The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866

On my return from England, I was observed to be in great distress about a certain box that I missed at Liverpool, looked for at Halifax, and all but lost at East Boston; and when it was found and opened, it only contained two suits of clothes, when, as Henry said, "I might have brought forty, the only thing they did have decent in England," and all the rest—mad, mad! I beg the readers of the Atlantic to listen to my humble confession of madness, as it culminated in this box.

It is this. The most valuable property a man can possibly have is books; if he has a hundred or a thousand dollars to spare, he had better at once put it into books than into any "paying investments," or any horses, clothes, pictures, or opera-tickets. A life passed among books, thinking, talking, living only for books, is the most amusing and improving life; and to make this possible, the acquisition of a library should be the first object of any one who makes any claim to the possession of luxuries. (My madness only allows me to make one exception,—I do acknowledge the solemn duty of laying in a stock of old Madeira.) But so far I have many fellow-maniacs. The special reason why I ought always to stop the Lowell cars at Somerville is, that I consider the reading of books only half the battle. I must have them in choice bindings, in rare imprints, in original editions, and in the most select forms. I must have several copies of a book I have read forty times, as long as there is anything about each copy that makes it peculiar, sui generis. I must own the first edition of Paradise Lost, because it is the first, and in ten books; the second, because it is the first in twelve; then Newton's, then Todd's, then Mitford's, and so on, till my catalogue of Miltons gets to equal Jeames de la Pluche's portraits of the "Dook." "And when," as Henry indignantly says, "he could read Milton all he wanted to, more than I should ever want to, notes and all, in Little and Brown's edition that father gave him, he must go spending money on a parcel of old truck printed a thousand years ago." Mad, quite mad.

Now, to finish the melancholy picture, I am classic mad. I prefer the ancient authors, decidedly, to the moderns. I love them as I never can the moderns; they are my most intimate friends, my heart's own darlings. And how I love to lavish money on them, to see them adorned in every way! How I love to heap them up, Aldines, and Elzevirs, and Baskervilles, and Biponts, in all their grace and majesty. This was what filled that London box. This was all I had to show for twenty-five or thirty guineas of good money; a parcel of trumpery old Greek and Latin books I had by dozens already! Mad, mad.

Will you come in and see them, ladies and gentlemen? Here they are, all ranged out on my table, large and small, clean and dirty. What have we first?

A goodly fat quarto in white vellum, "Plinii Panegyricus, cum notis Schwarzii, Norimbergæ, 1733." A fine, clean, fresh copy,—one of those brave old Teutonic classics of the last century, less exquisitely printed than the Elzevirs, less learnedly critical than the later Germans, but perfectly trustworthy and satisfactory, and attracting every one's eye on a library shelf, by the rich sturdiness of their creamy binding, that smacks of the true Dutch and German burgher wealth. The model of them all is Oudendorp's Cæsar. But there is nothing very great about Pliny's Panegyric, and a man must be a very queer bibliomaniac who would buy up all the vellum classics of the last century he saw. Look inside the cover; read under the book-plate the engraved name, "Edward Gibbon, Esq." What will you, my sanest friend, not give for a book that belonged to the author of the "Decline and Fall"?

The next is also a large quarto, but of a very different character. It is the Baskerville impression of the elegiac poets,—Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius: Birmingham, 1772. No books are more delightful to sight and touch than the Baskerville classics. This Catullus of mine is printed on the softest and glossiest post paper, with a mighty margin of two inches and a half at the side, and rich broad letters,—the standard n is a tenth of an inch wide,—of a glorious blackness in spite of their ninety-two years of age. The classics of all languages have never been more fitly printed than by Baskerville; and the present book may serve as an admirable lesson to those who think a large-paper book means an ordinary octavo page printed in the middle of a quarto leaf,—for instance; Irving's Washington. My Catullus is bound in glossy calf, with a richly gilt back, and bears within the inscription, "From H. S. C. | to her valued friend | Doctor Southey | Feby ye 24th, 1813," in a true English lady's hand. This cannot be the poet Southey, who was not made LL. D. till 1821; but it may be his brother, Henry Herbert Southey, M. D.

