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fore so august a company, might well seem monstrous; but Sir Francis Bacon's judgment seems a trifle overcharged. "The first and greatest sinne that ever was committed," said the mighty chancellor, "was done in Heaven. The second was done in Paradise, being Heaven upon Earth, and truly I cannot chuse but place this in the third ranke." Even the obscure Selman, placed side by side with Lucifer and Eve, must have felt amazed; but he, too, rose to the occasion, and his "last speech" reflects vast credit on his ingenuity or on the prisonchaplain's literary sense. "I am come (as you see)," he murmured on the scaffold, "patiently to offer up the sweet and deare sacrifice of my life, a life which I have gracelessly abused, and by the unruly course thereof made my death a scandall to my kindred and acquaintance." After this little masterpiece Samuel Rowland's "Humours Looking Glasse" (1608) seems but sorry stuff and suggests that the cheap jest-book was not much better then than now. In the same category we must put "A Chrystall Glasse for Christian Women. Containing a most excellent Discourse of The Godly Life and Christian Death of Mistriss Katherine Stubs, who departed this life in Burton upon Trent in Staffordshire, the fourteenth of December, 1625;" for despite its pompous title it is but a specimen of popular theology. Far more exhilarating in subject and treatment is the "Hymnus Tabaci" (1628), which is certainly a dwarfish shrub in the forest of books. Its author, one Raphael Thorius, modestly compares his work to the famous "Syphilis" of Fracastorius, and appropriately illustrates the titlepage with Bacchus and his attendant satyrs encircled with the fumes of tobacco. Moreover, being a doctor, he declares that his work "non delectat modo sed et docet," and but for the slur cast by the book upon Drummond's loyalty, which should have compelled agreement with his hero James, we might congratulate him without reserve on the possession of a rare and foolish work. However, it was not only by such fantastic books that he proved his curiosity. The colonies over sea also entertained him, as is attested by Captain John Smith's "Virginia and New England," and the treatise of Fernando Cortes, "De Insulis nuper inventis." And that no human knowledge should seem amiss to him, he studied in French the art of growing mulberry trees and of making silk.

Such were the books which Drummond presented to the University of Edinburgh with dignity and circumstance. He gave them at several times, and he fitted them with varying inscriptions. On the title-page of one is written in a bold and elegant hand, "Ego donatus sum Academiae Edinburgenae a Guilielmo Drummond." Others bear his name alone, almost faded to illegibility, and now, alas! all are cut and bound afresh. But there they were

in the library of Hawthornden, when Ben Jonson paid his celebrated visit to Scotland; and the fact that Drummond received his august visitor in their midst, and that Ben himself possibly hooked some of them off the shelf to verify a quotation or enforce an argument, assuredly lends them an added interest. interest. For Ben Jonson's visit was the golden event of Drummond's life, and happily for us he has left a full and particular account of the conversations which were held across the table. The journey itself is ever memorable, since Jonson made it on foot, for which the Lord Chancellor Bacon reproached him, saying that he "loved not to see Poesy goe on other feet than poeticall dactylus and spondaeus." But the making of journeys was the fashion of the time, and Taylor, the Water Poet, was not many months in advance of Jonson. Indeed, Jonson found him at Leith, and gave him two guineas to drink his health withal. But that did not hinder him from telling Drummond that "Taylor was sent along here to scorn him." Yet nothing could have been further from the truth, since Taylor tramped to Edinburgh, like a Yankee journalist, to prove that he could cover four hundred miles without money or beggary.

However, of Jonson's voyage we know but little, except that at Darlington his boots were worn out, that he purchased a new pair, and that he made it a point of honor to make them last until he should see Darlington again. Arrived at Hawthornden, he was met with the immortal "Welcome, welcome, honest Ben," which he instantly countered with "Thankee, thankee, Hawthornden." And then began the unequal duel of wits. On the one side was the Scots laird, by nature a gentle prig, by training an amiable pedant. On the other side gloomed the careless swashbuckler, determined to fight the good fight of letters even in the Mermaid's mouth. Now, Drummond was always tinged with the vices of the petit maitre. Look at his portrait and you will see that he was no fit antagonist for Jonson's sturdy wit. The lofty forehead, sure index of an overgrown intellectuality, the minarding moustache, the elegant ruff-all these prove that the laird of Hawthornden was pleasantly absorbed in the frothy trifles of existence. Moreover, he was a dilettante who pursued literature not because he must or because his genius clamored for expression, but because, being a squire delicately tinctured with polite learning, he found in the Muses a fashionable dignity. The great names which were bandied up and down Grub Street had been vaguely echoed in his ears; his curiosity had tempted him to the purchase of Shakespeare, Heywood and Drayton as they reached Scotland from the booksellers; and he expected the arrival of Jonson as the Eastern Jew looks toward sunrise for the fulfillment of prophecy. His timid respect for the professors of lit

erature reduced him to silence, and he was prepared to listen with reverential awe to the man who had shaken the hand of Shakespeare, and had presided in his arrogance over the parliament of poets. And Jonson appeared, burly and travel-stained, with no glow of fear or reverence left in him, and prepared, after the first greeting was over, to demolish the pretensions of every poet, excepting one, that ever climbed the slope of Parnassus.

