BOOKWORMS.

"Like caterpillar, eating his way in silence!"

The natural history of the bookworm has escaped the observation of Cuvier. Yet the bookworm shares his habitat in common with the student, and no doubt has often rubbed shoulder with the naturalist. The haunts of the bookworm are the national libraries, the old booksellers' shops about Holborn and Great Queen-street, Long-acre, and the bookstalls generally. One will be sure to meet with him—a weary, worn, and faded personage—in the reading-room of the Museum. The goodly morocco-bound tome in folio is the bookworm's bonne bouche. Its scented binding and odorous pages form the choicest of his meals. The atmosphere of the national reading-room is close and redolent of strange smells; the bookworm, however, enjoys it with the readier zest. Worm-like, he is a reproducer, and capable of spinning words by the myriad, which he deposits upon the surfaces of foolscap.

The bookworm's natural disposition is gentle; but his temper is irritable. His nature is indolent. He loves to doze over a Harleian manuscript, or a dusty Elzevir or black letter. It is legendary that his mission upon earth is occult—videlicet, to discover those lost treasures the Sibylline Leaves, supposed to be embedded and fossilized somewhere in the forest of leaves monastic. The hiding-place of the Sibyl's precious autograph, albeit, remains, like the philosopher's stone, a secret yet.

It is not intended in this paper to be satirical upon bibliographical pursuits. On this point our motto is the text recorded by the learned and indefatigable Mr. Lowdes, in his "Manual." "Mankind are disposed to remember the abuse rather than the utility of pursuits in which few are deeply interested. And in the ridicule which the enthusiastic zeal of bibliomaniacs has cast on bibliography, they lose sight of the fact that all accurate knowledge is in a greater or less degree absolutely dependent thereon."

But the eccentricities and peculiarities of bookworms are left to us to notice, without our incurring the displeasure of any liberal-minded student or book-collector. Our task at present is merely to throw together some information personally relating to bookworms, hitherto hidden within the mouldering pages of cumbrous volumes, offering little inducement for the perusal of the ordinary reader. Nevertheless we are not unmindful what a field of scholastic romance we have traveled through, at the cost of a somewhat dusty journey.

Who were the original bookworms? From what point shall our bibliographical notices date?—beyond or in advance of the monasticism? The old clerks or copyists of the convents were the primitive bookworms indubitably. Their occupation has been elevated by writers to a position of moral philosophy. Dr. Dibdin, in his "Bibliomania," says, "Copying excited insensibly a love of quiet, domestic order, and seriousness. I am willing to admit every degree of merit to the manual dexterity of the cloistered student. I admire his snow-white vellum missals, emblazoned with gold, and sparkling with carmine and ultra-marine blue. By the help of the microscopic glass I peruse his diminutive penmanship, executed with the most astonishing neatness and regularity; his ink so glossy black! Now and then, for a guinea or two, I purchase a specimen of such marvelous legerdemain, but the book to me is a sealed book! Surely the same exquisite and unrivaled beauty would have been exhibited in copying an ode of Horace or a dictum of Quinctilian." With reference to this allusion to the missal, it may be here worth while mentioning that the most splendidly executed book of devotion known is the MS. volume, the Bedford missal. It passed from the library of Harley, Earl of Oxford, through various fortunes, until it finally found a resting-place in the library of the Duchess of Portland. This antiquity is valued at 500 guineas.

As early as the sixth century, commenced the custom in some monasteries of copying ancient books and composing new ones. In the fifteenth century, the custom of keeping up monkish libraries had ceased, at least in England.

