Briton purchased by Hogarth, and carried in his pocket many days to show his friends.'" The Ireland referred to (as will presently appear) was Samuel Ireland of the Graphic Illustrations. When, in 1892, dispersed items of the famous Joly collection began to appear sporadically in the second-hand catalogues, I found in that of a well-known London bookseller an entry plainly describing this one, and proclaiming that it came "from the celebrated collection of Mr. Standly, of St. Neots." Unfortunately, the scrap of paper connecting it with Mrs. Hogarth's present to Ireland had been destroyed. Nevertheless, I secured my prize, had it fittingly bound up with the original number which accompanied it; and here and there, in writing about Hogarth, bragged consequentially about my fortunate acquisition. Then came a day—a day to be marked with a black stone!—when in the British Museum Print Room, and looking through the

"— Collection," for the moment deposited there, I came upon another copy of the North Briton, bearing in Samuel Ireland's writing a notification to the effect that it was the Identical No. 17, etc., etc. Now which is the right one? Is either the right one? I inspect mine distrustfully. It is soiled, and has evidently been folded; it is scribbled with calculations; it has all the aspect of a vénérable vétusté. That it came from the Standly collection, I am convinced. But that other pretender in the (now dispersed) "— Collection"? And was not Samuel Ireland (nomen invisum!) the, if not fraudulent, at least too-credulous father of one William Henry Ireland, who, at eighteen, wrote Vortigern and Rowena, and palmed it off as genuine Shakespeare? I fear me—I much fear me— that, in the words of the American showman, I have been "weeping over the wrong grave."

To prolong these vagrant adversaria would not be difficult. Here, for example, dated 1779, are the Coplas of the poet Don Jorge Manrique, which, having no Spanish, I am constrained to study in the renderings of Longfellow. Don Jorge was a Spaniard of the Spaniards, Commendador of Montizon, Knight of the Order of Santiago, Captain of a company in the Guards of Castile, and withal a valiant soldado, who died of a wound received in battle. But the attraction of my volume is, that, at the foot of the title-page, in beautiful neat script, appear the words, "Robert Southey. Paris. 17 May 1817,"—being the year in which Southey stayed at Como with Walter Savage Landor. Here are the Works of mock-heroic John Philips, 1720, whose Blenheim the Tories pitted against Addison's Campaign, and whose Splendid Shilling still shines lucidly among eighteenth-century parodies. This copy bears—also on the title-page—the autograph of James Thomson, not yet the author of The Seasons; and includes the book-plate of Lord Prestongrange, —that "Lord Advocate Grant" of whom you may read in the Kidnapped of

"R.L.S." Here again is an edition (the first) of Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Comic Writers, annotated copiously in MS. by a contemporary reader who was certainly not an admirer; and upon whom W.H.'s cockneyisms, Gallicisms, egotisms, and "ille-isms" generally, seem to have had the effect of a red rag upon an inveterately insular bull. "A very ingenious but pert, dogmatical, and Prejudiced Writer" is his uncomplimentary addition to the author's name. Then here is Cunningham's Goldsmith of 1854, vol. i., castigated with equal energy by that Alaric Alexander Watts,[2] of whose egregious strictures upon Wordsworth we read not long since in the Cornhill Magazine, and who will not allow Goldsmith to say, in the Haunch of Venison, "the porter and eatables followed behind." "They could scarcely have followed before,"—he objects, in the very accents of Boeotia. Nor will he pass "the hollow-sounding bittern" of the Deserted Village. A barrel may sound hollow, but not a bird—this wiseacre acquaints us.

[2] So he was christened. But Lockhart chose to insist that his second pre-name should properly be "Attila," and thenceforth he was spoken of in this way.

Had the gifted author of Lyrics of the Heart never heard of rhetorical figures? But he is not Goldsmith's only hyper-critic. Charles Fox, who admired The Traveller, thought Olivia's famous song in the Vicar "foolish," and added that "folly" was a bad rhyme to "melancholy."[3] He must have forgotten Milton's:—

Bird that shunn'st the noise of folly, Most musicall, most melancholy!

Or he might have gone to the other camp, and remembered Pope on Mrs. Howard:—

Not warp'd by Passion, aw'd by Rumour, Not grave thro' Pride,, or gay thro' Folly, An equal Mixture of good Humour, And sensible soft Melancholy.

[3] Recollections, by Samuel Rogers, 2nd ed., 1859, 43.

AN EPISTLE TO AN EDITOR

"Jamais les arbres verts n'ont essayé d'être bleus."— THÉOPHILE GAUTIER.

"A new Review!" You make me tremble (Though as to that, I can dissemble Till I hear more). But is it "new"? And will it be a real Review?— I mean, a Court wherein the scales Weigh equally both him that fails, And him that hits the mark?—a place Where the accus'd can plead his case, If wrong'd? All this I need to know Before I (arrogant!) say "Go."

