Note 68 — The Roxburghe Club.

As of other influential documents, there have been various versions of the Roxburghe list of toasts, and a corresponding amount of critical discussion, which leaves the impression common to such disputes, that this important manifesto was altered and enlarged from time to time. The version which bears the strongest marks of completeness and authenticity, was found among the papers of Mr Hazlewood, of whom hereafter. It is here set down as nearly in its original shape as the printer can give it:—

The Order of y^e Tostes. The Immortal Memory of John Duke of Roxburghe. Christopher Valdarfer, Printer of the Decameron of 1471. Gutemberg, Fust, and Schoeffher, the Inventors of the Art of Printing. William Caxton, the Father of the British Press. Dame Juliana Berners, and the St Albans Press. Wynkyn de Worde, and Richard Pynson, the Illustrious Successors of William Caxton. The Aldine Family, at Venice. The Giunta Family, at Florence. The Society of the Bibliophiles at Paris. The Prosperity of the Roxburghe Club. The Cause of Bibliomania all over the World.

It will be seen that this accomplished black-letterer must have been under a common delusion, that our ancestors not only wrote but pronounced the definite article "the" as "ye." Every blunderer ambitious of success in fabricating old writings is sure to have recourse to this trick, which serves for his immediate detection. The Gothic alphabet, in fact, as used in this country, had a Theta for expressing in one letter our present t and h conjoined. When it was abandoned, some printers substituted for it the letter y as most nearly resembling it in shape, hence the "ye" which occurs sometimes in old books, but much more frequently in modern imitations of them.

The primitive Roxburgheians used to sport these toasts as a symbol of knowingness and high caste in book-hunting freemasonry. Their representative man happening, in a tour in the Highlands, to open his refreshment wallet on the top of Ben Lomond, pledged his guide in the potent vin du pays to Christopher Valdarfer, John Gutemberg, and the others. The Celt had no objection in the world to pledge successive glasses to these names, which he had no doubt belonged "to fery respectaple persons," probably to the chief landed gentry of his entertainer's neighbourhood. But the best Glenlivet would not induce him to pledge "the cause of Bibliomania all over the world," being unable to foresee what influence the utterance of words so unusual and so suspiciously savouring of demonology might exercise over his future destiny.