The illustrious progenitors of bookworms were such personages as the venerable Bede, Alfred the Great, and Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury. Friar Roger Bacon was also an intense bookworm. The noble book-spirit by which the lives of the Oxford Athenians are recorded and preserved, is now probably forgotten by the world. The student, however reveres the name of old Anthony à Wood. The remembrance of his researches amidst paper and parchment documents, stored up in chests and desks, and upon which the moth was "feeding sweetly," is perpetuated in bibliography. We follow in imagination his cautious step, and head bowing from premature decay, and solemn air, and sombre visage, with cane under the arm, pacing from library to library, through Gothic quadrangles, or sauntering along the Isis on his way to some neighboring village, where, may be, with some congenial Radcliffe, he would recreate with pipe and pot. While the Bodleian and Ashmolean collections remain, so long will the memory of his laudable exertions continue unimpaired. Anthony à Wood was in person of a large, robust make, tall and thin, and had a sedate and thoughtful look, almost bordering upon a melancholy cast. Beneath a strange garb and coarse exterior, lay all that acuteness of observation and retentiveness of memory, as well as inflexible integrity, which marked his intellectual character. After he had by continual drudging worn out his body, he left this world contentedly, A.D. 1695.

In the early part of the seventeenth century, lived that very curious collector of ancient popular little pieces, as well as lover of sacred, secret soul soliloquies, that "melancholy Jaques," yclept Robert Burton. He gave a multitude of books to the Bodleian Library. This original, amusing, and now popular author was an arrant book-hunter—a "devourer of authors." Old Burton's constant companion was, we read, the eccentric "Harry" Hastings, a bibliomaniac, yet also an ardent sportsman. Just alighted from the toils of the chase, Harry Hastings, then in his eightieth year, would partake of a substantial dinner, tipple his tankard of ale dry, take his customary nap, wake up, rub his eyes, and behold the "Anatomy of Melancholy" seated before the fire, his visage buried in an opened folio! A rare old boy must have been this Hastings. He is described as low of stature, but strong and active, of a ruddy complexion, with flaxen hair. His clothes were always of Lincoln green. His house was of the old fashion, in the midst of a large park well stocked with game. He kept his hounds, and his great hall was commonly strewed with marrow bones. He lived to be an hundred, and never lost his eyesight nor used spectacles.

Richard Ashmole, the founder of the Ashmolean Museum, was an intimate of the astrologer Lilly, and one of the queerest of bookworms. His life was grotesquely checkered by family jars. He had a termagant wife, who, it appears, was continually "taking the law of him in return for neglect, cruelty," &c. Whether Ashmole was proof or not proof against this peculiar kind of henpecking, we can not report; but it is certain that his bodily health failed him in the course of his wife's persecution; he sought to tinker up his constitution with quack medicines, of which he became the victim.

The Bodleian and Ashmolean collections are emulated by the Harleian. Harley, Earl of Oxford's attachment to books, and the large sums he expended in forming the collection of MSS., have rendered the name celebrated. The Harleian collection of MSS. was purchased by government for the National Library; the purchase-money amounted to £10,000. Harley lived in the middle of the seventeenth century.

