Transcribed from the 1912 James Nisbet & Co. edition by
David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN

BY
IAN MACLAREN

London
JAMES NISBET & CO. LIMITED
22 BERNERS STREET, W.
1912

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN

They cannot be separated any more
than sheep and a shepherd, but I am minded to speak of the
bookman rather than of his books, and so it will be best at the
outset to define the tribe.

It does not follow that one is a bookman because he has many
books, for he may be a book huckster or his books may be those
without which a gentleman’s library is not complete. 
And in the present imperfect arrangement of life one may be a
bookman and yet have very few books, since he has not the
wherewithal to purchase them.  It is the foolishness of his
kind to desire a loved author in some becoming dress, and his
fastidiousness to ignore a friend in a fourpence-halfpenny
edition.  The bookman, like the poet, and a good many other
people, is born and not made, and my grateful memory retains an
illustration of the difference between a bookowner and a bookman
which I think is apropos.  As he was to preside at a lecture
I was delivering he had in his courtesy invited me to dinner,
which was excellent, and as he proposed to take the rôle
that night of a man who had been successful in business, but yet
allowed himself in leisure moments to trifle with literature, he
desired to create an atmosphere, and so he proposed with a
certain imposing air that we should visit what he called
“my library.”  Across the magnificence of the
hall we went in stately procession, he first, with that kind of
walk by which a surveyor of taxes could have at once assessed his
income, and I, the humblest of the bookman tribe, following in
the rear, trembling like a skiff in the wake of an ocean
liner.  “There,” he said, with his thumbs in the
armholes of his waistcoat, “what do you think of
that?” And that was without question a very large
and ornate and costly mahogany bookcase with glass doors. 
Before I saw the doors I had no doubt about my host, but they
were a seal upon my faith, for although a bookman is obliged to
have one bit of glass in his garden for certain rare plants from
Russia and Morocco, to say nothing of the gold and white vellum
lily upon which the air must not be allowed to blow, especially
when charged with gas and rich in dust, yet he hates this
conservatory, just as much as he loves its contents.  His
contentment is to have the flowers laid out in open beds, where
he can pluck a blossom at will.  As often as one sees the
books behind doors, and most of all when the doors are locked,
then he knows that the owner is not their lover, who keeps tryst
with them in the evening hours when the work of the day is done,
but their jailer, who has bought them in the market-place for
gold, and holds them in this foreign place by force.  It has
seemed to me as if certain old friends looked out from their
prison with appealing glance, and one has been tempted to break
the glass and let, for instance, Elia go free.  It would be
like the emancipation of a slave.  Elia was not, good luck
for him, within this particular prison, and I was brought back
from every temptation to break the laws of property by my
chairman, who was still pursuing his catechism. 
“What,” was question two, “do you think I paid
for that?”  It was a hopeless catechism, for I
had never possessed anything like that, and none of my
friends had in their homes anything like that, and in my
wildest moments I had never asked the price of such a thing as
that.  As it loomed up before me in its speckless
respectability and insolence of solid wealth my English sense of
reverence for money awoke, and I confessed that this matter was
too high for me; but even then, casting a glance of deprecation
in its direction, I noticed that was almost filled by a
single work, and I wondered what it could be.  “Cost
£80 if it cost a penny, and I bought it second-hand in
perfect condition for £17, 5s., with the books thrown
in—All the Year Round from the beginning in half
calf;” and then we returned in procession to the
drawing-room, where my patron apologised for our absence, and
explained that when two bookmen got together over books it was
difficult to tear them away.  He was an admirable chairman,
for he occupied no time with a review of literature in his
address, and he slept without being noticed through mine (which
is all I ask of a chairman), and so it may seem ungrateful, but
in spite of “that” and any books, even Spenser
and Chaucer, which that might have contained, this
Mæcenas of an evening was not a bookman.

It is said, and now I am going to turn the application of a
pleasant anecdote upside down, that a Colonial squatter having
made his pile and bethinking himself of his soul, wrote home to
an old friend to send him out some chests of books, as many as he
thought fit, and the best that he could find.  His friend
was so touched by this sign of grace that he spent a month of
love over the commission, and was vastly pleased when he sent
off, in the best editions and in pleasant binding, the very
essence of English literature.  It was a disappointment that
the only acknowledgment of his trouble came on a postcard, to say
that the consignment had arrived in good condition.  A year
afterwards, so runs the story, he received a letter which was
brief and to the point.  “Have been working over the
books, and if anything new has been written by William
Shakespeare or John Milton, please send it out.”  I
believe this is mentioned as an instance of barbarism.  It
cannot be denied that it showed a certain ignorance of the
history of literature, which might be excused in a bushman, but
it is also proved, which is much more important, that he had the
smack of letters in him, for being turned loose without the guide
of any training in this wide field, he fixed as by instinct on
the two classics of the English tongue.  With the help of
all our education, and all our reviews, could you and I have done
better, and are we not every day, in our approval of unworthy
books, doing very much worse?  Quiet men coming home from
business and reading, for the sixth time, some noble English
classic, would smile in their modesty if any one should call them
bookmen, but in so doing they have a sounder judgment in
literature than coteries of clever people who go crazy for a
brief time over the tweetling of a minor poet, or the preciosity
of some fantastic critic.

