may trace the footsteps of the Fathers; here you meet the clear-souled Aristotle and Tully of the mighty tongue; here Basil and Fulgentius shine, and Cassiodorus and John of the Golden Mouth." As Alcuin was returning from book-buying at Rome he met Charles the Great at Parma. The Emperor persuaded the traveler to enter his service, and they succeeded by their joint efforts in producing a wonderful revival of literature. The Emperor had a fine private collection of MSS. adorned in the Anglo-Frankish style; and he established a public library, containing the works of the Fathers, "so that the poorest student might find a place at the banquet of learning." Alcuin presented to the Emperor's own collection a revised copy of the Vulgate illuminated under his personal supervision.

Towards the end of Alcuin's career he retired to the Abbey of St. Martin at Tours, and there founded his "Museum," which was in fact a large establishment for the editing and transcription of books. Here he wrote those delightful letters from which we have already made an extract. To his friend Arno at Salzburg he writes about a little treatise on orthography, which he would have liked to have recited in person. “Oh, that I could turn the sentences into speech and embrace my brother with a warmth that cannot be sent in a book; but since I cannot come myself I send my rough letters, that they may speak for me instead of the words of my mouth." To the Emperor he sent a description of his life at Tours: "In the house of St. Martin I deal out the honey of the Scriptures, and some I excite with the ancient wine of wisdom, and others I fill with the fruits of grammatical learning."

Very few book-lovers could be found in England while the country was being ravaged by the Danes. The Northern abbeys were burned, and their libraries destroyed. The books at York perished, though the Minster was saved; the same fate befell the valuable collections at Croyland and Peterborough. The royal library at Stockholm contains the interesting "Golden Gospels," decorated in the same style as the "Book of Lindisfarne," and perhaps written at the same place. An inscription of the ninth century shows that it was bought from a crew of pirates by Duke Alfred, a nobleman of Wessex and was presented by him and his wife Werburga to the church at Canterbury.

It seems possible that literature was kept alive in our country by King Alfred's affection for the old English songs. We know that he used to recite them himself and would make his children get them by heart. He was not much of a scholar himself, but he had all the learning of Mercia to help him. Archbishop Plegmund and his chaplains were the King's secretaries, "and night and day, whenever he had time, he commanded these men to read to

him." From France came Provost Grimbald, a scholar and a sweet singer, and Brother John of Corbei, a paragon in all kinds of science. Asser came to the Court from his home in Wales: "I remained there," he says, "for about eight months, and all that time I used to read to him whatever books were at hand; for it was his regular habit by day and night, amidst all his other occupations, either to read to himself or to listen while others read to him." St. Dunstan was an ardent admirer of the old battle-chaunts and funeral-lays. He was, it need hardly be said, the friend of all kinds of learning. 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. We must say a word in remembrance of Archbishop Ælfric, the author of a great part of our English Chronicle. He was trained at Winchester, where the illuminators, it is said, were “for a while the foremost in the world." He enacted that every priest should have at least a psalter and hymn-book and half a dozen of the most important service-books, before he could hope for ordination. His own library, containing many works of great value, was bequeathed to the Abbey of St. Alban's. We end the story of the Anglo-Saxon books with a mention of Leofric, the first Bishop of Exeter, who gave a magnificent donation out of his own library to the cathedral church. The catalogue is still extant and some of the volumes are preserved at Oxford. There were many devotional works of the ordinary kind; there were "reading-books for winter and summer," and song-books, and especially "night-songs"; but the greatest treasure of all was the "great book of English poetry," known as the Exeter Book, in which Cynewulf sang of the ruin of the "purple arch," and set forth the Exile's Lament and the Traveler's Song.

CHARLES AND MARY ELTON, in
"The Great Book-Collectors."

Epigram-To a Conceited Rhymester.

"The world knows nothing of its greatest men,"
Sir Henry Taylor says, which may be true;
But though of you stark naught the world may ken,
Think not my foolish friend, that great are you.
W. L. SHOEMAKER,

The Library of An Old Scholar.

