Library of Old Authors

Library of Old Authors. London: John Russell Smith. 1856-7.

MANY of our older readers can remember the anticipation with which they looked for each successive volume of the late Dr. Young’s excellent series of old English prose-writers, and the delight with which they carried it home, fresh from the press and the bindery in its appropriate livery of evergreen. To most of us it was our first introduction to the highest society of letters, and we still feel grateful to the departed scholar who gave us to share the conversation of such men as Latimer, More, Sidney, Taylor, Browne, Toiler, and Walton. What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticized for us! What a precious feeling of seclusion in having a double wall of centuries between us and the heats and clamors of contemporary literature! How limpid seems the thought, how pure the old wine of scholarship that has been settling for so many generations in those silent crypts and Falernian amphorce of the Past! No other writers speak to us with the authority of those whose ordinary speech was that of our translation of the Scriptures; to no modern is that frank unconsciousness possible which was natural to a period when yet reviews were not; and no later style breathes that country charm characteristic of days ere the metropolis drew all literary activity to itself, and the trampling feet of the multitude had banished the lark and the daisy from the fresh privacies of language. Truly, as compared with the present, these old voices seem to come from the morning fields and not the pared thoroughfares of thought.

Even the “Retrospective Review” continues to be good reading, in virtue of the antique aroma (for wine only acquires its bouquet by age) which pervades its pages. Its sixteen volumes are so many tickets of admission to the vast and devious vaults of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through which we wander, tasting a thimbleful of rich Canary, honeyed Cyprus, or subacidulous Hock, from what dusty butt or keg our fancy chooses. The years (during which this Review was published were altogether the most fruitful in genuine appreciation of old English literature. Books were prized for their imaginative, and not their antiquarian value, by young writers who sat at the feet of Lamb and Coleridge. Rarities of style, of thought, of fancy were sought, rather than the barren scarcities of typography. But another race of men seems to hare sprung up, in whom the futile enthusiasm of the collector predominates, who substitute arclueologic perversity for aesthetic scholarship, and the worthless profusion of the curiosity-shop for the sifted exclusiveness of the cabinet of Art. They forget, in their fanaticism for antiquity, that the dust of never so many centuries is impotent to transform a curiosity into a gem, that only good books absorb tone-mellowness from age, and that a baptismal register which proves a patriarchal longevity (if existence be life) cannot make mediocrity anything but a bore, or garrulous commonplace entertaining. There are volumes which have the old age ot Plato, rich with gathering experience, meditation, and wisdom, which seem to have sucked color and ripeness from the genial autumns of all the select intelligences that have steeped them in the sunshine of their love and appreciation;— these quaint freaks of russet tell of Montaigne; these stripes of crimson fire, of Shakspeare; this sober gold, of Sir Thomas Browne ; this purpling bloom, of Lamb ;— in such fruits we taste the legendary gardens of Alcinoiis and the orchards of Allas ; and there are volumes again which can claim only the inglorious senility of Old Parr or older Jenkins, which have outlived their half-dozen of kings to be the prize of showmen and treasuries ot the born-to-be-forgotten trifles of a hundred years ago.

We confess a bibliothecarian avarice that gives all books a value in our eyes; there is for us a recondite wisdom in the phrase, “ A book is a book”; from the time when we made the first catalogue of our library, in which “Bible, Jarge, 1 vol.,” and “ Bible, small, 1 vol.,” asserted their alphabetic individuality and were the sole Bs, in our little hive, we have had a weakness even for those checker-board volumes that only fill up; we cannot breathe the thin air of that Pepysian self-denial, that Himalayan selectness, which, content with one book-case, would have no tomes in it but porphyrogeniti, books of the bluest blood, making room for choicer newcomers by a continuous ostracism to the garret of present incumbents. There is to us a saeredness in a volume, however dull; we live over again the author’s lonely labors and tremulous hopes; we see him, on his first appearance after parturition, “ as well as could he expected,” a nervous sympathy yet surviving between the late-severed umbilical cord and the wondrous offspring, doubtfully entering the Mermaid, or the Devil Tavern, or the Coffee-house of Will or Button, blushing under the eye of Ben or Dryden or Addison, as if they must needs know him for the author of the “Modest Enquiry into the Present State of Dramatique Poetry," or of the “ Unities briefly considered by Philomusus,” of which they have never heard and never will hear so much as the names; we see the country-gentlemen (sole cause of its surviving to our day) who buy it as a book no gentleman’s library can he complete without; we see the spendthrift heir, whose horses and hounds and Pharaonic troops of friends, drowned in a Red Sea of claret, bring it to the hammer, the tall octavo in tree-calf following the ancestral oaks of the park. Such a volume is sacred to us. But it must bo the original foundling of the hook-stall, the engraved blazon of some extinct baronetcy within its cover, its leaves enshrining memorial-flowers of some passion which the cliurch-yard smothered while the Stuarts were yet unkinged, suggestive of the trail of laced ruffles, burnt here and there with ashes from tinpipe of some dozing poet, its binding worn and weatherstained, that lias felt the inquisitive finger, perhaps, of Malone, or thrilled to the touch of Lamb, doubtful between desire and the odd sixpence. When it comes to a question of reprinting, we are more choice. The new duodecimo is bald and hare, indeed, compared with its battered prototype that could draw us with a single hair of association.

