XI. AN OLD LONDON BOOKSELLER
DEC. 22. Mr. John Newbery, of St. Paul's who knew him.' These words, copied from the 'Gentleman's Magazine' for 1767, record the death of one who, in his way, was an eighteenth century notability. He belonged to the good old 'Keep-your-Shop-and-your-Shop-will-keep-you' class of tradesmen, who lived without pretence near their places of business in the City, worked industriously during the week, marched off to St. Bride's or St. Dunstan's on Sunday morning with a crop-eared 'prentice in the rear to carry the great gilt Bible, and jogged away in crowded chaises of summer afternoons to eat tarts at Highgate or drink tea out of china in the Long churchyard, sincerely lamented by all.
In due time they made their 'plumbs;' sent their sons to St. Paul's or Merchant Taylors', sometimes even to Oxford or Cambridge; and finally left their portraits to posterity in the becoming and worshipful garb of Sheriffs or Common-councilmen. Unfortunately for this paper, there is no such limner's likeness of 'honest John Newbery.' Yet we are not wholly without details as to his character and personal appearance. That 'glorious pillar of unshaken orthodoxy,' Dr. Primrose, formerly of Wakefield, for whom, as all the world knows, he had published a pamphlet' 'against the Deuterogamists of the age,' describes him as a red-faced, good-natured little man, who was always in a hurry. 'He was no sooner alighted,' says the worthy Vicar, 'but he was in haste to be gone; for he was ever on business of the utmost importance.' 'Mr. Idler' confirms this indication. 'When he enters a house, his first declaration is, that he cannot sit down; and so short are his visits, that he seldom appears to have come for any other reason but to say, He must go.' It is not difficult to fill in the outline of Johnson and Goldsmith. 'The philanthropic bookseller in St. Paul's church-yard' was plainly a bustling, multifarious, and not unkindly personage, essentially commercial, essentially enterprising, rigorously exacting his money's worth of work, keeping prudent record of all casual cash advances, but, on the whole, not unbeneficent in his business fashion to the needy brethren of the pen by whom he was surrounded. Many of John Newbery's guineas passed to Johnson, to Goldsmith, to poor mad Christopher Smart, who married his step-daughter. As Johnson implies, it is not impossible that he finally fell a victim to that unreasoning mental activity which left him always struggling hopelessly with more schemes and proposals than one man could possibly manage. His wig must often have been awry, and his spectacles mislaid, in that perpetual journey from pillar to post which ultimately landed him, at the comparatively early age of fifty-four, in his grave at Waltham St. Lawrence.
It was at Waltham St. Lawrence, a quiet little Berkshire village, whose churchyard is dotted with the tombs of earlier Newberys, that he had been born. His father, a small farmer, destined him for his own calling. But, like Gay, it was not John Newbery's fate 'to brighten ploughshares in paternal land.' He passed early into the service of a 'merchant,' otherwise a printer and newspaper proprietor, at Reading, managing so well that, when his employer died, he was left a co-legatee in the business. Thereupon, being a resolute man, he did better still, and married his master's widow, who had three children. Even this succeeded; upon which, progressing always in prosperity, he began to think of starting in London. Before doing so, he made a tour in the provinces. Of this expedition there exists a curious record in the shape of an unprinted journal, throwing much light upon modes of travelling in those early coaching days, when the unfortunate outside passenger (like Pastor Moritz in a later paper *) had to choose between being jolted to death in the basket, or clinging like a fly to the slippery top of the vehicle.
* See-post, 'A German in England.'