There is a personal intimacy in a library which does not belong to any other possession of man. To look upon the books of scholar or poet is to see the place in which he sharpened, if he did not forge, his thought. When he has scored the margin with comment, or reflection, he has imparted something of himself to the printed page; but even when the page is virgin-white, you cannot forget the sentiment of him whose hand has touched it. The copy of Florio's "Montaigne," with Shakespeare's name scrawled on the first sheet, will always affect the beholder more poignantly than a copy to which no legend is attached. But if the mere accident of possession sanctifies a book, the use and comment of a great man might make it priceless. What would we not give for Shakespeare's "Plutarch," annotated or scored by his own careful hand? It would reveal his method of work more clearly than a month of argument; it might show us how he turned the noble prose of North into impassioned verse. And what is true of a single book is ten times true of a collection. A man's temper is touched at many points of interest, and by his choice and preference you may know him. The library of Samuel Pepys, for instance, is the best index of his many-sided mind. The careful arrangemen of the books, nicely adjusted according to their height, is as familiar as the methodical taste which dictated their selection. There they stand for all time, as Pepys intended they should stand, protected by the cases which he designed for their reception. If physical immortality were possible, surely it could best be attained by this artifice of Samuel Pepys. For as you stand in the room, which he himself could recognize, and gaze upon the books ordered by his will, you may easily believe that he still haunts the place. It is not a museum filled with the indiscriminate spoils of his life; it is a living library, such as he, the pious donor, might have inhabited. But not only are the treasures disposed according to the fancy of him who gathered them; they are such treasures as best illustrate his curiosity. In one press lies his music, written much of it by his hand; and there you may still find the manuscript of the famous song "Gaze Not on Swans," or of the yet more famous "Beauty Retire," which Knipp herself was wont to sing. Or you may turn over the collection of ballads and broadsides which he made for his amusement, and which to-day is priceless to the student of popular literature. Or you may recall his zeal for the Navy, which he served so faithfully, by contemplating the documents wherein is set forth the prowess of our flect. But wherever you look, you see the hand of Samuel Pepys, and you would not be disconcerted if he descended from Kneller's canvas and pointed

out to you his own cherished possessions. However, few men were ever so thoughtful of the future as the benefactor of Magdalen College, and the library of Pepys remains a unique episode in the history of learning.

As we look at their libraries, we find it hard to believe that Samuel Pepys and William Drummond of Hawthornden were in a sense contemporaries. But in truth their lives overlapped, since Pepys was entered at Magdalen College a few months after the death of Drummond. Yet this overlapping brings the men no nearer one to the other; for while Pepys, a true child of the Restoration, was ahead of his time, Drummond lagged always in the past. In taste, sympathy, and style he was a true Elizabethan, who, by an accident of survival, had strayed into the reign of Charles. His library, in the care and bequest of which he rivals Pepys, was already oldfashioned when he presented it to the University of Edinburgh. But it is all the more interesting to us on that account. For his books reveal to us the predilection of an old scholar, who was seventeen years of age when James united the thrones of England and Scotland, and who lived to see the head of Charles fall to the headsman's axe. And his books tell us far more of the man than do his works. When he wrote, he could never shake off the habit of pedantry; when he purchased books, he purchased those which the whim or fashion of the time commended; and he who turns over his treasures, now safely housed in the University of Edinburgh, may transport himself in fancy to the study of Hawthornden, where Drummond and Jonson met over a bottle and wrangled of letters.

But the two libraries are divided by more than time. Pepys' books are kept in the "new building," for which he himself subscribed, and which he designed for their reception. Drummond's books are put away, separate, it is true, but in a bookcase to which no romance may be attached. Moreover, an over-zealous librarian, to whom they were once entrusted, rebound them and planed them down with a Procrustean inexorability. The result is that many a fine copy is spoilt, and the most are defaced, by bindings upon which Drummond's eye never lighted. The defacement, of course, is an eternal regret. But it must be remembered that the laird of Hawthornden was no coxcomb. He did not, like Pepys, insist upon the decent housing of his books. It was not his own library that he was sending down to posterity-it was the library of Edinburgh's University. So far from insisting upon a separate maintenance, he did but add his books to the general stock, and set his name below those of Clement Little and other benefactors. None the less, he was anxious that his and the other names should be properly preserved, "which," he said "as it can be no disadvantage to the living, may serve to the dead

as a kind of epitaph." That is written in the proper spirit, and Drummond has achieved the epitaph he valued most highly. "Here lies a pious benefactor," so it might run, "who, while he enriched his University, bequeathed to the world a picture of his mind."

For the books, presented to Edinburgh in 1627, and afterwards increased, are Drummond's mind laid bare. They do not form the library of a specialist, curious to exhaust a single subject, but rather of a dilettante, to whom no subject comes amiss. They are bounded, then, neither by language nor by a narrow taste. Drummond, being a true Scot, spoke the vernacular, and found all other tongues of equal difficulty. Spanish and French, maybe, came as easy to him as English, which he always wrote with. the pedantic accuracy of an accomplished foreigner. Nor did the seventeenth century know the hard dividing lines which in our day separate the literature of one country from the literature of another. In the first place, Latin was the common speech of scholars; in the second, the cost and hardship of travel gave a student solemnity to the grand tour. And so we find Drummond expressing a polyglot sympathy after the fashion of his age. So we know from his manuscripts that in one year he read Tasso and Guarini, Bembo and Petrarch, Sanasar's "Acadia" and Henri Estienne's "Defence d'Herodote," as well as Spenser's "Faery Queene" and a treatise by Scaliger. Of this catholicity his library is a yet better proof.