How, then, should the two men have understood one another? Possibly Jonson was not supremely interested in Drummond, but Drummond could not help listening with open mouth to him who had frequented the Mermaid Tavern. And Jonson, after the second bottle, was ever eager to disparage all his contemporaries. "What do you think of Shakespeare?" lisped Drummond in wholesome fear. "Shakespeare wanted arte," reported honest Ben, though he would not have endured a hostile word levelled by another at his friend and master. Thereafter Ben, in his light and genial arrogance, led Drummond over the wide battlefield of literature, and showed him the heaps of slain and wounded. Sharpham, Day and Dekker were all rogues; Donne (whom, by the way, he worshipped), "for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging"; "Daniel was an honest man, but no poet"; "Drayton (Drummond's especial idol) feared him, and he esteemed not of him"; "he beat Marston and took his pistol from him." So Jonson repeated the gossip of the Coffee House, and Drummond (no doubt) trembled at his insolence. How should he stomach the violation of all his shrines? To Jonson the recklessness of criticism was nothing; he knew all the gods, and knew, moreover, that their feet, if not their heads, were made of clay. And then the great man thought little enough of Drummond's own exercises: "they smelled too much of the Schooles, and were not after the fancie of the time: for a child (says he) may writte after the fashion of the Greek and Latine verses in running." Then, after dinner, he turned to scandal, told intimate anecdotes of Gloriana herself, covered with shame the most of his contemporaries, and probably left Drummond gaping with terrified amazement.

Destiny never planned a more amusing situation, and most worthily did Hawthornden take advantage of it. He wrote down the heads of Jonson's converse, and so left us a priceless document, which bears upon itself the vivid marks of truth. For Drummond had a glimmering of Boswell's genius, which gave immortality to another Johnson, and he understood, better than most, the importance of trifles. So he jotted down the splendid trivialities of his guest, and the result is that we can get a clean and clear glimpse into the great age of English literature. That he understood Jonson is unlikely; that he disliked him is certain; the professed man

of letters will seldom meet the polished amateur without distressing him by what appears (yet is not) a common blasphemy. And when Jonson, having blackguarded all his friends, took up his cudgel again and went upon the tramp, poor Drummond sat down in the reaction which naturally followed this debauch of Rhenish and talk, to give his opinion of Jonson. Why not? True, Jonson had spoken in the excitement of hot blood, while Drummond wrote in the composure of reminiscence; but Drummond was dealing with material which he only half understood, and it is easy and just to find excuses for him.

Hitherto he had known none more intimately connected with literature than Andrew Hart, the Edinburgh printer, and Alexander, the Edinburgh poet, so that Jonson's prond condemnation of all the world inflamed him to anger. "Jonson," he complained, "is a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and scorner of others; given rather to lose a friend than a jest; jealous of every word and action of those about him, especially after drink, which is one of the elements in which he liveth; a dissembler of ill parts, which reign in him; a bragger of some good that he wanteth; thinketh nothing well but what either he himself or some of his friends and countrymen hath said or done; he is passionately kind and angry; careless either to gain or keep; vindictive, but, if he be well answered, at himself." There you see the true man of letters sketched by the amateur. "Given rather to lose a friend than a jest"-there is Ben Jonson's character, and the character of many a poet who lived either before or since. "Jealous after drink”—and you may be sure that the most of Ben Jonson's dogmatic opinions were delivered a very long way after drink. Indeed, Drummond's offended vanity is, in spite of itself, truthful and sincere. Old Ben would never have taken his host seriously. The memory of Hawthornden possibly vanished with the taste of the last stoup; for Ben most properly took up a far larger space in Drummond's imagination than Drummond could ever take up in his. So that we readily forgive the asperation as Jonson himself would have forgiven it--with a hearty laugh. Now Gifford, Jonson's biographer, was less happily inspired, and he has rated Drummond like the pendant that he was. He has also been betrayed by his partisanship into manifestly false statements. He declares that Drummond decoyed Jonson into the house that he might jot down notes which he never intended to publish, and which were not printed until seventy years after Jonson's death. The charge is too foolish to court refutation, and Jonson would be the first to flout the crazy loyalty of his biographer. Jonson, who had the humor which Gifford lacked, would have known that you cannot chain the opinion of a host, and that Drum

mond had a perfect right to confide to his commonplace book whatever wayward and casual views he chose to entertain. For our part we may respect him because he has shown us an admirable comedy played in the seventeenth century by the poet and the amateur-a comedy the more admirable, because the amateur that jotted it down guessed not of its excellence.