There are those who buy their right to citizenship in the
commonwealth of bookmen, but this bushman was free-born, and the
sign of the free-born is, that without critics to aid him, or the
training of a University, he knows the difference between books
which are so much printed stuff and a good book which is
“the Precious life-blood of a Master Spirit.” 
The bookman will of course upon occasion trifle with various
kinds of reading, and there is one member of the brotherhood who
has a devouring thirst for detective stories, and has always been
very grateful to the creator of Sherlock Holmes.  It
is the merest pedantry for a man to defend himself with a shamed
face for his light reading: it is enough that he should be able
to distinguish between the books which come and go and those
which remain.  So far as I remember, The Mystery of a
Hansom Cab and John Inglesant came out somewhat about
the same time, and there were those of us who read them both; but
while we thought the Hansom Cab a very ingenious plot
which helped us to forget the tedium of a railway journey, I do
not know that there is a copy on our shelves.  Certainly it
is not lying between The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and
The Mayor of Casterbridge.  But some of us venture to
think that in that admirable historical romance which moves with
such firm foot through both the troubled England and the
mysterious Italy of the seventeenth century, Mr. Shorthouse won a
certain place in English literature.

When people are raving between the soup and fish about some
popular novel which to-morrow will be forgotten, but which
doubtless, like the moths which make beautiful the summer-time,
has its purpose in the world of speech, it gives one bookman whom
I know the keenest pleasure to ask his fair companion whether she
has read Mark Rutherford.  He is proudly conscious at
the time that he is a witness to perfection in a gay world which
is content with excitement, and he would be more than human if he
had not in him a touch of the literary Pharisee.  She has
not read Mark Rutherford, and he does not advise
her to seek it at the circulating library, because it will not be
there, and if she got it she would never read more than ten
pages.  Twenty thousand people will greedily read Twice
Murdered and Once Hung and no doubt they have their reward,
while only twenty people read Mark Rutherford; but then
the multitude do not return to Twice Murdered, while the
twenty turn again and again to Mark Rutherford for its
strong thinking and its pure sinewy English style.  And the
children of the twenty thousand will not know Twice
Murdered, but the children of the twenty, with others added
to them, will know and love Mark Rutherford.  Mr.
Augustine Birrell makes it, I think, a point of friendship that a
man should love George Borrow, whom I think to appreciate is an
excellent but an acquired taste; there are others who would
propose Mark Rutherford and the Revelation in
Tanner’s Lane as a sound test for a bookman’s
palate.  But . . . de gustibus . . . !

It is the chief office of the critic, while encouraging all
honest work which either can instruct or amuse, to distinguish
between the books which must be content to pass and the books
which must remain because they have an immortality of
necessity.

According to the weightiest of French critics of our time the
author of such a book is one “who has enriched the human
mind, who has really added to its treasures, who has got it to
take a step further . . . who has spoken to all in a style of his
own, yet a style which finds itself the style of everybody, in a
style that is at once new and antique, and is the contemporary of
all the ages.”  Without doubt Sainte-Beuve has here
touched the classical quality in literature as with a needle, for
that book is a classic to be placed beside Homer and Virgil and
Dante and Shakespeare—among the immortals—which has
wisdom which we cannot find elsewhere, and whose form has risen
above the limitation of any single age.  While ordinary
books are houses which serve for a generation or two at most,
this kind of book is the Cathedral which towers above the
building at its base and can be seen from afar, in which many
generations shall find their peace and inspiration.  While
other books are like the humble craft which ply from place to
place along the coast, this book is as a stately merchantman
which compasses the great waters and returns with a golden
argosy.

The subject of the book does not enter into the matter, and on
subjects the bookman is very catholic, and has an orthodox horror
of all sects.  He does not require Mr. Froude’s
delightful apology to win the Pilgrim’s Progress a
place on his shelf, because, although the bookman may be far
removed from Puritanism, yet he knows that Bunyan had the secret
of English style, and although he may be as far from Romanism,
yet he must needs have his A’Kempis (especially in
Pickering’s edition of 1828), and when he places the two
books side by side in the department of religion, he has a
standing regret that there is no Pilgrim’s Progress
also in Pickering.

Without a complete Milton he could not be content.  He
would like to have Masson’s Life too in 6 vols. (with
index), and he is apt to consider the great Puritan’s prose
still finer than his poetry, and will often take down the
Areopagitica that he may breathe the air of high latitudes; but
he has a corner in his heart for that evil living and mendacious
bravo, but most perfect artist, Benvenuto Cellini.  While he
counts Gibbon’s Rome, I mean the Smith and Milman edition
in 8 vols., blue cloth, the very model of histories, yet he
revels in those books which are the material for historians, the
scattered stones out of which he builds his house, such as the
diaries of John Evelyn and our gossip Pepys, and that scandalous
book, Grammont’s Memoirs, and that most credulous
but interesting of Scots annalists, Robert Wodrow.

