Part 3 — The Roxburghe Club.

reat institutions and small institutions have each individually had a beginning, though it cannot always be discovered, distance often obscuring it before it has been thought worth looking after. There is an ingenious theory abroad, to the effect that every physical impulse, be it but a wave of a human hand, and that every intellectual impulse, whether it pass through the mind of a Newton or a brickmaker, goes, with whatever strength it may possess, into a common store of dynamic influences, and tells with some operative power, however imperceptible and infinitesimal, upon all subsequent events, great or small, so that everything tells on everything, and there is no one specific cause, primary or secondary, that can be assigned to any particular event. It may be so objectively, as the transcendentalists say, but to common apprehensions there are specific facts which are to them emphatic as beginnings, such as the day when any man destined for leadership in great political events was born, or that whereon the Cape of Good Hope was doubled, or America was discovered.

The beginning of the book clubs is marked by a like distinctness, both in date and circumstance. The institution did not spring in full maturity and equipment, like Pallas from the brain of Jove; it was started by a casual impulse, and remained long insignificant; but its origin and early progress are as distinctly and specifically its own, as the birth and infancy of any hero or statesman are his. It is to the garrulity of Dibdin writing before there was any prospect that this class of institutions would reach their subsequent importance and usefulness, that we owe many minute items of detail about the cradle of the new system. We first slip in upon a small dinner-party, on the 4th of June in the year 1813, at the table of "Hortensius." The day was one naturally devoted to hospitality, being the birthday of the reigning monarch, George III.; but this the historian passes unnoticed, the object of all-absorbing interest being the great conflict of the Roxburghe book-sale, then raging through its forty-and-one days. Of Hortensius it is needless to know more than that he was a distinguished lawyer, and had a fine library, which having described, Dibdin passes on thus to matters of more immediate importance: "Nor is the hospitality of the owner of these treasures of a less quality and calibre than his taste; for Hortensius regaleth liberally—and as the 'night and day champagnes' (so he is pleased humorously to call them) sparkle upon his Gottingen-manufactured table-cloth, 'the master of the revels,' or (to borrow the phraseology of Pynson) of the 'feste royalle,' discourseth lustily and loudly upon the charms—not of a full-curled or full-bottomed 'King's Bench' periwig—but of a full-margined Bartholomæus or Barclay like his own."[67]

After some forty pages of this sort of matter, we get another little peep at this momentous dinner-party. "On the clearance of the Gottingen-manufactured table-cloth, the Roxburghe battle formed the subject of discussion, when I proposed that we should not only be all present, if possible, on the day of the sale of the Boccaccio, but that we should meet at some 'fair tavern' to commemorate the sale thereof." They met accordingly on the 17th of June, some eighteen in number, "at the St Albans Tavern, St Albans Street, now Waterloo Place." Surely the place was symbolical, since on the 18th of June, two years afterwards, the battle of Waterloo was fought; and as the importance attributed to the contest at Roxburghe House on the 17th procured for it afterwards the name of the Waterloo of book-battles, it came to pass that there were two Waterloo commemorations treading closely one on the other's heels.

The pecuniary stake at issue, and the consequent excitement when the Valdarfer Boccaccio was knocked off, so far exceeded all anticipation, that at the festive board a motion was made and carried by acclamation, for meeting on the same day and in the same manner annually. And so the Roxburghe Club, the parent of all the book clubs, came into existence.

It must be admitted that its origin bears a curious generic resemblance to some scenes which produce less elevating results. On the day of some momentous race or cock-fight, a parcel of sporting devotees, "regular bricks," perhaps, agree to celebrate the occasion in a tavern, and when the hilarity of the evening is at its climax, some festive orator, whose enthusiasm has raised him to the table, suggests, amidst loud hurrahs and tremendous table-rapping, that the casual meeting should be converted into an annual festival, to celebrate the event which has brought them together. At such an assemblage, the list of toasts will probably include Eclipse, Cotherstone, Mameluke, Plenipo, the Flying Dutchman, and other illustrious quadrupeds, along with certain bipeds, distinguished in the second degree as breeders, trainers, and riders, and may perhaps culminate in "the turf and the stud all over the world." With a like appropriate reference to the common bond of sympathy, the Roxburghe toasts included the uncouth names of certain primitive printers, as Valdarfer himself, Pannartz, Fust, and Schoeffher, terminating in "The cause of Bibliomania all over the world."[68]