A remarkable individual of the order of bookworm, was the musical bibliomaniac, Thomas Britton. This curious character lived in the Augustan age of Queen Anne. He came to London from a northern county, and, after serving an humble apprenticeship, embarked in business as a kind of costermonger; he was in the habit of actually crying his coals about the street. His attire was a Guernsey frock; he carried a black sack on his shoulders, and a coal measure in his hands. In this style he was painted by Woollaston. Britton lived in Aylesbury-street, Clerkenwell, where he fitted up a concert-room, the progenitor of the great philharmonic and ancient nobility concerts of the present day. Sir Robert l'Estrange was one of Britton's first patrons, and by his reputation and example induced the fashionable world of those days to patronize Britton's concerts, at which Handel, Phil Hart, Banister, Dubourg the violinist, and others, performed to the genteelest of audiences. The concert-room was literally but one floor over a coal-shed; and the visitors had to climb up to it by a ladder fixed outside of the house, and to sit under a low roof, against which they could not avoid knocking their heads soundingly. Britton was no composer, only a musician and book-collector. He collected works on the occult art chiefly, and on music; his library sold for a large sum of money in those times. He was quite a notoriety on account of the humble trade he so openly followed, and the refined tastes he was known to cultivate. One day passing nigh the house of Woollaston the painter, in Warwick-lane, Britton, being in his work-a-day attire, gave out lustily his well-known cry of "Small-coal." Woollaston's attention was attracted, and he recognized in the voice that of his musical acquaintance Britton, whom he had never seen in the pursuit of his ordinary trade. The artist at once beckoned Britton in, and there and then took his portrait as he sat, a veritable itinerant coal-dealer. The portrait is most characteristic, and is now to be seen in the collection of paintings of the British Museum. But we must notice the small-coal man under his bibliopolic phase. A bibliomania raged among Queen Anne's nobility. The Earls of Oxford, Pembroke, Sunderland, and Winchelsea, and the Duke of Devonshire, were among the smitten. These personages, on Saturdays, during the winter season, used to resort to the city, and, there separating, take several routes to the booksellers' shops in different parts of the town, to search out old volumes and MSS. Some time before noon, they would assemble at the shop of Christopher Bateman, a bookseller, at the corner of Ave Maria-lane, in Paternoster-row (query, Little Britain?), where they were frequently met by other persons engaged in the same pursuits, and a conversation commenced on the subject of their inquiries. As nearly as possible to the hour of twelve by St. Paul's clock, Britton (uniquely, the "Literary Dustman" of his age), who by that time had finished his round, clad in his blue frock, and pitching his sack of small coal on the bulk of Mr. Bateman's shop window, used to go in and join them. After about an hour's chat, the noblemen adjourned to the Mourning Bush Tavern at Aldersgate (probably the site of the present Albion Tavern), where they dined, and spent the remainder of the day. Poor Britton was indeed a singular character, and died a death as singular as his life. He was, we are told, of an excessively nervous temperament, which rendered him the object occasionally of villainous practical jokes. Unfortunately he incurred the enmity of Honeyman, the ventriloquist. On a certain day, when Britton gave one of his nobility concerts in Aylesbury-street, Honeyman attended. An opportunity occurring, a voice was heard at a distance, which announced that Thomas Britton's hour was near and that he had but a short time to remain in this world. Poor Britton was not proof against the art of the malicious mimic. He felt the ventriloquist's words as though they were a sacred augur; so deep an impression did the incident make upon him, that he died, almost as predicted, in a brief period, aged fifty-eight, 1714.

Browne Willis was another original of whom we are enabled to furnish a few whimsical anecdotes. But we would reserve this respectful remark, that the doctor was, notwithstanding oddities in externals and manners, nevertheless a learned antiquary, and a good man. So were they all, all learned antiquaries, and excellent men. His tastes led him chiefly to the study of ecclesiastical relics. He visited every cathedral in England and Wales. To these journeys he himself gave the name of pilgrimages. Browne Willis lived in the latter part of the seventeenth century. He was grandson of Dr. Thomas Willis, a celebrated physician, and the first to reduce the theory of phrenology to order and system. His person and dress are described by one who knew him well; they were "so singular that, though a gentleman of £1000 per annum, he was often taken for a beggar. An old leathern girdle or belt always surrounded the two or three coats he wore, and over them an old blue cloak. He wrote the worst hand of any man in England, such as he could with difficulty read himself. His boots, which he almost always appeared in, were not the least singular part of his dress. I suppose it would not be falsity to say they were forty years old, patched and vamped up at various times. They were all in wrinkles, and did not come up above half-way of his legs. He was often called, in the neighborhood of Buckingham, 'Old Wrinkle Boots.' The chariot of Mr. Willis was so singular, that from it he was called himself, the 'Old Chariot.' It was his wedding chariot, and had his arms on brass plates about it, not unlike a coffin, and painted black." This rare antiquary was satirized by Dr. Darrell, in some humorous and highly descriptive verses, of which the subjoined couplets are a specimen:

His wife having written a serious book, Browne Willis wrote on his own copy of the work, "All the connection in this book is owing to the book-binder." He delighted to joke upon Mrs. Willis's book and her authorship.