This, then, was the supreme event which passed in Drummond's library, and which throws a lustre upon the books now treasured in the University of Edinburgh. But the books have another interest, because Drummond, above all writers that ever held a pen, was the product of his library. He wrote English as he wrote Latin, as he might have written French or Italian, like a foreign tongue. His very correctness proves the want of habit, and suggests that his language proceeded straight from his books. His verses leave us cold, because they are with few exceptions exercises upon a given theme. When he writes a sonnet, he thinks of Shakespeare, from whom also he borrowed his boldest images. The comparison of night to a reeling drunkard, for instance, might suggest a touch with life did we not remember that "Romeo and Juliet" was before him. In fact, he was a perfect decadent, who played the game of a past age rather more elaborately than any of those to whom the game was a natural heritage. He was, in fact, like his library, an Elizabethan who had strayed into the age of Charles; he was prepared to fit the commonest idea with a symbol and to turn the plain facts of life into metaphysical conceits. To say that he was a bad poet is more than any durst; he suffers rather by being too good-by smelling, in Ben Jonson's immortal phrase, "too much of the Schooles." He wrote few verses that you can criticise; fewer still that quicken your admiration. To say of Phillis, "Her hand seemed milk in milk, it was so white," was to play the tune of the time without expression; and it is perchance a bitter indictment of his verse to say that such a line as "The stately comeliness of forests old" strikes an odd note of freshness and sincerity. But the truth is, Drummond was merely a poet in the sense that they are poets who dabble in Pindaric Greek. As we have said, he wrote a foreign language with all the ease and circumspection that an acquired knowledge demands. And for all that, he was an accomplished versifier, and as good a specimen of the symbolist as our literature affords.

Now and again he attempted the austerer medium of prose, and strangely enough it is in prose that this bookish gentleman won his real triumph. His "Cypress Grove," in fact, is touched here and thereby the rare quality of distinction. The obvious praise, which must be bestowed upon it, is none the less because it is obvious. It suggests and anticipates the sounding prose of Sir Thomas Browne.

In thought it is but an echo of the prevailing Platonism; in expression it is vastly better than the most of contemporary prose, and there are passages at least in which Drummond forgot that English was not the vernacular, and that his style was masquerading in fancy dress. Take, for instance, the following passage: "If thou dost complain that there shall be a time in the which thou shalt not be, why dost thou not too grieve that there was a time in the which thou wast not, and so that thou art not as old as that enlifening Planet of Time? For not to have been a thousand years before this moment is as much to be deplored as not to be a thousand years after it, the effect of them both being one: that will be after us which long long ere we were, was." Or again, this other passage: "One year is sufficient to behold all the Magnificence of Nature; nay, even one day and night; for more is but the same brought round again. This Sun, that Moon, these Stars, the varying dance of the spring, summer, autumn, winter, is that very same which the Golden Age did see." That is prose, not too sternly subdued to the fashion of the ancients, yet stately and dignified. And then again, when he tells you that "life is a journey on a dusty way; the furthest rest is Death," you have a momentary impression that he is writing his own language; but when he proceeds that "swift and active Pilgrims come to the end of it in the morning, or at noon, which tortoise-paced wretches, clogged with the fragmentary rubbidge of this world, scarce with great travel crawl into at midnight," you are brought back to the library, and you remember that after all Drummond was the child of the printed page.

Yet to be the child of a library is no mean heritage, since it assures the one supreme comfort of this life. Drummond shows us what it is to be born of books; but infinitely worse is his plight who is born without books. For books are the friends which can inflict neither failure nor disappointment. They grow old with our blood, and buckle their friendship to us with the passing years. Of our nearest intimates we may say what Montaigne said of Plutarch: "He is so universall and so full, that upon all occasions, and whatsoever extravagant subject you have undertaken, he intrudeth himself into your work, and gently reacheth you a helpeaffording hand, fraught with rare embellishments, and inexhaustible of precious riches." So it is that when men speak of taste, we may disregard their argument, and cling close to those well-covered friends, who have become ours by industry and usage. So, like Montaigne, we can never "travel without books, nor in peace nor in war." So, like Montaigne, we can isolate ourselves in the tower of our library, and defy the world of fashion or displeasure. For books are the one solid solace of our life, which knows neither malice nor treachery.