The club thus abruptly formed, consisted of affluent collectors, some of them noble, with a sprinkling of zealous practical men, who assisted them in their great purchases, while doing minor strokes of business for themselves. These, who in some measure fed on the crumbs that fell from the master's table, were in a position rather too closely resembling the professionals in a hunt or cricket club. The circle was a very exclusive one, however; the number limited to thirty-one members, "one black ball excluding;" and it used to be remarked, that it was easier to get into the Peerage or the Privy Council than into "the Roxburghe."

Nothing has done so much to secure the potent influence of clubs as the profound secrecy in which their internal or domestic transactions have generally been buried. The great safeguard of this secrecy will be found in that rigid rule of our social code which prohibits every gentleman from making public the affairs of the private circle; and if from lack of discretion, as it is sometimes gently termed, this law is supposed to have a lax hold on any one, he is picked off by the "one," "two," "three black balls." It is singular that a club so small and exclusive as the Roxburghe should have proved an exception to the rule of secrecy, and that the world has been favoured with revelations of its doings which have made it the object of more amusement than reverence. In fact, through failure of proper use of the black ball, it got possession of a black sheep, in the person of a certain Joseph Hazlewood. He had achieved a sort of reputation in the book-hunting community by discovering the hidden author of Drunken Barnaby's Journal. In reality, however, he was a sort of literary Jack Brag. As that amusing creation of Theodore Hook's practical imagination mustered himself with sporting gentlemen through his command over the technicalities or slang of the kennel and the turf, so did Hazlewood sit at the board with scholars and aristocratic book-collectors through a free use of their technical phraseology. In either case, if the indulgence in these terms descended into a motley grotesqueness, it was excused as excessive fervour carrying the enthusiast off his feet. When Hazlewood's treasures—for he was a collector in his way—were brought to the hammer, the scraps and odds and ends it contained were found classified in groups under such headings as these—Garlands of Gravity, Poverty's Pot Pourri, Wallat of Wit, Beggar's Balderdash, Octagonal Olio, Zany's Zodiac, Noddy's Nuncheon, Mumper's Medley, Quaffing Quavers to Quip Queristers, Tramper's Twattle, or Treasure and Tinsel from the Tewksbury Tank, and the like. He edited reprints of some rare books—that is to say, he saw them accurately reprinted letter by letter. Of these one has a name which—risking due castigation if I betray gross ignorance by the supposition—I think he must certainly have himself bestowed on it, as it excels the most outrageous pranks of the alliterative age. It is called, "Green-Room Gossip; or, Gravity Gallinipt; A Gallimaufry got up to guile Gymnastical and Gyneocratic Governments; Gathered and Garnished by Gridiron Gabble, Gent., Godson to Mother Goose."

The name of Joseph Hazlewood sounds well; it is gentleman-like, and its owner might have passed it into such friendly commemoration as that of Bliss, Cracherode, Heber, Sykes, Utterson, Townley, Markland, Hawtrey, and others generally understood to be gentlemen, and, in virtue of their bookish propensities, scholars. He might even, for the sake of his reprints, have been thought an "able editor," had it not been for his unfortunate efforts to chronicle the doings of the club he had got into.[69] His History, in manuscript, was sold with his other treasures after his death, and was purchased by the proprietor of the Athenæum, where fragments of it were printed some fifteen years ago, along with editorial comments, greatly to the amusement, if not to the edification, of the public.