According to the bookman, but not, I am sorry to say, in
popular judgment, the most toothsome kind of literature is the
Essay, and you will find close to his hand a dainty volume of
Lamb open perhaps at that charming paper on “Imperfect
Sympathies,” and though the bookman be a Scot yet his
palate is pleasantly tickled by Lamb’s description of his
national character—Lamb and the Scots did not agree through
an incompatibility of humour—and near by he keeps his
Hazlitt, whom he sometimes considers the most virile writer of
the century: nor would he be quite happy unless he could find in
the dark The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.  He is
much indebted to a London publisher for a very careful edition of
the Spectator, and still more to that good bookman, Mr.
Austin Dobson, for his admirable introduction.  As the
bookman’s father was also a bookman, for the blessing
descendeth unto the third and fourth generation, he was early
taught to love De Quincey, and although, being a truthful man, he
cannot swear he has read every page in all the fifteen
volumes—roxburghe calf—yet he knows his way about in
that whimsical, discursive, but ever satisfying writer, who will
write on anything, or any person, always with freshness and in
good English, from the character of Judas Iscariot and
“Murder as a Fine Art” to the Lake Poets—there
never was a Lake school—and the Essenes.  He has much
to say on Homer, and a good deal also on “Flogging in
Schools”; he can hardly let go Immanuel Kant, but if he
does it is to give his views, which are not favourable, of
Wilhelm Meister; he is not above considering the art of
cooking potatoes or the question of whether human beings once had
tails, and in his theological moods he will expound St.
John’s Epistles, or the principles of Christianity. 
The bookman, in fact, is a quite illogical and irresponsible
being, who dare not claim that he searches for accurate
information in his books as for fine gold, and he has been known
to say that that department of books of various kinds which come
under the head of “what’s what,” and
“why’s why,” and “where’s
where,” are not literature.  He does not care, and
that may be foolish, whether he agrees with the writer, and there
are times when he does not inquire too curiously whether the
writer be respectable, which is very wrong, but he is pleased if
this man who died a year ago or three hundred years has seen
something with his own eyes and can tell him what he saw in words
that still have in them the breath of life, and he will go with
cheerful inconsequence from Chaucer, the jolliest of all book
companions, and Rabelais—although that brilliant satirist
had pages which the bookman avoids, because they make his gorge
rise—to Don Quixote.  If he carries a Horace,
Pickering’s little gem, in his waistcoat pocket, and
sometimes pictures that genial Roman club-man in the Savile, he
has none the less an appetite for Marcus Aurelius.  The
bookman has a series of love affairs before he is captured and
settles down, say, with his favourite novel, and even after he is
a middle-aged married man he must confess to one or two book
friendships which are perilous to his inflammable heart.

In the days of calf love every boy has first tasted the
sweetness of literature in two of the best novels ever written,
as well as two of the best pieces of good English.  One is
Robinson Crusoe and the other the Pilgrim’s
Progress.  Both were written by masters of our tongue,
and they remain until this day the purest and most appetising
introduction to the book passion.  They created two worlds
of adventure with minute vivid details and constant
surprises—the foot on the sand, for instance, in
Crusoe, and the valley of the shadow with the hobgoblin in
Pilgrim’s Progress—and one will have a
tenderness for these two first loves even until the end. 
Afterwards one went afield and sometimes got into queer company,
not bad but simply a little common.  There was an endless
series of Red Indian stories in my school-days, wherein trappers
could track the enemy by a broken blade of grass, and the enemy
escaped by coming down the river under a log, and the price was
sixpence each.  We used to pass the tuck-shop at school for
three days on end in order that we might possess Leaping
Deer, the Shawnee Spy.  We toadied shamefully to
the owner of Bull’s Eye Joe, who, we understood, had
been the sole protection of a frontier state.  Again and
again have I tried to find one of those early friends, and in
many places have I inquired, but my humble companions have
disappeared and left no signs, like country children one played
with in holiday times.

It appears, however, that I have not been the only lover of
the trapper stories, nor the only one who has missed his friends,
for I received a letter not long ago from a bookman telling me
that he had seen my complaint somewhere, and sending me the
Frontier Angel on loan strictly that I might have an
hour’s sinless enjoyment.  He also said he was on the
track of Bill Bidden, another famous trapper, and hoped to
send me word that Bill was found, whose original value was
sixpence, but for whom this bookman was now prepared to pay
gold.  One, of course, does not mean that the Indian and
trapper stories had the same claim to be literature as the
Pilgrim’s Progress, for, be it said with reverence,
there was not much distinction in the style, or art in the
narrative, but they were romances, and their subjects suited
boys, who are barbarians, and there are moments when we are
barbarians again, and above all things these tales bring back the
days of long ago.  It was later that one fell under the
power of two more mature and exacting charmers, Mayne
Reid’s Rifle Rangers and Dumas’ Monte
Christo.  The Rangers has vanished with many
another possession of the past, but I still retain in a grateful
memory the scene where Rube, the Indian fighter, who is supposed
to have perished in a prairie fire and is being mourned by the
hero, emerges with much humour from the inside of a buffalo which
was lying dead upon the plain, and rails at the idea that he
could be wiped out so easily.  Whether imagination has been
at work or not I do not know, but that is how my memory has it
now, and to this day I count that resurrection a piece of most
fetching work.