And it is for this that we love old Drummond, who has not only left us a library that is unique in history, but who also found the best source of his inspiration in those very books which are the kindest companions which man can encounter.

CHARLES WHIBLKY, in
Blackwood's Magazine.

*

The Most Beautiful Book in the World.

According to the distinguished English archaeologist, Dr. Westwood, the Book of Kells, now in the library of the Dublin University, "is the most beautiful book in the world." He is not alone in his opinion. Not only poetical historians, like Henri Martin, but grave scholars like Wyatt, Waagen, Keller, Zimmer and others, grow almost lyrical when describing this marvel of art. "In delicacy of handling, and minute but faultless execution, the whole range of palaeography offers nothing comparable to these early Irish manuscripts, and the most marvelous of all is the Book of Kells, some of the ornaments of which I attempted to copy, but broke down in despair," says Mr. Digby Wyatt. Waagen tells us that "the ornamental pages, borders and initial letters exhibit such a rich variety of beautiful and peculiar designs, so admirable a taste in the arrangement of the colors, and such uncommon perfection and finish, that one is absolutely lost in amazement."

The Book of Kells is an illuminated manuscript of the Four Gospels in Latin. It contains also prefaces, explanations of the meaning of Hebrew names, summaries, and the tables of the Eusebian Canon.

It was formerly believed to have been composed by St. Columba, in the second half of the sixth century. Conservative archaeologists are pretty generally agreed at present that it was produced during the second half of the seventh. It cannot well be later; the saints in it are represented with the Celtic. tonsure, which consisted in shaving the front of the head from ear to ear. As the Roman tonsure, which is entirely different, was universally accepted by the Irish Church several years before the close of the century, it seems a natural conclusion that these saints would have had the Roman tonsure, if the manuscript had been composed after the year 700.

The real manuscript of St. Columba, or what is left of it, is in the library of the Irish Academy. It has a somewhat curious interest in connection with an incident which may be regarded as the first attempted enforcement of a law of copyright. We are told in an Irish manuscript of the eleventh century, published by Windische, that Columba requested permission of Bishop Molaise to copy the Gospels

of St. Finnan, which had been lately placed in the Episcopal Cathedral. Meeting with a churlish refusal, he stole into the church night after night, until he had the whole copied. When Molaise learned the trick that had been played on him, he fell into a terrible rage, demanded the copy, and, on Columba's refusal, appealed to King Diarmuid, then in residence in Tara. After hearing both parties, Diarmuid sought for precedents in all the libraries in Erin, but there never before had been a case in which the rights of an author or transcriber in his work were involved. However, there had been any number of cases dealing with the ownership of cattle, and on these was the King's judgment based. "The calf," he said, "belongs to the owner of the cow, and the little book to the owner of the big book." Le cah boin a boineen agaus le cah lebar a lebraun; literally: To each cow her little cow and to each book her little book. As to the terrible calamities that followed the enforcement of this novel and unjust copyright law, are they not written in the chronicles of the wars of the Gael?

The text of the Book of Kells is written in the noble semi-uncial characters adopted by all the Irish scribes of the period, but it is the illustrations, borders, initial letters, etc., that render it a perfect treasure-house of artistic wealth. No wonder Giraldus Cambrensis, who was sent by Henry II., on an embassy to Ireland in 1185, should have insisted that it could have been written only by angels. Fancy what seems a mere colored dot to the naked eye becoming, under the power of the microscope, a conventional bunch of foliage with a conventional bird among the branches! In speaking of the minuteness and almost miraculous correctness of the drawing, Professor Westwood mentions that, with the aid of a powerful lens, he counted within the space of one inch, one hundred and fifty-eight interlacements of bands or ribands, each riband composed of a strip of white, bordered on each side by a black strip!

"No words," says Dr. Middleton, professor of Fine Arts in Cambridge University, in his admirable work on Illuminated Manuscripts, "can describe the intricate delicacy of the ornamentation of this book, lavishly decorated as it is with all the different varieties of ingeniously intricate patterns formed by interlaced and knotted lines of color, plaited in and out, with such complicated interlacement that one cannot look at the page without astonishment at the combined taste, patience, unfaltering certainty of touch and imaginative ingenuity of the artist. With regard to the intricate interlaced ornaments in which (with the aid of a lens) each line can be followed out in its windings and never found to break off or lead to an impossible loop of knotting, it is evident that the artist must have enjoyed not only an aesthetic pleasure in

the invention of his pattern, but must also have had a distinct intellectual enjoyment of his work, such as a skillful mathematician feels in the working out of a complicated mathematical problem."