In these revelations we find how long a probation the system of book clubs had to pass through, before it shook off the convivial propensities which continued to cluster round the normal notion of a club, and reached the dry asceticism and attention to the duties of printing and editing, by which the greater number of book clubs are distinguished. It was at first a very large allowance of sack to the proportion of literary food, and it was sarcastically remarked that the club had spent a full thousand pounds in guzzling before it had produced a single valuable volume. We have some of the bills of fare at the "Roxburghe Revels," as they were called. In one, for instance, there may be counted, in the first course, turtle cooked five different ways, along with turbot, john dory, tendrons of lamb, souchée of haddock, ham, chartreuse, and boiled chickens. The bill amounted to £5, 14s. a-head; or, as Hazlewood expresses it, "according to the long-established principles of 'Maysterre Cockerre,' each person had £5, 14s. to pay." Some illustrious strangers appear to have been occasionally invited to attend the symposium. If the luxurious table spread for them may have occasioned them some surprise, they must have experienced still more in the tenor of the invitation to be present, which, coming in the name of certain "Lions of Literature," as their historian and the author of the invitation calls them, was expressed in these terms—"The honour of your company is requested to dine with the Roxburghe dinner, on Wednesday the 17th instant." One might be tempted to offer the reader a fuller specimen of the historian's style; but unfortunately its characteristics, grotesque as they are, cannot be exemplified in their full breadth without being also given at full length. The accounts of the several dinners read like photographs of a mind wandering in the mazes of indigestion-begotten nightmare.[70]

When Dibdin protested against the publication of this record, he described it a great deal too attractively when he called it "the concoction of one in his gayer and unsuspecting moments—the repository of private confidential communications—a mere memorandum-book of what had passed at convivial meetings, and in which 'winged words' and flying notes of merry gentlemen and friends were obviously incorporated." No! certainly wings and flying are not the ideas that naturally associate with the historian of the Roxburghe, although, in one instance, the dinner is sketched off in the following epigrammatic sentence, which startles the reader like a plover starting up in a dreary moor: "Twenty-one members met joyfully, dined comfortably, challenged eagerly, tippled prettily, divided regretfully, and paid the bill most cheerfully." On another occasion the historian's enthusiasm was too expansive to be confined to plain prose, and he inflated it in lyric verse:—

This, and a quantity of additional matter of like kind, was good fun to the scorners, and, whether any of the unskilful laughed at it, scarcely made even the judicious grieve, for they thought that those who had embarked in such pompous follies deserved the lash unconsciously administered to them in his blunders by an unhappy member of their own order.

In fact, however, this was the youthful giant sowing his wild oats. Along with them there lay also, unseen at first, the seed of good fruit. Of these, was a resolution adopted at the second meeting, and thus set forth by the historian in his own peculiar style: "It was proposed and concluded for each member of the club to reprint a scarce piece of ancient lore to be given to the members, one copy to be on vellum for the chairman, and only as many copies as members."

The earliest productions following on this resolution were on a very minute scale. One member, stimulated to distinguish himself by "a merry conceited jest," reprinted a French morsel called "La Contenance de la Table," and had it disposed of in such wise, that as each guest opened his napkin expecting to find a dinner-roll, he disclosed the typographical treasure. It stands No. 6 on the list of Roxburghe books, and is probably worth an enormous sum. The same enthusiast reprinted in a more formal manner a rarity called "News from Scotland, declaring the damnable life of Dr Fian, a notable sorcerer," &c. This same morsel was afterwards reprinted for another club, in a shape calculated almost to create a contemptuous contrast between the infantine efforts of the Roxburghe and the manly labours of its robust followers. It is inserted as what the French call a pièce justificative in Pitcairn's Criminal Trials, edited for the Bannatyne, and there occupies ten of the more than 2000 pages which make up that solid book.

It was not until the year 1827 that a step was taken by the Roxburghe Club which might be called its first exhibition of sober manhood. Some of the members, ashamed of the paltry nature of the volumes circulated in the name of the club, bethought themselves of uniting to produce a book of national value. They took Sir Frederick Madden into their counsels, and authorised him to print eighty copies of the old metrical romance of Havelok the Dane. This gave great dissatisfaction to the historian, who muttered how "a MS. not discovered by a member of the club was selected, and an excerpt obtained, not furnished by the industry or under the inspection of any one member, nor edited by a member; but, in fact, after much pro and con., it was made a complete hireling concern, truly at the expense of the club, from the copying to the publishing."