The majority of the entries are merely matter of business, – titles for new books, recipes for diet-drinks, shrewd trade maxims, and the like. But here and there the writer intersperses notes of general interest, – on Dick Turpin the highwayman, on Lady Godiva and peeping Tom, and (more than once) upon that 'curious and very useful machine,' the Ducking-Stool for scolds, a 'plan of which instrument (he says) he shall procure and transplant to Berkshire for the good of his native county.' His business at Reading was as miscellaneous as his memorandum book, and he seems to have dealt in all kinds of goods. About 1744 he removed to London, opening a shop at the sign of the 'Bible and Crown,' near Devereux Court, without Temple Bar, together with a branch establishment at the Royal Exchange. To this Johnson probably refers when he says: 'He has one habitation near Bow Church, and another about a mile distant. By this ingenious distribution of himself between two houses, he has contrived to be found at neither.' From the 'Bible and Crown,' which had been his old Reading sign, he moved a year later to the 'Bible and Sun' in St. Paul's Churchyard. This continued to be his headquarters until his death. Gradually his indiscriminate activities narrowed themselves to two distinct branches of business, in these days incongruous enough, – the sale of books and the sale of patent medicines. While at Reading, he had become part owner, among other things, of Dr. Hooper's Female Pills; and soon after his settlement in London, he acquired the sole management of a more famous panacea, Dr. James's Fever Powders, which had in their time an extraordinary vogue. According to Mrs. Delany, the King dosed the Princess Elizabeth with them; Gray and Cowper both believed in their efficacy; and Horace Walpole, declared he should take them if the house were on fire. Fielding specially praises them in 'Amelia,' affirming that in almost any country but England they would have brought 'public Honours and Rewards' to his 'worthy and ingenious Friend Dr. James;' while Goldsmith may be said to have laid down his life for them. With the sale of these and kindred specifics, John Newbery alternated his unwearied speculations as a bookseller. He was at the back of Smollett's venture of the 'British Magazine;' it was for his 'Universal Chronicle' that Johnson wrote his 'Idler' and quizzed his proprietor as 'Jack Whirler;' he was the publisher of Goldsmith's 'Traveller' and 'Citizen of the World;' and lie probably found part of the historical sixty guineas which somebody paid for the 'Vicar of Wakefield.' He died at Canbury or Canonbury House, Islington, in the still-existent Tower of which he was an occasional resident. Indeed, it is more than probable that he was at one time the responsible landlord of that favourite retiring place for literary men, – a retiring place not without its exceptional advantages, if we* are to believe last-century advertisements, which, in addition to a natural cold bath, speak of 'a superlative Room, furnish'd for a single Person, or two Gentlemen, having a Prospect into five Counties ['longos prospicit agros!'], and the use of a good Garden and Summer-House.' Besides this there were traditions of Prior Bolton and Anne of Cleves, of Bacon and Elizabeth, of Sir John Spencer and William Fielding, Earl of Denbigh (the novelist's grand-uncle), which certainly have figured in any schedule of attractions, and must naturally have been interesting to the Smarts and Hills and Woodfalls and Goldsmiths who afterwards inhabited the old ivy-clad Tower.
Newbery's epitaph in the churchyard of his native village lays its main stress upon his connection with Dr. James's nostrum; and it was doubtless to this and the other patent medicines with which he was connected that he owed the material part of his prosperity. Yet it is not now upon the celebrated 'Arquebusade Water' (dear to Lady Mary Coke), or the far-famed 'Cephalic Snuff,' or the incomparable 'Beaume de Vie,' once so familiar in eighteenth-century advertisements, that he bases his individual claim to the gratitude of posterity. It is, to quote his biographer, Mr. Welsh, as 'the first bookseller who made the issue of books, specially intended for children, a business of any importance;' as the publisher of 'The Renowned History of Giles Gingerbread: a little Boy who lived upon Learning,' of 'Mrs. Margery Two-Shoes' (afterward Lady Jones), of the redoubtable 'Tommy Trip and his dog Jouler,' of the 'Lilliputian Magazine,' and of numbers of other tiny masterpieces in that flowered and gilt Dutch paper of which the art has been lost, that he is best remembered. Concerning these commendable little treatises, with their matter-of-fact title-pages and their artless appeal to all little Masters and Misses 'who are good, or intend to be good,' there are varying opinions. Dr. Johnson, according to Mrs. Thrale, thought them too childish for their purpose. He preferred the 'Seven Champions,' or 'Parisenus and Parismenus.' 'Babies,' he said in his legislative way, 'do not want to hear about babies. They like to be told of giants and castles, and of somewhat which can stretch and stimulate their little minds.' 'Remember always,' he added, 'that the parents buy the books, and that the children never read them.' Yet it is claimed for Robert Southey that in Newbery's 'delectable histories' he found just that very stimulus which made him a life-long book-lover; and it is characteristic of Charles Lamb (a better judge of children's literature than Johnson) that he puts forward these particular publications against the Bar-baulds and Trimmers ('those blights and blasts of all that is human in man and child'), as presenting the very quality which Johnson desired, the 'beautiful interest in wild tales, which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child.' 'Think what you would have been now,' he writes to Coleridge of 'Goody Two-Shoes,' 'if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!' The authorship of these 'classics of the nursery' is an old battle ground. Newbery, it is alleged, wrote some of them himself. He was (says Dr. Primrose when he met him) 'at that time actually compiling materials for the history of one Mr. Thomas Trip,' and if this can hardly be accepted as proof positive, it may be safely asserted that to Newbery's business instincts are due those ingenious references to his different wares and publications which crop up so unexpectedly in the course of the narrative. For example, in 'Goody Two-Shoes' we are told that the heroine's father 'died miserably' because he was 'seized with a violent Fever in a place where Dr. James's Powder was not to be had!' But who were Newbery's assistant authors? Giles and Griffith Jones, say some; Oliver Goldsmith, say others. With respect to the last-named no particular testimony seems to be forthcoming beyond his known relations to the publisher, and the so-called 'evidence of style.' In the absence of confirmatory details the former is worthless; and the latter is often entirely misleading. Without going back to the time-honoured case of Erasmus and Scaliger's oration, two modern instances of this may be cited. Mr. Thackeray, says Mr. Forster, claimed the 'Pleasant and Delightful History of Thomas Hickathrift' for Henry Fielding. But both Mr. Forster and Mr. Thackeray should have remembered that their common acquaintance, Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff, of the 'Tatler,' had written of Hickathrift as a chap-book when Fielding was a baby. In the same way 'Tommy Trip' has, by no mean judges, been attributed to Goldsmith upon the strength of the following quatrain: —
'Three children sliding on the ice
Upon a summer's day,
As it fell out they all fell in,
The rest they ran away.'