Rambling through a bookshop a few months ago I lighted on a
copy of Monte Christo and bought it greedily, for there
was a railway journey before me.  It is a critical
experiment to meet a love of early days after the years have come
and gone.  This stout and very conventional woman—the
mother of thirteen children—could she have been the
black-eyed, slim girl to whom you and a dozen other lads lost
their hearts?  On the whole, one would rather have cherished
the former portrait and not have seen the original in her last
estate.  It was therefore with a flutter of delight that one
found in this case the old charm as fresh as ever—meaning,
of course, the prison escape with its amazing ingenuity and
breathless interest.

When one had lost his bashfulness and could associate with
grown-up books, then he was admitted to the company of Scott, and
Thackeray, and Dickens, who were and are, as far as one can see,
to be the leaders of society.  My fond recollection goes
back to an evening in the early sixties when a father read to his
boy the first three chapters of the Pickwick Papers from
the green-coloured parts, and it is a bitter regret that in some
clearance of books that precious Pickwick was allowed to go, as
is supposed, with a lot of pamphlets on Church and State, to the
great gain of an unscrupulous dealer.

The editions of Scott are now innumerable, each more tempting
than the other; but affection turns back to the old red and
white, in forty-eight volumes, wherein one first fell under the
magician’s spell.  Thackeray, for some reason I cannot
recall, unless it were a prejudice in our home, I did not read in
youth, but since then I have never escaped from the fascination
of Vanity Fair and The Newcomes, and another about
which I am to speak.  What giants there were in the old
days, when an average Englishman, tried by some business worry,
would say, “Never mind, Thackeray’s new book will be
out to-morrow.”  They stand, these three sets, Scott,
Thackeray, and Dickens, the very heart of one’s library of
fiction.  Wearied by sex novels, problem novels, theological
novels, and all the other novels with a purpose, one returns to
the shelf and takes down a volume from this circle, not because
one has not read it, but because one has read it thirty times and
wishes for sheer pleasure’s sake to read it again. 
Just as a tired man throws off his dress coat and slips on an old
study jacket, so one lays down the latest thoughtful, or intense,
or something worse pseudo work of fiction, and is at ease with an
old gossip who is ever wise and cheery, who never preaches and
yet gives one a fillip of goodness.  Among the masters one
must give a foremost place to Balzac, who strikes one as the
master of the art in French literature.  It is amazing that
in his own day he was not appreciated at his full value, and that
it was really left to time to discover and vindicate his
position.  He is the true founder of the realistic school in
everything wherein that school deserves respect, and has been
loyal to art.  He is also certain to maintain his hold and
be an example to writers after many modern realists have been
utterly and justly forgotten.

Two books from the shelf of fiction are taken down and read
once a year by a certain bookman from beginning to end, and in
this matter he is now in the position of a Mohammedan converted
to Christianity, who is advised by the missionary to choose one
of his two wives to have and to hold as a lawful spouse. 
When one has given his heart to Henry Esmond and the
Heart of Midlothian he is in a strait, and begins to doubt
the expediency of literary monogamy.  Of course, if it go by
technique and finish, then Esmond has it, which from first
to last in conception and execution is an altogether lovely book;
and if it go by heroes—Esmond and Butler—then again
there is no comparison, for the grandson of Cromwell’s
trooper was a very wearisome, pedantic, grey-coloured Puritan in
whom one cannot affect the slightest interest.  How poorly
he compares with Henry Esmond, who was slow and diffident, but a
very brave, chivalrous, single-hearted, modest gentleman, such as
Thackeray loved to describe.  Were it not heresy to our Lady
Castlewood, whom all must love and serve, it also comes to one
that Henry and Beatrix would have made a complete pair if she had
put some assurance in him and he had installed some principle
into her, and Henry Esmond might have married his young kinswoman
had he been more masterful and self-confident.  Thackeray
takes us to a larger and gayer scene than Scott’s Edinburgh
of narrow streets and gloomy jails and working people and
old-world theology, but yet it may be after all Scott is
stronger.  No bit of history, for instance, in Esmond
takes such a grip of the imagination as the story of the Porteous
mob.  After a single reading one carries that night scene
etched for ever in his memory.  The sullen, ruthless crowd
of dour Scots, the grey rugged houses lit up by the glare of the
torches, the irresistible storming of the Tolbooth, the abject
helplessness of Porteous in the hands of his enemies, the austere
and judicial self-restraint of the people, who did their work as
those who were serving justice, their care to provide a minister
for the criminal’s last devotions, and their quiet
dispersal after the execution—all this remains unto to-day
the most powerful description of lynch law in fiction.  The
very strength of old Edinburgh and of the Scots-folk is in the
Heart of Midlothian.  The rivalry, however, between
these two books must be decided by the heroine, and it seems
dangerous to the lover of Scott to let Thackeray’s fine
lady stand side by side with our plain peasant girl, yet soul for
soul which was greater, Rachel of Castlewood or Jeanie
Deans?  Lady Castlewood must be taken at the chief moment in
Esmond, when she says to Esmond: “To-day, Henry, in
the anthem when they sang, ‘When the Lord turned the
captivity of Zion we were like them that dream’—I
thought, yes, like them that dream, and then it went, ‘They
that sow in tears shall reap in joy; and he that goeth forth and
weepeth, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his
sheaves with him.’  I looked up from the book and saw
you; I was not surprised when I saw you, I knew you would come,
my dear, and I saw the gold sunshine round your head.”