It is not easy to divine the rule which has governed Mr. Smith in making the selections for his series. A choice of old authors should be a florilegium, and not a botanist’s hortus siccus, to which grasses aro as important as the single shy blossom of a summer. The old-maidenly genius of antiquarianism seems to have presided over the editing of the “ Library.” We should be inclined to surmise that the works to he reprinted had been commonly suggested by gentlemen with whom they were especial favorites, or who were ambitious that their own names should he signalized on the title-pages with the suffix of EDITOR. The volumes already published are ; Increase Mather’s “ Remarkable Providences”; the poems of Drummond of Hawthornden ; the “ Visions ” of Piers Ploughman ; the works in prose and verse of Sir Thomas Overbury; the “Hymns and Songs” and the “Hallelujah” of George Wither; the poems of Southwell; Solden’s “Table-talk”; the “Enchiridion” of Quarles; the dramatic works of Marston and Webster; and Chapman’s translation of Homer. The volume of Mather is curious and entertaining, and fit to stand on the same shelf with the “Magnalia” of his book-suffocated son. Cunningham’s comparatively recent edition, we should think, might satisfy for a long time to come the demand for Drummond, whose chief value to posterity is as the Boswell of Ben Tonson. Sir Thomas Overbury’s “ Characters ” are interesting illustrations of contemporary manners, and a mine of footnotes to the works of better men,—but, with the exception of “ The Fair and Happv Milkmaid,” they arc dull enough to have pleased James the First; His “ Wife” is a cento of far-fetched conceits,:—here a tomtit, and there a hen mistaken for a pheasant, like the contents of a cockney’s game-bag; and his chief interest for us lies in His having been mixed up with an inexplicable tragedy and poisoned in the Tower, not without suspicion of royal complicity. The “Piers Ploughman ” is a reprint, with very little improvement that we can discover, of Mr. Wright’s former edition. It would have been very well to have republished the “ Fair Virtue,” and “ Shepherd’s Hunting” of George Wither, which contain all the true poetry he ever wrote ; but we can imagine nothing more dreary than the seven hundred pages of his “Hymns and Songs,” whose only use, that we can conceive of, would he as penal reading for incorrigible poetasters. If a steady course of these did not bring them out of their nonsenses, nothing short of hanging would. Take this as a sample, hit on by opening at random :—

Southwell is, if possible, worse. He paraphrases David and puts into his mouth such punning conceits as “Fears are my feres,” and in his “ Saint Peter’s Complaint” makes that rashest and shortestspoken of the Apostles drawl through thirty pages of maudlin repentance, in which the distinctions between the north and northeast sides of a sentimentality are worthy of Duns Seotus. It does not follow, that, because a man is hanged for his faith, he is able to write good verses. We would almost match the fortitude that quails not at the good Jesuit’s poems with his own which carried him serenely to the fatal tree. The stuff of which poets are made, whether finer or not, is of a very different fibre from that which is used in the tough fabric of martyrs. It is time that an earnest protest should be uttered against the wrong done to the religious sentiment by the greater part of what is called religious poetry, and which is commonly a painful something misnamed by the noun and misqualified by the adjective. To dilute David, and make doggerel of that majestic prose of the Prophets which has the glow and wide-orbited metre of constellations, may be a useful occupation to keep country-gentlemen out of litigation or retired clergymen from polemics ; but to regard these metrical mechanics as sacred because nobody wishes to touch them, as meritorious because no one can be merry in their company,—to rank them in the same class with those ancient songs of the Church, sweet with the breath of saints, sparkling with the tears of forgiven penitents, and warm with the fervor of martyrs, —nay, to set them up beside such poems as those of Herbert, composed in the upper chambers of the soul that open toward the sun’s rising, is to confound piety with dullness, and the manna of heaven with its sickening namesake from the apothecary’s drawer. The “ Enchiridion ” of Quarles is hardly worthy of the author of the “Emblems,” and is by no means an unattainable book in other editions,—nor a matter of heartbreak, if it were so. Of the dramatic works of Mars ton it is enough to say that they arc truly works to the reader, but in no sense dramatic, nor worth the paper they blot. He seems to have been deemed worthy of republication because he was the contemporary of true poets; and if all the Tuppers of the nineteenth century will buy his plays on the same principle, the sale will be a remunerative one. The Homer of Chapman is so precious a gift, that we are ready to forgive all Mr. Smith’s shortcomings in consideration of it. It is a vast placer, full of nuggets for the philologist and the lover of poetry.

