Charles Isaac Elton

“ It was long a saying among the French that a man had never seen Paris who had not looked upon the books of Thuanus. The historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou held a leading place in literature, without pretending in any way to rival the greatness of Joseph Scaliger or the erudition of Isaac Casaubon. He was the master of a great store of personal and secret history collected in state papers and records; but he was also famous for the extent of his general scholarship, and for the patronage which he manifested towards all who laboured about books. He was himself a most fastidious collector. ”

“ De Mesmes was a collector with a love of curiosities of all kinds. He seems to have been equally fond of his early specimens of printing, his Flemish and Italian illuminations, and the Arabic and Armenian treatises procured by his agents in the East. His library became a valuable museum which was praised by all the writers of that age, except indeed by François Pithou, who called De Mesmes a literary grave-digger, and mourned over the burial of so many good books in those cold and gloomy sepulchres. ”

“ However, I never saw them torturing one deliberately, as the Welsh fishermen will put pins or thorns in the eyes of a dog-fish, and turn him out, or as these very men treat the skates; they dislike these last for being very heavy and very profitless, besides entangling all the lines with their struggles. When the skate comes up at last with his nose out of water, sighing and grunting, they as often as not cut the hook clean out of him, and let him sink or swim away if he can. ”

“ The good wine from thy master’s cup,
Made of thy father’s head.”
IV.
The king’s red face grew pale with ire,
He smote upon the board:
“Pour up the wine which flames like fire,
And drink damnation to thy sire,
And glory to thy lord! ”

“ It is sufficient to name such men as M. Renouard, the owner of many of Grolier's treasures, or M. Firmin-Didot 'the friend of all good books,' or the collections of Mr. Beckford and Baron Seillière which have been in our own time dispersed. No doubt there is a tendency, especially among French amateurs, to regard books as mere curiosities; and M. Uzanne has drawn an amusing picture of the book-hunter as a chrysalis in his library, destined to find his wings in a flight after mosaic bindings, autographs, original water-colours, or plates in early states. ”

“ No paper on Denmark would be at all perfect without a mention of the fêtes, of which the Danes are so passionately fond, that everyone, gentle or simple, turns out after dinner to see fireworks and horse-riders, and to hear music à la Cremorne, for the small price of the inevitable fourpence-halfpenny. These fêtes are all alike in their general features; but I think that the Tivoli Gardens are beaten by the Alhambra, which latter place we were told by the waiter is “the glory of Copenhagen.” ”

“ If Serenus had done nothing else in his life, and had not read a word in all those volumes, would he not have had enough to do in learning their titles and sizes and numbers and their authors' names? Here you have a science that turns a philosopher into a librarian. ”

“ The Land’s Enders have an idea that few English and no French can catch fish at all like them, and if you want to provoke their scorn, tell them of Welsh or French conger-fishers. Foreigners, they say, they cannot abide, and by foreigners they mean especially Welsh, Irish, Manxmen, and French. Of these they hate the Welsh most, since they enter into competition with them sometimes in the mines and other rough work across the Channel. The Welsh do not like Cornish labour being brought in to reduce the price, and try to make their life a burden to them. ”

“ Every desert in the East seems to have held a library, where the pillars of some temple lie in the sand, and where dead men 'hang their mute thoughts on the mute walls around.' The Egyptian traveller sees the site of the book-room of Rameses that was called the 'Hospital for the Soul.' There was a library at the breast of the Sphinx, and another where Cairo stands, and one at Alexandria that was burned in Julius Cæsar's siege, besides the later assemblage in the House of Serapis which Omar was said to have sacrificed as a tribute of respect for the Koran. ”

“ After we had killed our shark, the dead of the tide came on, in which very few fish bite. The bait hangs quietly at the bottom, and, even if a fish touch it, hardly moves: so that at this time of the night it requires a very practised hand to recognise the gentle vibration caused by some large fish playing with the hook. Of course, unless one does make sure somehow, and without striking hard, the fish blows the bait out of his mouth when the hook pricks him, and comes no more. ”

“ It is possible, however, to prevent the 'book-buying disease' from developing into a general collector's mania. With the world full of books, we must adopt some special variety for our admiration. One person will choose his library companions for their stateliness and splendid raiment, another for their flavour of antiquity, or the fine company that they kept in old times. Montaigne loved his friends on the shelf, because they always received him kindly and 'blunted the point of his grief.' He turned the volumes over in his round tower within any method or design ”

“ There are many other works of art here which are well known out of Denmark by reputation, especially the ivory head of Queen Helen, a horse modelled out of one piece of steel, with a fly on its leg, and various cameos and coral carvings. But the genuine antiquities are in reality the most valuable, from their scientific accuracy of arrangement and completeness.
Nobody should leave Copenhagen without driving out to the Deerpark and the Castle. ”

“ The elder Mirabeau was a collector of another type. The 'friend of mankind' intended to gather together the best and largest library in the world. He cared nothing for the scarcity or the external adornments of a volume; but he had a huge appetite for knowledge, and he longed to have the means of referring to all that could illustrate the progress of the race. He did not live to attain any marked success in his gigantic design; but his library had at least the distinction of containing all the books of the Comte de Buffon, enriched with marginal notes in the naturalist's handwriting. ”

“ One passes funny little farms, numbered like toy-houses, with solemn storks on the roof; then through long beech woods, with rabbits hopping away, and sometimes past old houses of the feudal times. There are many such in Denmark, complete with moat, embrasures, and battlements, with a ditch intersecting the court, to mark the proper limits of the master’s side and the rooms of the serving-folk. ”

“ The Franciscans were too ready to give and sell, to lend and spend, the volumes that they were so keen to acquire. A Dominican was always drawn with a book in his hand; but he would care nothing for it, if it contained no secrets of science. Richard de Bury had much to say about the Friars in that treatise on the love of books, 'which he fondly named Philobiblon,' being a commendation of Wisdom and of the books wherein she dwells. The Friars, he said, had preserved the ancient stores of learning, and were always ready to procure the last sermon from Rome or the newest pamphlet from Oxford. ”

“ The Saint was an expert scribe and a painter of miniatures; and specimens of his exquisite handiwork may still be seen at Canterbury and in the Bodleian at Oxford. He was the real founder of the Glastonbury library, where before his time only a few books had been presented by missionaries from Ireland. His great work was the establishment of the Benedictines in the place of the regular clergy: and the reform at any rate insured the rise of a number of new monasteries, each with its busy 'scriptorium,' out of which the library would grow. ”

“ Naudé in vain petitioned against a decree which had fallen like a thunder-bolt on the 'wonderful work of his life.' 'Why will you not save this daughter of mine, this library that is the fairest and best-endowed in the world? Can you permit the public to be deprived of such a precious and [187] useful treasure? Can you endure that this fair flower, which spreads its perfume through the world, should wither as you hold it in your hands?'
Naudé spent his own small fortune in ransoming the books on medicine. He had worked hard to persuade Queen Christina to purchase the whole collection ”