Alas! and alas! for the 'evidence of style.' Not only had these identical lines been turned into Latin in the 'Gentleman's Magazine' for July, 1754, when Goldsmith was still studying medicine at Leyden; but they are quoted at p. 30 of 'The Character of Richard St[ee]le,
Esq;' by 'Toby, Abel's Kinsman,' which was issued by 'J. Morphew, near Stationer's Hall,' as far back as the month of November, 1713. As a matter of fact, they are much older still, being affirmed by Chambers in his excellent 'Book of Days' to be, in their first form, part of a long and rambling story in doggerel rhyme dating from the early part of the Civil Wars, which is to be found at the end of a little old book entitled 'The Loves of Hero and Leander,' 12mo, London, 1653, and 1677.
XII. GRAY'S LIBRARY
AMONG Gray's papers was one inscribed 'Dialogue of Books.' The handwriting was that of his biographer Mason, but it was believed to be either by Gray or by West. There is a strong presumption that the author was Gray; and it is accordingly attributed to him in the Rev. D. C. Tovey's 'Gray and his Friends,' where for the first time it was printed. It shows us the little great man (if it is accurately dated 1742, it must have been in the year of his fullest poetical activity) sitting tranquilly in his study chair, when he is 'suddenly alarmd with a great hubbub of Tongues.' He listens; and finds that his books are talking to one another. Madame de Sévigné is being what Mrs. Gamp would call 'scroudged' by Aristotle, who replies to her compressed expostulations with all the brutality of a philosopher and a realist. Thereupon she appeals to her relative, the author of the 'Histoire amoureuse des Gaules.' But the gallant M. Bussy-Rabutin, himself pining for an interchange of compliments with a neighbouring Catullus, is hopelessly penned in by a hulking edition of Strabo, and cannot possibly arrive to the assistance of his belle Cousine. Elsewhere La Bruyère comments upon the strange companions with whom Fate has acquainted him; and Locke observes, with a touch of temper, that he is associated with Ovid, – and Ray the Naturalist! 22 Virgil placidly quotes a line of his own poems; More, the Platonist, delivers himself of a neat little copybook sentiment in praise of theological speculation; and great fat Dr. Cheyne huskily mutters his own adage, 'Every man after forty is either a fool or a Physician.'
In another corner an ill-judged and irrelevant remark by Euclid, touching the dimensions of a point, brings down upon him the scorn both of Swift and Boileau, who clamour for the unconditional suppression of mathematics. (If there be nothing else, this in itself is almost sufficient to fix the authorship of the paper with Gray, whose hatred of mathematics was only equalled by that of Goldsmith.) Then a pert exclamation from a self-sufficient Vade Mecum provokes the owner of the library to so hearty an outburst of merriment that the startled tones at once shrink back into 'uncommunicating muteness.' Laughter, it would seem, is as fatal to books as it was of old to the Coquecigrues.