Next comes a very neat and compact little Seneca, in four 18mo volumes, bound in rich old Russia, and bearing the esteemed imprint, "Amstelodami apud Ludovicum et Danielem Elzevirios, M.D.CLVIII." As the Baskerville classics are the noblest for the library table, so the Elzevirs are the neatest and prettiest for the pocket or the lecture-room. And to their great beauty of mechanical execution is generally added a scrupulous textual accuracy, which the great Birmingham printer did not boast. This edition of Seneca, for instance, is that of Gronovius. His dedicatory epistle, and the title-pages of Vols. II., III. and IV., are all dated 1658, but the general title-page in Vol. I. is 1659, as if, like White's Shakespeare, the first volume was the last published. Contrasting a bijou edition with a magnificent one, it may be noted that in the Elzevir the four words and two stops, "Moriar: die ergo verum," occupy just an inch, exactly the space of the one word "compositis" in the Baskerville; but the printing of each is in its way exquisite.

Just about a century after the Elzevirs, and contemporary with Baskerville, an English publisher of the name of Sandby, who appears to have been, as we should say, the University printer and bookseller at Cambridge, projected a series of classics, which are highly prized on large paper and not despised on small. I possess two of the latter, a Terence and a Juvenal; the second, curiously enough, lettered "Juvenalus," a regular binder's blunder. They are called pocket editions, but are much larger than the Elzevirs, and, though very pretty, just miss that peculiar beauty and finish which have made the former the delight of all scholars. There is a carelessness somewhere—it is hard to say where—about the printing, which prevents their being perfect; but a "Sandby" is a very nice thing.

My next "wanity" is a Virgil,—Justice's Virgil; a most elaborate and elegant edition, in five octavo volumes, published in the middle of the last century. It is noted, first, for the great richness and beauty of its engravings from ancient gems, coins, and drawings, which form an unrivalled body of illustration to the text. But, secondly, it will be seen, on inspection, that the whole book is one vast engraving, every line, word, and letter being cut on a metallic plate. Consequently, only every other page is printed on. The same idea was still more perfectly carried out by Pine, a few years later, who executed all Horace in this way, but only lived to complete one volume of Virgil, choicer even than Justice's. It is well bound, in perfect order, and ranks with the choicest of ornamental classics.

Side by side with this Virgil is another, the rare Elzevir Virgil, and a gem, if ever there was one. It is the corrected text of Heinsius, and thus has a fair claim to rank as the earliest of the modern critical editions of Maro. The elegance of this little book in size and shape, the clearness and beauty of the type, and the truly classical taste and finish of the whole design, can never be surpassed in Virgilian bibliography, unless by Didot's matchless little copies. Elzevir Virgils are common enough; but mine is, as I have said, the rare Elzevir, known by the pages introductory to the Eclogues and Æneid being printed in rubric, while the ordinary Elzevirs have them in black. It dates 1637,—the year when John Harvard left his money to the College at Newtowne, and the first printing-press in the United States was set up hard by.

The books, then, that I have described so far all date within the two hundred and thirty years of our collegiate history. But I have behind three of an earlier—a much earlier date; books which John Cotton and Charles Chauncy might have gazed upon as old in Emmanuel College Library.

First, I show you a pair of Aldines, and, what is better, a pair editionum principum,—the first Sophocles and the first Thucydides. Both have the proper attestation at the end that they come from the Aldi in Venice in the year 1502,—the Thucydides in May, and the Sophocles in August; hence the former has not the Aldine anchor at the extreme end. Both are in exquisitely clean condition; but the Sophocles, though taller than other known copies of the same edition, has suffered from the knife of a modern binder, who otherwise has done his work with the greatest elegance and judgment. The Thucydides has a grand page, over twelve inches by eight; the Sophocles is about seven by four. The type of both is small, and, though distinct, especially the Thucydides, not at all what we should call elegant. In fact, elegant Greek type is a very late invention. There is, I believe, no claim to textual criticism in these early Aldines; the publishers printed from such manuscripts as they could get. The Thucydides has a long dedicatory address by Aldus to a Roman patrician; the Sophocles has no such introduction. But it is, at any rate, most curious to consider that these two writers, who stand at the very head of Greek, or at least Attic, prose and verse, both for matter and style, should not have found a printer till the fifteenth century was long past, and then in a style which, for the Sophocles, can only be called neat. The Thucydides is handsome, but far inferior to the glory of the princeps Homer. And to own them—for a maniac—O, it is glorious!