Being a scholar, he perforce knew the classics, and being a gentleman, he filled many a shelf with dull, heavy, respectable volumes. Here you find the Greek grammar of Johannes Varennius, there a fine example of primitive archaeology entitled "Petrus Ciacconius Toletanus De Triclinio," which, despite its curious cuts, is not likely to tempt a modern reader. The masterpieces of Greece and Rome he collected as the humor took him, and without any ambition of completeness. However, he possessed not a few pretty editions, which any bibliophile might proudly treasure, if only they were tall copies. But for the most part he seems to have read the classics in languages not their own. For example, For example, he studied Thucydides not only in the Latin of Laurentius Valla but in the French of Claude de Seyffel, and one wonders that he did not add thereto the version of John Nicholls, goldsmith of the city of London, who also knew more of Seyffel's French than of the original Greek. So, too, he read the "Carmen Saeculare" in Greek, Ovid in Spanish, and Herodotus in Italian; indeed, were it not for an occasional Xenophon, a slim volume of Lucian, the Aldine Plautus and Virgil, and the blameless verses of Apollonius Rhodius, we might almost believe that Drummond borrowed his learning at secondhand. Nevertheless, the curiosity is undeniable;

and since Drummond lived before the age of exact scholarship, we reproach him as little as he could have reproached himself.

But before all things Drummond was a poet, and in duty bound he gathered the masterpieces of his fellow-craftsmen. In his library we may still see the first editions of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, as they might have come hot from the press. It is true that Ben Jonson told Drummond that Shakespeare wanted art; but long before the poet's tramp to Hawthornden, Drummond had read and judged Shakespeare for himself. At any rate, among his books we find "Romeo and Juliet" as it was printed in 1599 and as it was printed by Thomas Creede for Cuthbert Burby, and "Love's Labour Lost" in the small quarto of 1598, as well as " "The Most Lamentable Romaine Tragedie of Titus Androncius...at London. Printed by J. R. for Edward White, and are to be solde at his shoppe, at the little North doore of Paules, at the Signe of the Gun. 1600." Of his friend Drayton, he had the splendid "Battaile of Agincourt," and therewith the works of Daniell, that other poet who wrote of wars, "and yett hath not one batle in all his book," while Joshua Sylvester's "Lachrimae Lachrimarum, or the Distillation of Teares Shede for the untymely Death of the Incomparable Prince, Panaretus," a book surrounded, like his own "Moeliades," with black bands of mourning, doubtless chimed with his fancy. Of course he treasured the works of Spenser, to whose preciosity he owed a profound debt, while for the better passage of his leisure he kept and thumbed Turberville's "Tragicall Tales," translated “in time of his trouble" out of Bandello and Boccaccio. Possibly it was patriotism which urged him to purchase David Murray's portentous "Death of Sophonisba" (1611); he may not plead so good an excuse for the acquisition of "Humours Heav'n on Earth, with the Civil Warres of Death and Fortune," by John Davies of Hereford. But even this fantastic work has a certain curiosity to commend it, and assuredly it lives up to its profession. "O! 'tis a sacred kind of excellence," says the title page, "That hides a rich truth in a Tale's pretence;" and whatever "rich truth" the tale contains is effectually hidden from our knowledge. On the other hand, he esteemed "Astrophel and Stella" so highly that he kept these sonnets in manuscript, a compliment which he paid to no other poet except Donne. Of course, he followed the fashion of the hour, and collected plays, as a modern reader might collect novels, and he had better luck than the luckiest of the moderns. For here we find "The Spanish Tragedy," there the "Comedies Facesieuses" of Pierre de l'Arrivey, while, like a true Elizabethan, Drummond boasted the possession of such popular masterpieces as "Volpone," "A Game of Chess," and "Two Wise Men and all the Rest Fooles."