"We, that are very old" (the phrase Is STEELE'S, not mine!), in former days, Have seen so many "new Reviews" Arise, arraign, absolve, abuse;— Proclaim their mission to the top (Where there's still room!), then slowly drop,

Shrink down, fade out, and sans preferment, Depart to their obscure interment;— We should be pardon'd if we doubt That a new venture can hold out.

It will, you say. Then don't be "new"; Be "old." The Old is still the True. Nature (said GAUTIER) never tries To alter her accustom'd dyes; And all your novelties at best Are ancient puppets, newly drest. What you must do, is not to shrink From speaking out the thing you think; And blaming where 'tis right to blame, Despite tradition and a Name. Yet don't expand a trifling blot, Or ban the book for what it's not (That is the poor device of those Who cavil where they can't oppose!); Moreover (this is very old!), Be courteous—even when you scold!

Blame I put first, but not at heart. You must give Praise the foremost part;— Praise that to those who write is breath Of Life, if just; if unjust, Death. Praise then the things that men revere; Praise what they love, not what they fear; Praise too the young; praise those who try; Praise those who fail, but by and by May do good work. Those who succeed, You'll praise perforce,—so there's no need To speak of that. And as to each, See you keep measure in your speech;— See that your praise be so exprest That the best man shall get the best; Nor fail of the fit word you meant Because your epithets are spent. Remember that our language gives No limitless superlatives; And SHAKESPEARE, HOMER, should have more Than the last knocker at the door!

"We, that are very old!"—May this Excuse the hint you find amiss. My thoughts, I feel, are what to-day Men call vieux jeu. Well!—"let them say." The Old, at least, we know: the New (A changing Shape that all pursue!) Has been,—may be, a fraud. —But there! Wind to your sail! Vogue la galère!

BRAMSTON'S "MAN OF TASTE"

Were you to inquire respectfully of the infallible critic (if such indeed there be!) for the source of the aphorism, "Music has charms to soothe a savage beast," he would probably "down" you contemptuously in the Johnsonian fashion by replying that you had "just enough of learning to misquote";— that the last word was notoriously "breast" and not "beast";—and that the line, as Macaulay's, and every Board School-boy besides must be abundantly aware, is to be found in Congreve's tragedy of The Mourning Bride. But he would be wrong; and, in fact, would only be confirming the real author's contention that "Sure, of all blockheads, Scholars are the worst." For, whether connected with Congreve or not, the words are correctly given; and they occur in the Rev. James Bramston's satire, The Man of Taste, 1733, running in a couplet as follows:—

Musick has charms to sooth a savage beast, And therefore proper at a Sheriff's feast.

Moreover, according to the handbooks, this is not the only passage from a rather obscure original which has held its own. "Without black-velvet-britches, what is man?"—is another (a speculation which might have commended itself to Don Quixote);[4] while The Art of Politicks, also by Bramston, contains a third:—

What's not destroy'd by Time's devouring Hand? Where's Troy, and where's the May-Pole in the Strand?

Polonius would perhaps object against a "devouring hand." But the survival of—at least—three fairly current citations from a practically forgotten minor Georgian satirist would certainly seem to warrant a few words upon the writer himself, and his chief performance in verse.

The Rev. James Bramston was born in 1694 or 1695 at Skreens, near Chelmsford, in Essex, his father, Francis Bramston, being the fourth son of Sir Moundeford Bramston, Master in Chancery, whose father again was Sir John Bramston, Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench, generally known as "the elder."[5]James Bramston was admitted to Westminster School in 1708. In 1713 he became a scholar at Christ Church, Oxford, proceeding B.A. in 1717, and M.A. in 1720. In 1723 he was made Vicar of Lurgashall, and in 1725 of Harting, both of which Sussex livings he held until his death in March 1744, ten weeks before the death of Pope. His first published verses (1715) were on Dr. Radcliffe. In 1729 he printed The Art of Politicks, one of the many contemporary imitations of the Ars Poetica; and in 1733 The Man of Taste. He also wrote a mediocre variation on the Splendid Shilling of John Philips, entitled The Crooked Sixpence, 1743. Beyond a statement in Dallaway's Sussex that "he [Bramston] was a man of original humour, the fame and proofs of

whose colloquial wit are still remembered"; and the supplementary information that, as incumbent of Lurgashall, he received an annual modus of a fat buck and doe from the neighbouring Park of Petworth, nothing more seems to have been recorded of him.

[4] Whose grand tenue or holiday wear—Cervantes tells us—was "a doublet of fine cloth and velvet breeches and shoes to match." (ch. 1). [5] Sir John Bramston, the younger, was the author of the "watery incoherent Autobiography"—as Carlyle calls it—published by the Camden Society in 1845.

The Crooked Sixpence is, at best, an imitation of an imitation; and as a Miltonic pastiche does not excel that of Philips, or rival the more serious Lewesdon Hill of Crowe. The Art of Politicks, in its turn, would need a fairly long commentary to make what is only moderately interesting moderately intelligible, while eighteenth-century copies of Horace's letter to the Pisos are "plentiful as blackberries." But The Man of Taste, based, as it is, on the presentment of a never extinct type, the connoisseur against nature, is still worthy of passing notice.