Having now run cursorily through the series of Mr. Smith’s reprints, we come to the closer question of How are they edited ? Whatever the merit of the original works, the editors, whether self-elected or chosen by the publisher, should be accurate and scholarly. The editing of the Homer we can heartily commend; and Dr. Kimbault, who carried the works of Ovcrburv through the press, has done his work well; but the other volumes of the Library are very creditable neither to English scholarship nor to English typography. The Introductions to some of them are enough to make us think that we are fallen to the necessity of reprinting our old authors because the art of writing correct and graceful English has been lost. William B. Turnbull, Esq., of Lincoln's Inn, Barrister at Law, says, for instance, in bis Introduction to Southwell: “There was resident at Uxendon, near Harrow on the Hill, in Middlesex, a Catholic family of the name of Bellamy whom [which] Southwell was in the habit of visiting and providing with religious instruction when he exchanged his ordinary [ordinarily] close confinement for a purer atmosphere.” (pp. xxii.-xxiii.) Again, (p. xxii.,) "He had, in this manner, for six years, pursued, with very great success, the objects of his mission, when these were abruptly terminated by his foul betrayal into the hands of his enemies in 1592." We should like to have Mr. Turnbull explain how the objects of a mission could be terminated by a betrayal, however it might be with the mission itself. From the many similar flowers in the Introduction to Mather’s "Providences,” by Mr, George Offer, (in whom, we fear, we recognize a countryman,) we select the following ; " It was at this period when, [that,] oppressed by the ruthless hand of persecution, our pilgrim fathers, threatened with torture and death, succumbed not to man, but trusting on [in] an almighty arm, braved the dangers of an almost unknown ocean, and threw themselves into the arms of men called savages, who proved more beneficent than national Christians.” To whom or what our pilgrim fathers did succumb, and what “ national Christians ” are, we leave, with the song of the Sirens, to conjecture. Speaking of the " Providences,” Mr. Oftbr says, that “ they faithfully delineate the state of public opinion two hundred years ago, the most striking feature being an implicit faith in the power of the [in-]visible world to hold visible intercourse with man:—not the angels to bless poor erring mortals, hut of demons imparting power to witches and warlocks to injure, terrify and destroy,”—a sentence which we defy any witch or warlock, though he were Michael Scott himself, to parse with the astutest demonic aid. On another page, he says of Dr. Mather, that "he was one of the first divines who discovered that very many strange events, which were considered preternatural, had occurred in the course of nature or by deceitful juggling; that the Devil could not speak English, nor prevail with Protestants; the smell of herbs alarms the Devil; that medicine drives out Satan ! ” We do not wonder that Mr. Offor put a mark of exclamation at the end of this surprising sentence, but wo do confess our astonishment that the vermilion pencil of the proof-reader suffered it to pass unchallenged. Leaving its had English out of the question, we find, on referring to Mather’s text, that he was never guilty of the absurdity of believing that Satan was less eloquent in English than in any other language ; that it was the British (Welsh) tongue which a certain demon whose education had been neglected (not the Devil) could not speak ; that Mather is not fool enough to say that the Fiend cannot prevail with Protestants, nor that the smell of herbs alarms him, nor that medicine drives him out.

Mr. Offor is superbly Protestant and iconoclastic,— not sparing, as we have seen, even Prisciau’s head among the rest; but, en revanche, Mr. Turnbull is ultramontane beyond the editors of the Civilta Cattolica. He allows himself to say, that, “ after Southwell’s death, one of his sisters, a Catholic in heart, but timidly and blameably simulating heresy, wrought, with some relics of the martyr, several cures on persons afflicted with desperate and deadly diseases, which had baffled the skill of all physicians.” Mr. Turnbull is, we suspect, a recent convert, or it would occur to him that doctors are still secure of a lucrative practice in countries full of the relics of greater saints than even Southwell. That father was hanged (according to Protestants) for treason, and the relic which put the whole pharmacopoeia to shame was, if we mistake not, his neckerchief. But whatever the merits of the Jesuit himself, and however it may gratify Mr. Turnbull’s catecluunenieal enthusiasm to exalt the curative properties of this integument of his, even at the expense of Jesuits' bark, we cannot but think that he has shown a credulity that unfits him for writing a fair narrative of his hero's life, or making a tolerably just estimate of his verses. It is possible, however, that these last seem prosaic as a neck-tie only to heretical readers.