Now, the most of these are not beyond our reach; only, on our shelves they would figure in neat little. reprints, with neat little notes. But we are no more likely to discover the small quartos, which their own creators first contemplated, than we are to study arithmetic (with Drummond) in the treatise of Chauvet, or to consult for a dictionary Florio's immortal "Worlde of Wordes," which Drummond read in its first edition of 1598. Yet if we had our choice of the library, perhaps we might take the beautiful black-letter translations of Gawin Douglas. This, indeed, was a masterpiece, which no Scot could lack, and which truly it is more easy to look at than to read. But the type has a rugged splendour all its own, and the title page might serve at once as a biography and a criticism of Gawin Douglas. Thus it runs: "The xiii Bukes of Eneados of the famose Poete Virgill Translated out of Latyne verses into Scottish metir, bi the Reverend Father in God, Mayster Gawin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkel and unkil to the Erle of Angus. Every buke having hys particular Prologe. Imprinted at Londo, 1553.” "Unkil to the Erle of Angus"! That touch of pride reminds us of the famous couplet

"The great Dalhousie, he the god of war,
Lieutenant-colonel to the Earl of Mar.”

But the "Virgill" is a fine book, and were it ours we would not exchange it for the "Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Art of Poesie," by James the Sixth himself, which doubtless was highly esteemed by the loyal Drummond, nor for J. Derrick's "Image of Ireland" (1581), of which the Hawthornden copy is reputed unique.

However, Drummond's library was not wholly devoted to humaner letters. Theology, with astrology, its entertaining vice, also engrossed him, and he added Hebrew to his long list of conquered languages. Moreover, such religious books as were his he appears to have read with zeal and attention. His copy of "Chrystomus de Ecclesia" has its slender margins thickly scrawled with notes, a tribute of interest which he does not often pay to secular literature. For the rest, his theology is varied in doctrine, and expressed in many languages. A metrical version of the Psalms in Spanish, made by Juan le Quesne (1606), jostles an ill-printed chapbook, entitled "A Briefe Instruction, by way of Dialogue, concerning the Principal poyntes of Christian Religion," by the Rev. M. George Doulye, Priest (1604). Then there are the Latin poems of Franciscus Bencui, the Jesuit, and five volumes of sermons by Bernardino Ochino, the revolted Catholic, whose famous "Tragedy" may have influenced Milton. Nowadays there is not much anxiety to read the reply of Villagagno, "Eques Rhodius," to Calvin; but the tract of D. Gregorius Nazianzenus, "adversus mulieres ambitionis se adornantes et excolentes carmen satyricum," is still

apposite, and should contain many useful reflections. On the other hand, Drummond consulted the stars as well as the more orthodox guidance of theology, for he possessed not only one of the works of Raymond Lully, but a far more secret treatise, "De Elementis et Orbibus coelestibus," an ancient and erudite book written by Messahala, the most highly vaunted astrologer among the Arabs, whereto he added the yet more mysterious "Alcabitii ad magisterium judiciorum astrorum Isagoge." So he was curious concerning precious stones and their properties, a lore closely bound to mediaeval occultism, and he studied the matter in Conrad Gesner's Latin work on "Fossils, Stones, and Gems," which the title-page assures us will prove useful and pleasant not only to doctors, sed omnibus rerum Naturae ac Philologiae studiosis. Thus the inquisitive Scot packed his head with mysteries, and trusted himself to the literature and learning of an age earlier than his own.

But once in his life this man of books embarked upon an adventure which had nought to do with poetry or politics. Being a true child of his age, he devoted himself with sanguine mind to the simple discovery of the impossible. The seventeenth century was a season of restlessness and research; the England of Elizabeth was dead, and the England of Anne, which was presently to be chilled by the cold douche of common sense, was as yet undreampt. Meanwhile all the eager spirits were busy with miracles; they knew vaguely what problems awaited solution; but they knew too little to recognize that the most were insoluble; and when Drummond was granted the Royal Patent of an inventor, he proved himself as reckless and fantastic as the vainest of his contemporaries. To find a just comparison for his extravagance you must go to the works of Sir Thomas Urquhart and the Marquis of Worcester, who both in style and project resembled the laird of Hawthornden. While the knight of Cromartie was prepared to deduce his pedigree from Adam or to square the circle, while the philosopher of Raglan would anticipate the steam engine or revolutionize the martial arts, Drummond asked leave to fabricate "various machines, which may be of use and profit to the State in the affairs both of peace and war," and to solve the great problem perpetual motion. The ambition, no doubt, seemed modest in 1626, and no doubt Drummond deemed it essential to protect himself against the encroachments of rivals. Wherefore he composed a document, to which Urquhart himself might have set his name, and in which, after Urquhart's own fashion, he gave high-sounding Greek names to his warlike engines of offence or defence. But, like his rivals, he does no more than sketch his ambition; he artfully refrains from explaining his inventions. For instance, he tells us he has devised a cavalry weapon, which