That she said as she laughed and sobbed, crying out wildly,
“Bringing your sheaves with you, your sheaves with
you.”  And this again, as Esmond thinks of her, is
surely beaten gold.  “Gracious God, who was he, weak
and friendless creature, that such a love should be poured out
upon him; not in vain, not in vain has he lived that such a
treasure be given him?  What is ambition compared to that
but selfish vanity?  To be rich, to be famous: what do these
profit a year hence when other names sound louder than yours,
when you lie hidden away under the ground along with the idle
titles engraven on your coffin?  Only true love lives after
you, follows your memory with secret blessing or precedes you and
intercedes for you.  ‘Non omnis moriar’—if
dying I yet live in a tender heart or two, nor am lost and
hopeless living, if a sainted departed soul still loves and prays
for me.”  This seems to me the second finest passage
in English fiction, and the finest is when Jeanie Deans went to
London and pleaded with the Queen for the life of her condemned
sister, for is there any plea in all literature so eloquent in
pathos and so true to human nature as this, when the Scottish
peasant girl poured forth her heart: “When the hour of
trouble comes to the mind or to the body—and seldom may it
visit your ladyship—and when the hour of death that comes
to high and low—lang and late may it be yours—oh, my
lady, then it is na’ what we hae dune for oursels but what
we hae dune for ithers that we think on maist pleasantly. 
And the thought that ye hae intervened to spare the puir
thing’s life will be sweeter in that hour, come when it
may, than if a word of your mouth could hang the haill Porteous
mob at the tail of ae tow.”  Jeanie Deans is the
strongest woman in the gallery of Scott, and an embodiment of all
that is sober, and strong, and conscientious, and passionate in
Scotch nature.

The bookman has indeed no trouble arranging his gossips in his
mind, where they hold good fellowship, but he is careful to keep
them apart upon his bookshelves, and when he comes home after an
absence and finds his study has been tidied, which in the
feminine mind means putting things in order, and to the bookman
general anarchy (it was the real reason Eve was put out of Eden),
when he comes home, I say, and finds that happy but indecorous
rascal Boccaccio, holding his very sides for laughter, between
Lecky’s History of European Morals and Law’s
Serious Call, both admirable books, then the bookman is
much exhilarated.  Because of the mischief that is in him he
will not relieve those two excellent men of that disgraceful
Italian’s company for a little space, but if he finds that
the domestic sprite has thrust a Puritan between two Anglican
theologians he effects a separation without delay, for a
religious controversy with its din and clatter is more than he
can bear.

The bookman is indeed perpetually engaged in his form of
spring cleaning, which is rearranging his books, and is always
hoping to square the circle, in both collecting the books of one
department together, and also having his books in equal
sizes.  After a brief glance at a folio and an octavo side
by side he gives up that attempt, but although he may have to be
content to see his large Augustine, Benedictine edition, in the
same row with Bayle’s Dictionary, he does not like it and
comforts himself by thrusting in between, as a kind of mediator,
Spotswood’s History of the Church of Scotland with
Burnett’s Memoirs of the Dukes of Hamilton, that
edition which has the rare portrait of Charles I. by
Faithorne.  He will be all his life rearranging, and so
comes to understand how it is that women spend forenoons of
delight in box rooms or store closets, and are happiest when
everything is turned upside down.  It is a slow business,
rearrangement, for one cannot flit a book bound after the taste
of Grolier, with graceful interlacement and wealth of small
ornaments, without going to the window and lingering for a moment
over the glorious art, and one cannot handle a Compleat Angler
without tasting again some favourite passage.  It is days
before five shelves are reconstructed, days of unmixed delight, a
perpetual whirl of gaiety, as if one had been at a conversazione,
where all kinds of famous people whom you had known afar had been
gathered together and you had spoken to each as if he had been
the friend of your boyhood.  It is in fact a time of
reminiscences, when the two of you, the other being Sir Thomas
Browne, or Goldsmith, or Scott, or Thackeray, go over passages
together which contain the sweetest recollections of the
past.  When the bookman reads the various suggestions for a
holiday which are encouraged in the daily newspapers for
commercial purposes about the month of July, he is vastly amused
by their futility, and often thinks of pointing out the only
holiday which is perfectly satisfying.  It is to have a week
without letters and without visitors, with no work to do, and no
hours, either for rising up or lying down, and to spend the week
in a library, his own, of course, by preference, opening out by a
level window into an old-fashioned garden where the roses are in
full bloom, and to wander as he pleases from flower to flower
where the spirit of the books and the fragrance of the roses
mingle in one delight.