Whether Gray's library ever again broke silence, his biographers have not related. But if his books were pressed for space while in his possession, they have since enjoyed ample opportunities for change of air and scene. When he died he left them, with his manuscripts, to Mason, who in turn bequeathed them to the poet's friend Stonehewer, from whom they passed, in part, to a relative, Mr. Bright of Skeffington Hall. At Mr. Bright's death, being family property, they were sold by auction. In August, 1851, they were again offered for sale; and three years later a number of them, which had apparently been reserved or bought in, once more came under the hammer at Sotheby and Wilkinson's. We have before us the catalogue of the second sale, which is naturally much fuller than that of 1854. What strikes one first is the care with which the majority of the volumes had been preserved by their later possessors. Many of the Note-Books were cushioned on velvet in special cases, while the more precious manuscripts had been skilfully inlaid, and bound in olive morocco with leather joints and linings of crimson silk. Like Prior, Gray must have preserved almost everything, 'e'en from his boyish days.' Among the books is 'Plutarch's Lives,' with Dacier's notes, and the inscription, 'E libris Thomæ Gray, Scholæ Eton: Alumn. Januar. 22, 1733' – a year before he left for Cambridge; there is also his copy of Pope's 'Iliad,' with autograph date a year earlier; there is a still more youthful (though perhaps more suspicious) possession – namely, three volumes of Dryden's 'Virgil,' which were said to have actually belonged to Pope. 'Ex libris A. Pope, 1710,' was written at the back of the portrait, and the same inscription recurred in each volume, though in the others some Vandal, probably a classmate, by adding a tail to the 'P' and an 'r' at the end, had turned the 'Pope' into 'Roper.' Another of Gray's Eton books was a Waller, acquired in 1729, in which favourite poems and passages were underlined.
Of the classics he must have been a most unwearied and sedulous student. Euripides he read in the great folio of Joshua Barnes (Cantab. 1694), which is marked throughout by a special system of stars, inverted commas, and lines in red crayon; and his note-books bristle with extracts, neatly 'arranged and digested,' from all the best Greek authors – Sophocles, Thucydides, Xenophon, and even that Isocrates whom Goldsmith, from the critical altitudes of the 'Monthly Review,' recommended him to study. At other 'classics' he worked with equal diligence. His 'Decameron' – the London quarto of 1725 – was filled with marginalia identifying Boccaccio's sources of inspiration and principal imitators, while his Milton – the two-volume duodecimo of 1730-8 – was interleaved, and annotated profusely with parallel passages drawn from the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, and 'the ancients.'' He had crowded Dugdale's 'Baronage' with corrections and additions; he had largely 'commented' the four folio volumes of Clarendon's 'Rebellion;' and he had followed everywhere, with remorseless rectifications, the vagrant utterances of gossiping Gilbert Burnet. His patience, accuracy, research, were not less extraordinary than his odd, out-of-the-way knowledge. In the 'Voyages de Bergeron' (quarto) that author says: 'Mango Cham fut noie.' No, comments Gray, decisively, 'Muncacâ or Mangu-Khanw was not drowned, but in reality slain in China at the siege of Hochew in 1258.' Which of us could oblige an inquisitive examiner with the biography of this Eastern potentate! Which of us would not be reduced to 'combining our information' (like the ingenious writer on Chinese Metaphysics) as to 'mangoes' and 'great Chams'!
But the two most interesting items of the Catalogue are yet unmentioned. One is the laborious collection of Manuscript Music that Gray compiled in Italy while frivolous Horace Walpole was eating iced fruits in a domino to the sound of a guitar. Zamperelli, Pergolesi, Arrigoni, Galuppi – he has ransacked them all, noting the school of the composer and the source of the piece selected – copying out religiously even the 'Regole per l'Accompagnamento.' The other, which we who write have seen, is the famous Linnaeus exhibited at Cambridge in 1885 by Mr. Ruskin. It is an interleaved copy of the 'Systema Naturae,' two volumes in three, covered as to their margins and added pages with wonderful minute notes in Latin, and illustrated by Gray himself with delicately finished pen-and-ink drawings of birds and insects. During the later part of his life these volumes, we are told, were continually on his table, and his absorbing love for natural history is everywhere manifested in his journals and pocket-books. When he is in the country, he classes the plants; when in town, he notes the skins of birds in shops; and when he eats whitebait at Greenwich, he straightway describes that dainty in the language of Tacitus. Nullus odor nisi Piscis; farina respersus, frixusque editur.
Among the manuscripts proper of this collection, the place of honour belongs to one which Mason had labelled 'Original Copy of the Elegy in a Country Church Yard.' In addition to other variations from the printed text, erased words in this MS. showed that Cato stood originally for Hampden, and Tully and Cæsar for Milton and Cromwell:
'Some mute inglorious Tully here may rest,
Some Cæsar guiltless of his country's blood.'