will enable one warrior to perform as much in battle as five or six can do with the common arms. And the name of this weapon is Βακτροβροντήφον, οι the Thundering Rod. No more precise in its details is his Λογχακοντιστης, or Shooting Pike, a murderous implement, wherewith one foot-soldier may do the work of six sclopetarii. So also he would explode his enemies with burning-glasses; he would invent a boat called the 'Evaλodpoμos, or the Sea Postilion, which seems to foreshadow the paddle-boat of modern times; he would construct a repeating gun called the 'Avwgiẞalioтpov, or the Open Gun, "by which without fail in the same space of time in which hitherto one ball has been discharged, there may be discharged four or five, and that whether in naval or in land engagement." After these exploits, may be, a machine of perpetual motion, appropriately styled 'AεKIVηTоs, seems tame enough; and the whole scheme is chiefly interesting because it illustrates the temper of the time. To us it appears increditable that wildcat schemes, such as these, should need protection; but Drummond was secured against all competition for twenty-one years, and the patent was signed and sealed at Hampton Court.

The hare-brained inventor, of course, is still in our midst the poor, hopeless, hopeful maniac, who believes that the chasm between thought and fact may easily be crossed; yet never did the harebrained inventor thrive so fantastically as in the Scotland of the seventeenth century. Urquhart and Drummond were possessed by that enchanting spirit of mad enterprise which distinguished their age and country, nor is it surprising that the "scantlings" of the Marquis of Worcester have been ascribed by more than one historian to the translator of Rabelais.

However, the interest which Drummond professes in the arts of war is mirrored in his library; and he seems to have been as curious in the curing as in the giving of wounds. He possessed, for instance, "the 'Sclopotarie' of Josephus Quarcetanus, Phititian, or His booke containing the cure of wounds received by shot of gunne or suchlike Engines of Warre," in the English edition of John Hester (1590), and it is to the pages of this strange work, no doubt, that he owned some of his own ingenious projects. Moreover, that very rare book, the "Pallas Armata," was his, and right valiantly does he justify its sub-title, "the Gentleman's Armorie, wherein the right and genuine use of the Rapier and of the Sword, as well against the righthanded as against the left-handed man, is displayed: And now set forth and first published for the common Good by the author" (1639). This work, of which but few copies exist, does not precisely touch upon the palatial art of the battlefield; none the less, it is such as no warlike gentleman of the age could

spare, and on its merits it is worth examination. For it is equipped with a set of cuts, which represent fencers, naked as when they were born, and among its dedications is a set of verses by no less a poet that Richard Lovelace himself. Thus Drummond treasured the literature of all subjects as engrossed his active intelligence; and if his ingenious projects were secure not only against the privilege of twenty-one years, but against all time, they find a brilliant reflection in his books.

For, indeed, Drummond interpreted his library in no mean spirit. Though by the accident of his century he possessed a goodly collection of masterpieces, he does not seem to have cherished a peculiar love of rarities, and the few books, which to-day are unique, were not then read to shreds. But hear his own wise pronouncement: "Libraries are as forests, in which not only tall cedars but oaks are to be found, but bushes too and dwarfish shrubs; and as in apothecaries' shops all sorts of drugs are permitted to be, so may all sorts of books be in a Library and as they out of vipers and scorpions, and poisoning vegetables, extract often wholesome medicaments for the life of mankind, so out of whatsoever book good instructions and examples may be acquired." That is a liberal saying, and it explains the presence in Drummond's library of many a book which the pedant of to-day would dismiss as merely curious. Indeed, he had room on his shelves for the jest-book and common chap, as well as for the stately editions of the Greek and Latin classics, while among his "dwarfish shrubs" are not a few such as time seldom spares. The sturdy oak of literature easily survives the shock of centuries, but the poor low-growing bush, whose leaves are within the reach of every defacing hand, is speedily torn to pieces. So that while the Aldine Virgil may now and again be recovered, where shall we find those slim pamphlets which pictured the crimes and criminals of the seventeenth century? Yet they have their fascination, these ragged, illprinted books-a fascination rather of life than of letters.

In 1612, for instance, the name of John Selman. was on every tongue, and doubtless the "flyingstationers" of the time sold a rude woodcut of his features at every street corner. Drummond, at any rate, treasured a stately, whimsical account of his exploits and dying speech, wherein you know not which to admire the more, the rhetoric of Sir Francis Bacon or the eloquence of the culprit. "The Arraignment of John Selman," so runs the title, "who was executed neere Charing-Crosse the 7 of January, 1612 for a Fellony by him committed in the King's Chappell at White-Hall upon Christmas Day last in presence of the King and Divers of the Nobility." That a miscreant should commit so base a crime on such a day, in such a place, be