Last comes my special treasure,—my fifteener,—my book as old as America,—my darling copy of my darling author. Here, at the culmination of my madness, my friends, especially my brother Henry, are all ready to say at once what author I mean. For it has been my special mania for twenty years—thereby causing the deepest distress to nearly all my friends, even those who have been thought fellow-lunatics, except one,4 who is for me about the only sane man alive—to prefer Virgil to all authors, living or dead, and to seek to accumulate as many different editions and copies of him as possible. I have in these pages chronicled two. My library holds twelve more, besides two translations, and I consider myself very short; for to my mind no breadth of paper, no weight of binding, no brilliancy of print, no delicacy of engraving, no elaboration of learning, can ever do honor enough to the last and best of the ancients, who was all but the first of the Christians,—who would have been, if his frame had not broken down under a genius too mighty and a soul too sweet for earth. (Mad, you see, beyond all question. Virgil is allowed to be a servile copyist, far inferior to Lucretius. Compare Lucr. V. 750 with Georg. II. 478, and Heyne's note.) This Virgil of mine bears the imprint of Antony Koburger, Nuremberg, 1492. It is in the original binding of very solid boards overlaid with stamped vellum, and is still clasped with the original skin and metal. It is a small folio, on very coarse paper, and the only one of my rare classics not in the cleanest condition. Its stains appear to be caused by its use in a school; for it is covered with notes, in German current hand, very antiquated, and very elementary in their scholarship. It has all the poetry ascribed to Virgil, and the Commentaries of Servius and Landini, which are so voluminous that the page looks like a ha'p'orth of sack to an intolerable deal of very dry bread. It is very rare, being unknown to the great Dibdin, and was snapped up by me for three guineas out of a London bookseller's catalogue. A Virgil printed by Koburger in the year America was discovered, original binding and clasps, not in Dibdin, for three guineas! Hurrah! It excites my madness so that I must rush straight to Piper's and buy right and left. Kind friends, come and take me away ere I am reduced to beggary.

THE GREAT DOCTOR

A STORY IN TWO PARTS

II

Five or six years of the life of our hero we must now pass over in silence, saying of them, simply, that Fancy had not cheated much in her promises concerning them. The first rude cabin had given place to a whitewashed cottage; the chimney-corner was bright and warm; the easy-chair was in it, and the Widow Walker often sat there with her grandson on her knee, getting much comfort from the reflection that he looked just as her own Johnny did when he was a baby!

The garden smiled at the doorside, and the village had sprung up just as Fancy promised; and Hobert and Jenny walked to church of a Sunday, and after service shook hands with their neighbors,—for everybody delighted to take their strong, willing hands, and look into their honest, cheerful faces,—they were amongst the first settlers of the place, and held an honored position in society. Jenny was grown a little more stout, and her cheek a little more ruddy, than it used to be; but the new country seemed not so well suited to Hobert, and the well-wishing neighbor often said when he met him, "You mustn't be too ambitious, and overdo! Your shoulders ain't so straight as they was when you come here! Be careful in time; nothing like that, Walker, nothing like that." And Hobert laughed at these suggestions, saying he was as strong as the rest of them; and that, though his cheek was pale, and his chest hollow, he was a better man than he seemed.

The summer had been one of the wildest luxuriance ever known in the valley of the Wabash; for it was in that beautiful valley that our friend Hobert had settled. The woods cast their leaves early, and the drifts lay rotting knee-deep in places. Then came the long, hot, soaking rains, with hotter sunshine between. Chills and fever prevailed, and half the people of the neighborhood were shivering and burning at once. It was a healthy region, everybody said, but the weather had been unusually trying; as soon as the frost came, the ague would vanish; the water was the best in the world, to be sure, and the air the purest.