Here, too, were found those well-known but rejected 'additional' stanzas:
'The thoughtless World to Majesty may bow,
Exalt the brave, and idolize Success;
But more to Innocence their Safety owe
Than Pow'r and Genius e'er conspir'd to bless.
'And thou, who mindful of th' unhonour'd Dead,
Dost in these Notes their artless Tale relate,
By Night and lonely Contemplation led
To linger in the gloomy Walks of Fate:
'Hark! how the sacred Calm that broods around,
Bids ev'ry fierce tumultuous Passion cease;
In still small Accents whisp'ring from the Ground,
A grateful Earnest of eternal Peace.
'No more, with Reason and thyself at Strife,
Give anxious Cares and endless Wishes room;
But thro' the cool sequester'd Vale of Life
Pursue the silent Tenour of thy Doom.' *
Another additional stanza, perhaps better known than the above, does not occur in the 'Original Copy' of the Elegy, but in a later MS. at Pembroke College: —
'There scatter'd oft, the earliest of the Year,
By Hands unseen, are Show'rs of Violets found:
The Red-breast loves to build, & warble there,
And little Footsteps lightly print the Ground.'
His bushy beard, and shoe-strings green,
His high-crown'd hat, and sattin-doublet,
Mov'd the stout heart of England's Queen,
Tho' Pope and Spaniard could not trouble it.'
Or again:
'Who prowl'd the country far and near,
Bewitch'd the children of the peasants,
Dried up the cows, and lam'd the deer,
And suck'd the eggs, and kill'd the pheasants.'
Another group of autographs in this volume had a special interest. The first was the notelet, or 'spell,' which Lady Schaub and Miss Speed left for Gray upon that first call when the nervous poet was 'not at home' to his unexpected visitors. Next to this came the poem which the note elicited – that charming 'Long Story,' with its echo of Matthew Prior, which has set their tune to so many later verse-spinners:
Does not one seem to catch in this the coming cadences of another haunter of the 'Poets' Walk' at Eton – of Winthrop Mackworth Praed; nay, an it be not lèse majesté, even of the lighter strains of Lord Tennyson himself! To the 'Long Story' followed Miss Speed's polite little acknowledgment with its invitation to dinner, and a few pages further on the verses beginning —
Midst Beauty and Pleasure's gay Triumphs to languish,'
which Gray probably wrote for her – verses in which there is more of poetic ardour than genuine passion. Gray was not a marrying man. Yet one feels half sorry that he was never united to 'Your oblig'd & obedient Henrietta Jane Speed,' with her £30,000, her house in town, and her 'china and old japan infinite.' Still more to be resented is the freak of Fate which transformed the delightful Melissa of the 'Long Story' into the berouged French Baronne who, sixteen years later, in company with her lap-dogs, piping bullfinch, and cockatoo, arrived from the Hague as Madame de la Perrière, and 'Ministress at London.'
The large quarto volume containing the above poems also included the first sketch in red crayon of Gray's unfinished Latin Poem, 'De Principiis Cogitandi,' and a copy of the translation of the Ugolino episode from the 'Inferno,' first printed by Mr. Gosse in 1884. Of the volumes of miscellaneous MSS. (where was found the 'Dialogue of Books') it is impossible to speak here. But among the rest comes a copy of the 'Strawberry Hill' edition of the 'Odes by Mr. Gray' – those Odes which at first he had so obstinately refused to annotate. 'If a thing cannot be understood without notes,' he told Walpole, 'it had better not be understood at all.' He must, however, have subsequently recanted, since this copy is filled with carefully written explanations of the allusions, and with indications of the sources of information. This book and the Note-books of Travel and Reading, with their methodical arrangement, their scrupulous accuracy, their unwearied pains, all help us to understand that leisurely fastidiousness, that hesitating dilettanteism, that endless preluding to unachieved performance, which make of the most literary, exact, and polished of poets, at the same time the least copious of writers. In his bust in the Pembroke College, Mr. Hamo Thorny-croft has happily succeeded in accentuating these qualities of refinement and intellectual precision. For the rest, is not Gray wholly contained in the vignette of Rogers to Mitford?
Gray, he says, saw little society in London. He had 'a nice dinner from the Tavern brought to his lodgings, a glass or two of sweet wine, and [here is a delightful touch!] as he sippd it talked about great People.' It needs but to fill the room with those scarlet martagon-lilies and double stocks for which he trudged daily to Covent Garden, to spread a meteorological register upon the writing-table, to open Gavin Douglas his 'Palice of Honour' in the window-seat – and the picture is finished.