It would be impossible, in our limited space, to enter on an analysis of the different classes of ornament in this, the most wonderful example of human workmanship the world has ever produced. One of the most noteworthy is formed by bands or diapers of steplike lines surrounding minute spaces of entrancingly brilliant color, a sort of cloisonne inlay suggested evidently by the inlay with bits of transparent carbuncle employed by the Irish jewelers in gold jewelry. Another prominent feature is the use of spirals imitated from the application of gold wire to flat surfaces. It may be as well to state that the scribes of the Irish manuscripts were evidently much indebted to the goldsmith's art, which, judging by the specimens that have come down to us, now in the museum of the Royal Irish Academy, must have attained an unapproachable delicacy and beauty in Ireland during the first centuries of the Christian era.

In his "Bilder und Schriftzuge in den Irischen Manuscripten," Dr. Keller considers the spirals the most difficult part of the patterns. "They are," he says, "real masterpieces, which furnish magnificent evidence of the extraordinary firmness of hand of the artist." The beautiful trumpet pattern, of which so much has been written, is the expansion of the spiral into something in the form of a trumpet.

The Dublin University has a priceless collection of manuscripts dating from the sixth to the fourteenth century. One of them, the Book of Durrow a century older than the Book of Kells-is but little inferior to it in beauty.

Some years ago a Dublin publishing house issued a series of photographic reproductions of the principal pages and most striking initials, under the title "Celtic Ornaments From the Book of Kells," a copy of which is in the Boston Public Library. But it was found utterly impossible to reproduce, by any mechanical process, the colors, which are as fresh and brilliant to-day as when the artist laid them on twelve hundred years ago. Consequently the work, though interesting, is but a pale, almost ghostly reflection of the splendid manuscript that is a living witness to the civilization and culture of the century which gave it birth.

JAMES A. CLARKSON, in Book Culture.

*

A First Copy of FitzGerald's Omar. There lately passed through my hands an extremely interesting book, on its way to that remarkable library now being formed by the well-known collector, Mr. DeWitt Miller of Philadelphia, who

is finding time in the intervals of lecturing expeditions to bring together many individually interesting copies of books.

It will be remembered that the late Mr. Levi Lincoln Thaxter did more than any one else to introduce FitzGerald's Omar Khayyam into the United States; and among those who shared his interest was his friend, Mr. James G. Clarke, who was, like him, a member of the Harvard class of 1844. Mr. Clarke, when traveling in the West Indies, once found himself in an open boat with an Englishman who was a stranger to him. Some peril occurred and the Englishman said meditatively "He knows about it all." Mr. Clarke said "That sounds like Omar Khayyam." "Do you know Omar Khayyam?" said the other in great surprise. This was soon after the time of the publication of the third edition (1872) and before Omar became known to the world generally. The Englishman turned out to be a friend of FitzGerald's, and, after Mr. Clarke had told him of Thaxter's ardent advocacy of the book, the Englishman told Fitzgerald of it, who sent Thaxter a copy of each of the first two editions, both now very rare.

This first edition (1859) doubtless came to Thaxter in its original pamphlet form, which, as we know, was published at five shillings and was finally sold off, as Mr. Swinburne assures us, at a penny. The volume contains no inscription by FitzGerald, but there is a correction in red ink, probably by the translator himself, of a single typographical error. Thaxter afterwards had it bound in white vellum, with the Persian title in gilt letters on the cover, and this is the copy now in possession of Mr. Miller.

Thaxter himself imported for his friends many copies of the third edition and prepared for me (January, 1877) one of these in which he had laboriously written, doubtless from the copies given him by FitzGerald, all the various readings of the two earliest ones. This book I still possess. The variant phrases from the first edition are in blue ink, of the second in black; and it is a work of patient industry worthy of that true friend and most loyal man. He himself always preferred the second edition, thinking that FitzGerald had fidgetted over his own work a little too much when it came to the third; an impression in which I agree with him. THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON, in Book Culture.

The Book.

Each life of man is but a page
In God's great diary; each age
A separate volume and each race
A chapter. For a little space
We write, and, childlike, cry our powers,
Nor deem His hand is guiding ours.
POST WHEEler.

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