Hobert was ploughing a piece of low ground for wheat, cutting a black snake in two now and then, and his furrow behind him fast filling with water that looked almost as black as the soil. Often he stopped to frighten from the quivering flank of the brown mare before him the voracious horse-flies, colored like the scum of the stagnant pools, and clinging and sucking like leeches. She was his favorite, the pride of his farm,—for had she not, years before, brought Jenny on her faithful shoulder to the new, happy home? Many a fond caress her neck had had from his arm; and the fine bridle with the silver bit, hanging on the wall at home, would not have been afforded for any other creature in the world. Hobert often said he would never sell her as long as he lived; and in the seasons of hard work he favored her more than he did himself. She had been named Fleetfoot, in honor of her successful achievement when her master had intrusted to her carrying the treasure of his life; but that name proving too formal, she was usually called Fleety. She would put down her forehead to the white hands of little Jenny, four years old and upward now, and tread so slow and so carefully when she had her on her back! Even the white dress of Johnny Hobert had swept down her silken side more than once, while his dimpled hands clutched her mane, and his rosy feet paddled against her. He was going to be her master after a while, and take care of her in her old age, when the time of her rest was come; he knew her name as well as he knew his own, and went wild with delight when he saw her taking clover from the tiny hand of his sister or drinking water from the bucket at the well.

"She grows handsomer every year," Hobert often said; "and with a little training I would not be afraid to match her against the speediest racer they can bring." And this remark was always intended as in some sort a compliment to Jenny, and was always so received by her.

On this special day he had stopped oftener in the furrow than common; and as often as he stopped Fleety twisted round her neck, bent her soft eyes upon him, and twitched her little ears as though she would say, "Is not all right, my master?" And then he would walk round to her head, and pass his hand along her throat and through her foretop, calling her by her pet name, and pulling for her handfuls of fresh grass, and while she ate it resting himself against her, and feeling in her nearness almost a sense of human protection. His feet seemed to drag under him, and there was a dull aching in all his limbs; the world appeared to be receding from him, and at times he could hardly tell whether he stood upon solid ground. Then he accused himself of being lazy and good for nothing, and with fictitious energy took up the reins and started the plough.

He looked at the sun again and again. He was not used to leaving off work while the sun shone, and the clear waters of the Wabash held as yet no faintest evening flush. There were yet two good hours of working time before him, when the quick shooting of a pain, like the running of a knife through his heart, caused him to stagger in the furrow. Fleety stopped of her own accord, and looked pityingly back. He sat down beside the plough to gather up his courage a little. A strange sensation that he could not explain had taken possession of him, a feeling as if the hope of his life was cut off. The pain was gone, but the feeling of helpless surrender remained. He opened his shirt and passed his hand along his breast. He could feel nothing,—could see nothing; but he had, for all that, a clearly defined consciousness as of some deadly thing hold of him that he would fain be rid of.

He had chanced to stop his plough under an elm-tree, and, looking up, he perceived that from the fork upward one half of it was dead; mistletoe had sucked the life out of it, and lower and lower to the main body, deeper and deeper to the vital heart of it, the sap was being drawn away. An irresistible impulse impelled him to take the jack-knife from his pocket, and as far as he could reach cut away this alien and deadly growth. The sympathy into which he was come with the dying tree was positively painful to him, and yet he was withheld from moving on by a sort of fascination,—he was that tree, and the mistletoe was rooted in his bosom!

The last yellow leaves fluttered down and lodged on his head and shoulders and in his bosom,—he did not lift his hand to brush them away; the blue lizard slid across his bare ankle and silently vanished out of sight, but he did not move a muscle. The brown mare bent her side round like a bow, and stretched her slender neck out more and more, and at last her nose touched his cheek, and then he roused himself and shook the dead leaves from his head and shoulders, and stood up. "Come, Fleety," he said, "we won't leave the plough in the middle of the furrow." She did not move. "Come, come!" he repeated, "it seems like a bad sign to stop here";—and then he put his hand suddenly to his heart, and an involuntary shudder passed over him. Fleety had not unbent her side, and her dumb, beseeching eyes were still upon him. He looked at the sun, low, but still shining out bright, and almost as hot as ever; he looked at his shadow stretching so far over the rough, weedy ground, and it appeared to him strange and fantastic. Then he loosed the traces, and, winding up the long rein, hung it over the harness; the plough dropped aslant, and Fleety turned herself about and walked slowly homeward,—her master following, his head down and his hands locked together behind him.