Times there are when he would like to hold a meeting of
bookmen, each of whom should be a mighty hunter, and he would
dare to invite Cosmo Medici, who was as keen about books as he
was about commerce, and according to Gibbon used to import Indian
spices and Greek books by the same vessel, and that admirable
Bishop of Durham who was as joyful on reaching Paris as the
Jewish pilgrim was when he went to Sion, because of the books
that were there.  “O Blessed God of Gods, what a rush
of the glow of Pleasure rejoiced our hearts, as often as we
visited Paris, the Paradise of the World!  There we long to
remain, where on account of the greatness of our love the days
ever appear to us to be few.  There are delightful libraries
in cells redolent with aromatics, there flourishing greenhouses
of all sorts of volumes, there academic meads, trembling with the
earthquake of Athenian Peripatetics pacing up and down, there the
promontory of Parnassus and the Porticoes of the
Stoics.”  The Duke of Roxburghe and Earl Spencer, two
gallant sportsmen whose spoils have enriched the land; Monkbarns
also, though we will not let him bring any antiquities with him,
jagged or otherwise; and Charles Lamb, whom we shall coax into
telling over again how he started out at ten o’clock on
Saturday night and roused up old Barker in Covent Garden, and
came home in triumph with “that folio Beaumont and
Fletcher,” going forth almost in tears lest the book should
be gone, and coming home rejoicing, carrying his sheaf with
him.  Besides, whether Bodley and Dibdin like it or not, we
must have a Royalty, for there were Queens who collected, and
also on occasions stole books, and though she be not the greatest
of the Queenly bookwomen and did not steal, we shall invite Mary
Queen of Scots, while she is living in Holyrood, and has her
library beside her.  Mary had a fine collection of books
well chosen and beautifully bound, and as I look now at the
catalogue it seems to me a library more learned than is likely to
be found even in the study of an advanced young woman of
to-day.  A Book of Devotion which was said to have belonged
to her and afterwards to a Pope, gloriously bound, I was once
allowed to look upon, but did not buy, because the price was
marked in plain figures at a thousand guineas.  It would be
something to sit in a corner and hear Monkbarns and Charles Lamb
comparing notes, and to watch for the moment when Lamb would
withdraw all he had said against the Scots people, or Earl
Spencer describing with delight to the Duke of Roxburghe the
battle of Sale.  But I will guarantee that the whole company
of bookworms would end in paying tribute to that intelligent and
very fascinating young woman from Holyrood, who still turns
men’s heads across the stretch of centuries.  For even
a bookman has got a heart.

Like most diseases the mania for books is hereditary, and if
the father is touched with it the son can hardly escape, and it
is not even necessary that the son should have known his
father.  For Sainte-Beuve’s father died when he was an
infant and his mother had no book tastes, but his father left him
his books with many comments on the margins, and the book microbe
was conveyed by the pages.  “I was born,” said
the great critic in the Consolations, “I was born in
a time of mourning; my cradle rested on a coffin . . . my father
left me his soul, mind, and taste written on every margin of his
books.”  When a boy grows up beside his father and his
father is in the last stages of the book disease, there is hardly
any power which can save that son, unless the mother be robustly
illiterate, in which case the crossing of the blood may make him
impervious.  For a father of this kind will unconsciously
inoculate his boy, allowing him to play beside him in the
bookroom, where the air is charged with germs (against which
there is no disinfectant, I believe, except commercial
conversation), and when the child is weary of his toys will give
him an old book of travels, with quaint pictures which never
depart from the memory.  By and by, so thoughtless is this
invalid father, who has suffered enough, surely, himself from
this disease, that he will allow his boy to open parcels of
books, reeking with infection, and explain to him the rarity of a
certain first edition, or show him the thickness of the paper and
the glory of the black-letter in an ancient book. 
Afterwards, when the boy himself has taken ill and begun on his
own account to prowl through the smaller bookstalls, his father
will listen greedily to the stories he has to tell in the
evening, and will chuckle aloud when one day the poor victim of
this deadly illness comes home with a newspaper of the time of
Charles II., which he has bought for threepence.  It is only
a question of time when that lad, being now on an allowance of
his own, will be going about in a suit of disgracefully shabby
tweeds, that he may purchase a Theophrastus of fine print and
binding upon which he has long had his eye, and will be taking
milk and bread for his lunch in the city, because he has a
foolish ambition to acquire by a year’s saving the
Kelmscott edition of the Golden Legend.  A change of
air might cure him, as for instance twenty years’ residence
on an American ranch, but even then on his return the disease
might break out again: indeed the chances are strong that he is
really incurable.  Last week I saw such a case—the
bookman of the second generation in a certain shop where such
unfortunates collect.  For an hour he had been there
browsing along the shelves, his hat tilted back upon his head
that he might hold the books the nearer to his eyes, and an
umbrella under his left arm, projecting awkwardly, which he had
not laid down, because he did not intend to stay more than two
minutes, and knew indeed, as the father of a family, that he
ought not to be there at all.  He often drops in, for this
is not one of those stores where a tradesman hurries forward to
ask what you want and offers you the last novel which has
captivated the juicy British palate; the bookman regards such a
place with the same feeling that a physician has to a patent
drug-store.  The dealer in this place so loved his books
that he almost preferred a customer who knew them above one who
bought them, and honestly felt a pang when a choice book was
sold.  Never can I forget what the great Quaritch said to me
when he was showing me the inner shrine of his treasure-house,
and I felt it honest to explain that I could only look, lest he
should think me an impostor.  “I would sooner show
such books to a man that loved them though he couldn’t buy
them, than a man who gave me my price and didn’t know what
he had got.”  With this slight anecdote I would in
passing pay the tribute of bookmen to the chief hunter of big
game in our day.