Anything more helplessly inadequate than Mr. Offer's preliminary dissertation on Witchcraft we never read ; but we could hardly expect much from an editor whose citations from the book he is editing show that he had either not read or not understood it.

We have singled out the Introductions of Messrs: Turnbull and Ofibr for special animadversion because they are on the whole the worst, both of them being offensively sectarian, while that of Mr. Offer in particular gives us almost no information whatever. Some of the others are not without grave faults, chief among which is a vague declamation, especially out of place in critical essays, where it serves only to weary the reader and awaken his distrust. In his Introduction to Wither's “Hallelujah," for instance, Mr. Farr informs us that "nearly all the best poets of the latter half of the sixteenth century— for that was the period when the Reformation was fully established—and the whole of the seventeenth century were sacred poets,” and that "even Shakspeare and the contemporary dramatists of his age sometimes attuned their well-strung harps to the songs of Zion.” Comment on statements like these would he as useless as the assertions themselves are absurd.

We have quoted these examples only to justify us in Saying, that Mr. Smith must select his editors with more care, if he wishes that his " Library of Old Authors ” should deserve the confidence and thereby gain the good word of intelligent readers,— without which such a series can neither win nor keep the patronage of the public.

It is impossible that men who cannot construct an English sentence correctly, and who do not know the value of clearness in writing, should he able to disentangle the knots which slovenly printers have tied in the thread of an old author’s meaning; and it is more than doubtful whether they who assert carelessly, cite inaccurately, and write loosely are not by nature disqualified for doing thoroughly what they

undertake to do. If it were unreasonable to demand of every one who assumes to edit one of our early poets the critical acumen, the genial sense, the illimitable reading, the philological scholarship, which in combination would alone make the ideal editor, it is not presumptuous to expect some one of these qualifications singly, and we have the right to insist upon patience and accuracy, which are within the reach of every one, and without which all the others are well nigh vain. How to this virtue of accuracy Mr. Offor specifically lays claim in one of his remarkable sentences: “ We are bound to admire,” be says, "the accuracy and beauty of this specimen of typography. Following in the path of my late friend illiam Pickering, our publisher rivals the Akline and Elzevir presses, which have been so universally admired.” We should think that it was the product of those presses which had been admired, and that Mr. Smith presents a still worthier object of admiration when lie contrives to follow a path and rival a press at the same time. But let that pass ;—it is the claim to accuracy which we dispute; and we deliberately affirm, that, as far as we are able to judge by the volumes we have examined, no claim more unfounded was ever set up. In some cases, as we shall show presently, the blunders of the original work have been followed with painful accuracy in the reprint; but many others have been added by the carelessness of Mr. Smith’s printers or editors. In the thirteen pages of Mr. Offer's own Introduction we have found as many as seven typographical errors,— unless some of them are to be excused on the ground that Mr. Offer's studies have not yet led him into those arcana where we are taught such recondite mysteries of language as that verbs agree with their nominatives. In Mr. Farr’s Introduction to the "Hymns and Songs” nine short extracts from other poems of Wither are quoted, and in these we have found no less than seven misprints or false readings which materially affect the sense. Textual inaccuracy is a grave fault in the new edition of an old poet; and Mr. Farr is not only liable to this charge, but also to that of making blundering misstatements which are calculated to mislead the careless or uncritical reader. Infected by the absurd cant which has been prevalent for the last dozen years among literary sciolists, he gays,—“ The language used by Wither in all his various works—whether secular or sacred—is pure Saxon.” Taken literally, this assertion is manifestly ridiculous, and, allowing it every possible limitation, it is not only untrue of Wither, but of every English poet, from Chaucer down. The translators of our Bible made use of the German version, and a poet versifying the English Scriptures would therefore be likely to use more words of Teutonic origin than in his original compositions. But no English poet can write English poetry except in English,—that is, in that compound of Teutonic and Romanic which derives its heartiness and strength from the one and its canorous elegance from the other. The Saxon language does not sing, and, though its tough mortar servo to hold together the less compact Latin words, porous with vowels, it is to the Latin that our verse owes majesty, harmony, variety, and the capacity for rhyme. A quotation of six lines from Wither ends at the top of the very page on which Mr. Farr lays down his extraordinary dictum, and we will let this answer him, Italicizing the words of Romanic derivation :—

But space fails us, and we shall take up the editions of Marston and Webster in a future article.