The value of this book has been attested by the extensive critical examination it has received, and by the serviceable aid it has given to all recent writers on the infancy of English literature. It was followed by another interesting old romance, William and the Wer Wolf, valuable not only as a specimen of early literature, but for the light it throws on the strange wild superstition dealing with the conversion of men into wolves, which has been found so widely prevalent that it has received a sort of scientific title in the word Lycanthropy. These two books made the reputation of the Roxburghe, and proved an example and encouragement to the clubs which began to arise more or less on its model. It was a healthy protest against the Dibdinism which had ruled the destinies of the club, for Dibdin had been its master, and was the Gamaliel at whose feet Hazlewood and others patiently sat. Of the term now used, the best explanation I can give is this, that in the selection of books—other questions, such as rarity or condition, being set aside or equally balanced—a general preference is to be given to those which are the most witless, preposterous, and in every literary sense valueless—which are, in short, rubbish. What is here meant will be easily felt by any one who chooses to consult the book which Dibdin issued under the title of "The Library Companion, or the Young Man's Guide and the Old Man's Comfort in the choice of a Library." This, it will be observed, is not intended as a manual of rare or curious, or in any way peculiar books, but as the instruction of a Nestor on the best books for study and use in all departments of literature. Yet one will look in vain there for such names as Montaigne, Shaftesbury, Benjamin Franklin, D'Alembert, Turgot, Adam Smith, Malebranche, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Fénelon, Burke, Kant, Richter, Spinoza, Flechier, and many others. Characteristically enough, if you turn up Rousseau in the index, you will find Jean Baptiste, but not Jean Jacques. You will search in vain for Dr Thomas Reid, the metaphysician, but will readily find Isaac Reed, the editor. If you look for Molinæus or Du Moulin, it is not there, but alphabetic vicinity gives you the good fortune to become acquainted with "Moule, Mr, his Bibliotheca Heraldica." The name Hooker will be found, not to guide the reader to the Ecclesiastical Polity, but to Dr Jackson Hooker's Tour in Iceland. Lastly, if any one shall search for Hartley on Man, he will find in the place it might occupy, or has reference to, the editorial services of "Hazlewood, Mr Joseph."

Though the Roxburghe, when it came under the fostering care of the scholarly Botfield, and secured the services of men like Madden, Wright, and Taylor, outgrew the pedantries in which it had been reared, and performed much valuable literary work, yet its chief merit is in the hints its practice afforded to others. The leading principle, indeed, which the other clubs so largely adopted after the example of the Roxburghe, was not an entire novelty. The idea of keeping up the value of a book by limiting the impression, so as to restrain it within the number who might desire to possess it, was known before the birth of this the oldest book club. The practice was sedulously followed by Hearne the antiquary, and others, who provided old chronicles and books of the class chiefly esteemed by the book-hunter. The very fame of the restricted number, operating on the selfish jealousy of man's nature, brought out competitors for the possession of the book, who never would have thought of it but for the pleasant idea of keeping it out of the hands of some one else.

There are several instances on record of an unknown book lying in the printer's warerooms, dead from birth and forgotten, having life and importance given to it by the report that all the copies, save a few, have been destroyed by a fire in the premises. This is an illustration in the sibylline direction of value being conferred by the decrease of the commodity; but by judiciously adjusting the number of copies printed, the remarkable phenomenon has been exhibited of the rarity of a book being increased by an increase in the number of copies. To understand how this may come to pass, it is necessary to recall the precept elsewhere set forth, and look on rarity as not an absolute quality, but as relative to the number who desire to possess the article. Ten copies which two hundred people want constitute a rarer book than two copies which twenty people want. Even to a sole remaining copy of some forgotten book, lying dead, as it were, and buried in some obscure library, may collective vital rarity be imparted. Let its owner print, say, twenty copies for distribution—the book-hunting community have got the "hark-away," and are off after it. In this way, before the days of the clubs, many knowing people multiplied rarities; and at the present day there are reprints by the clubs themselves of much greater pecuniary value than the rare books from which they have been multiplied.