When the bookman is a family man, and I have sometimes doubts
whether he ought not to be a celibate like missionaries of
religion and other persons called to special devotion, he has of
course to battle against his temptation, and his struggles are
very pathetic.  The parallel between dipsomania and
bibliomania is very close and suggestive, and I have often
thought that more should be made of it.  It is the wife who
in both cases is usually the sufferer and good angel, and under
her happy influence the bookman will sometimes take the pledge,
and for him, it is needless to say, there is only one cure. 
He cannot be a moderate drinker, for there is no possibility of
moderation, and if he is to be saved he must become a total
abstainer.  He must sign the pledge, and the pledge must be
made of a solemn character with witnesses, say his poor afflicted
wife and some intelligent self-made Philistine.  Perhaps it
might run like this: “I, A. B., do hereby promise that I
will never buy a classical book in any tongue, or any book in a
rare edition; that I will never spend money on books in tree-calf
or tooled morocco; that I shall never enter a real old bookshop,
but should it be necessary shall purchase my books at a dry goods
store, and there shall never buy anything but the cheapest
religious literature, or occasionally a popular story for my
wife, and to this promise I solemnly set my hand.” 
With the ruin of his family before his eyes, or at least, let us
say, the disgraceful condition of the dining-room carpet, he
intends to keep his word, and for a whole fortnight will not
allow himself to enter the street of his favourite
bookshop.  Next week, however, business, so he says at
least, takes him down the street, but he remembers the danger,
and makes a brave effort to pass a public-house.  The
mischief of the thing, however, is that there is another
public-house in the street and passing it whets the latent
appetite, and when he is making a brave dash past his own, some
poor inebriate, coming out reluctantly, holds the door open, and
the smell is too much for his new-born virtue.  He will go
in just for a moment to pass the time of day with his friend the
publican and see his last brand of books, but not to buy—I
mean to drink—and then he comes across a little volume, the
smallest and slimmest of volumes, a mere trifle of a thing, and
not dear, but a thing which does not often turn up and which
would just round off his collection at a particular point. 
It is only a mere taste, not downright drinking; but ah me, it
sets him on fire again, and I who had seen him go in and then by
a providence have met his wife coming out from buying that
carpet, told her where her husband was, and saw her go to fetch
him.  Among the touching incidents of life, none comes
nearer me than to see the bookman’s wife pleading with him
to remember his (once) prosperous home and his (almost) starving
children.  And indeed if there be any other as entirely
affecting in this province, it is the triumphant cunning with
which the bookman will smuggle a suspicious brown paper parcel
into his study at an hour when his wife is out, or the effrontery
with which he will declare when caught, that the books have been
sent unbeknown to him, and he supposes merely for his
examination.  For, like drink, this fearsome disease eats
into the very fibre of character, so that its victim will
practise tricks to obtain books in advance of a rival collector,
and will tell the most mendacious stories about what he paid for
them.

Should he desire a book, and it be not a king’s ransom,
there is no sacrifice he will not make to obtain it.  His
modest glass of Burgundy he will cheerfully surrender, and if he
ever travelled by any higher class, which is not likely, he will
now go third, and his topcoat he will make to last another year,
and I do not say he will not smoke, but a cigar will now leave
him unmoved.  Yes, and if he gets a chance to do an extra
piece of writing, between 12 and 2 A.M., he will clutch at the opportunity,
and all that he saves, he will calculate shilling by shilling,
and the book he purchases with the complete price—that is
the price to which he has brought down the seller after two
days’ negotiations—anxious yet joyful days—will
be all the dearer to him for his self-denial.  He has also
anodynes for his conscience when he seems to be wronging his
afflicted family, for is he not gathering the best of legacies
for his sons, something which will make their houses rich for
ever, or if things come to the worst cannot his collection be
sold and all he has expended be restored with usury, which in
passing I may say is a vain dream?  But at any rate, if
other men spend money on dinners and on sport, on carved
furniture and gay clothing, may he not also have one luxury in
life?  His conscience, however, does give painful twinges,
and he will leave the Pines Horace, which he has been handling
delicately for three weeks, in hopeless admiration of its
marvellous typography, and be outside the door before a happy
thought strikes him, and he returns to buy it, after thirty
minutes’ bargaining, with perfect confidence and a sense of
personal generosity.  What gave him this relief and now
suffuses his very soul with charity?  It was a date which
for the moment he had forgotten and which has occurred most
fortunately.  To-morrow will be the birthday of a man whom
he has known all his days and more intimately than any other
person, and although he has not so high an idea of the man as the
world is good enough to hold, and although he has often
quarrelled with him and called him shocking names—which
tomcats would be ashamed of—yet he has at the bottom a
sneaking fondness for the fellow, and sometimes hopes he is not
quite so bad after all.  One thing is certain, the rascal
loves a good book and likes to have it when he can, and perhaps
it will make him a better man to show that he has been remembered
and that one person at least believes in him, and so the bookman
orders that delightful treasure to be sent to his own address in
order that next day he may present it—as a birthday
present—to himself.