The chimney was sending up its hospitable smoke, and Jenny was at the well with the teakettle in her hand when he came into the dooryard.

"What in the world is going to happen?" she exclaimed, cheerfully. "I never knew you to leave work before while the sun shone. I am glad you have, for once. But what is the matter?"

He had come nearer now, and she saw that something of light and hope had gone out of his face. And then Hobert made twenty excuses,—there wasn't anything the matter, he said, but the plough was dull, and the ground wet and heavy, and full of green roots; besides, the flies were bad, and the mare tired.

"But you look so worn out, I am afraid you are sick, yourself!" interposed the good wife; and she went close to him, and pushed the hair, growing thinner now, away from his forehead, and looked anxiously in his face,—so anxiously, so tenderly, that he felt constrained to relieve her fears, even at some expense of the truth.

"Not to look well in your eyes is bad enough," he answered, with forced cheerfulness, "but I feel all right; never better, never better, Jenny!" And stooping to his little daughter, who was holding his knees, he caught her up, and tossed her high in the air, but put her down at once, seeming almost to let her fall out of his hands, and, catching for breath, leaned against the well-curb.

"What is it, Hobert? what is it?" and Jenny had her arm about him, and was drawing him toward the house.

"Nothing, nothing,—a touch of rheumatism, I guess,—no, no! I must take care of the mare first." And as she drank the water from the full bucket he held poised on the curb for her, he thought of the elm-tree in the field he had left, of the mistletoe sucking the life out of it, and of the unfinished furrow. "Never mind, Fleety," he said, as he led her away to the stable, "we'll be up betimes to-morrow, and make amends, won't we?"

"I believe, mother, I'll put on the new teacups!" Jenny said, as she set a chair before the cupboard, and climbed on it so as to reach the upper shelf. She had already spread the best table-cloth.

"Why, what for?" asked the provident mother, looking up from the sock she was knitting.

"O, I don't know; I want to make things look nice, that's all."

But she did know, though the feeling was only half defined. It seemed to her as if Hobert were some visitor coming,—not her husband. A shadowy feeling of insecurity had touched her; the commonness of custom was gone, and she looked from the window often, as the preparation for supper went on, with all the sweetness of solicitude with which she used to watch for his coming from under the grape-vines. Little Jenny was ready with the towel when he came with his face dripping, and the easy-chair was set by the door that looked out on the garden. "I don't want it," the good grandmother said, as he hesitated; "I have been sitting in it all day, and am tired of it!"

And as he sat there with his boy on his knee, and his little girl, who had climbed up behind him, combing his hair with her slender white fingers,—his own fields before him, and his busy wife making music about the house with her cheerful, hopeful talk,—he looked like a man to be envied; and so just then he was.

The next morning he did not fulfil his promise to himself by rising early; he had been restless and feverish all night, and now was chilly. If he lay till breakfast was ready, he would feel better, Jenny said; she could milk, to be sure, and do all the rest of the work, and so he was persuaded. But when the breakfast was ready the chilliness had become a downright chill, so that the blankets that were over him shook like leaves in a strong wind.

Jenny had a little money of her own hidden away in the bottom of the new cream-pitcher. She had saved it, unknown to Hobert, from the sale of eggs and other trifles, and had meant to surprise him by appearing in a new dress some morning when the church-bell rang; but now she turned the silver into her hand and counted it, thinking what nice warm flannel it would buy to make shirts for Hobert. Of course he had them, and Jenny had not made any sacrifice that she knew of,—indeed, that is a word of which love knows not the meaning.

"We will have him up in a day or two," the women said, one to the other, as they busied themselves about the house, or sat at the bedside, doing those things that only the blessed hands of women can do, making those plans that only the loving hearts of women can make. But the day or two went by, and they didn't have Hobert up. Then they said to one another, "We must set to work in earnest; we have really done nothing for him as yet." And they plied their skill of nursing with new hope and new energy. Every morning he told them he was better, but in the afternoon it happened that he didn't feel quite like stirring about; he was still better, but he had a little headache, and was afraid of bringing on a chill.