Concerning tastes in pleasure there can be no final judgment,
but for the bookman it may be said, beyond any other sportsman,
he has the most constant satisfaction, for to him there is no
close season, except the spring cleaning which he furiously
resents, and only allows once in five years, and his autumn
holiday, when he takes some six handy volumes with him.  For
him there are no hindrances of weather, for if the day be
sunshine he taketh his pleasure in a garden, and if the day be
sleet of March the fireside is the dearer, while there is a
certain volume—Payne’s binding, red morocco, a
favourite colour of his—and the bookman reads Don
Quixote with the more relish because the snowdrift is beating
on the window.  During the hours of the day when he is
visiting patients, who tell their symptoms at intolerable length,
or dictating letters about corn, or composing sermons, which will
not always run, the bookman is thinking of the quiet hour which
will lengthen into one hundred and eighty minutes, when he shall
have his reward, the kindliest for which a man can work or hope
to get.  He will spend the time in the good company of
people who will not quarrel with him, nor will he quarrel with
them.  Some of them of high estate and some extremely low;
some of them learned persons and some of them simple, country
men.  For while the bookman counteth it his chief honour and
singular privilege to hold converse with Virgil and Dante, with
Shakespeare and Bacon, and suchlike nobility, yet is he very
happy with Bailie Nicol Jarvie and Dandie Dinmont, with Mr.
Micawber and Mrs. Gamp; he is proud when Diana Vernon comes to
his room, and he has a chair for Colonel Newcome; he likes to
hear Coleridge preach, who, as Lamb said, “never did
anything else,” and is much flattered when Browning tries
to explain what he meant in Paracelsus.  It repays
one for much worry when William Blake not only reads his Songs
of Innocence but also shows his own illustrations, and he
turns to his life of Michael Angelo with the better understanding
after he has read what Michael Angelo wrote to Vittoria
Colonna.  He that hath such friends, grave or gay, needeth
not to care whether he be rich or poor, whether he know great
folk or they pass him by, for he is independent of society and
all its whims, and almost independent of circumstances.  His
friends of this circle will never play him false nor ever take
the pet.  If he does not wish their company they are silent,
and then when he turns to them again there is no difference in
the welcome, for they maintain an equal mind and are ever in good
humour.  As he comes in tired and possibly upset by smaller
people they receive him in a kindly fashion, and in the firelight
their familiar faces make his heart glad.  Once I stood in
Emerson’s room, and I saw the last words that he wrote, the
pad on which he wrote them, and the pen with which they were
written, and the words are these: “The Book is a sure
friend, always ready at your first leisure, opens to the very
page you desire, and shuts at your first fatigue.”

As the bookman grows old and many of his pleasures cease, he
thanks God for one which grows the richer for the years and never
fades.  He pities those who have not this retreat from the
weariness of life, nor this quiet place in which to sit when the
sun is setting.  By the mellow wisdom of his books and the
immortal hope of the greater writers, he is kept from peevishness
and discontent, from bigotry and despair.  Certain books
grow dearer to him with the years, so that their pages are worn
brown and thin, and he hopes with a Birmingham book-lover, Dr.
Showell Rogers, whose dream has been fulfilled, that Heaven,
having a place for each true man, may be “a bookman’s
paradise, where early black-lettered tomes, rare and stately,
first folios of Shakespeare, tall copies of the right editions of
the Elzevirs, and vellumed volumes galore, uncropped, uncut, and
unfoxed in all their verdant pureness, fresh as when they left
the presses of the Aldi, are to be had for the
asking.”  Between this man at least and his books
there will be no separation this side the grave, but his
gratitude to them and his devotion will ever grow and their
ministries to him be ever dearer, especially that Book of books
which has been the surest guide of the human soul. 
“While I live,” says one who both wrote and loved
books and was numbered among our finest critics, “while I
live and think, nothing can deprive me of my value for such
treasures.  I can help the appreciation of them while I last
and love them till I die, and perhaps if fortune turns her face
once more in kindness upon me before I go, I may chance, some
quiet day, to lay my overbeating temples on a book, and so have
the death I most envy.”