Montesinos. — The practicability of forming such a system of prevention may easily be allowed, where, as in Paraguay, institutions are fore-planned, and not, as everywhere in Europe, the slow and varying growth of circumstances. But to introduce it into an old society, hic labor, hoc opus est! The Augean stable might have been kept clean by ordinary labour, if from the first the filth had been removed every day; when it had accumulated for years, it became a task for Hercules to cleanse it. Alas, the age of heroes and demigods is over!
Sir Thomas More. — There lies your error! As no general will ever defeat an enemy whom he believes to be invincible, so no difficulty can be overcome by those who fancy themselves unable to overcome it. Statesmen in this point are, like physicians, afraid, lest their own reputation should suffer, to try new remedies in cases where the old routine of practice is known and proved to be ineffectual. Ask yourself whether the wretched creatures of whom we are discoursing are not abandoned to their fate without the highest attempt to rescue them from it? The utmost which your laws profess is, that under their administration no human being shall perish for want: this is all! To effect this you draw from the wealthy, the industrious, and the frugal, a revenue exceeding tenfold the whole expenses of government under Charles I., and yet even with this enormous expenditure upon the poor it is not effected. I say nothing of those who perish for want of sufficient food and necessary comforts, the victims of slow suffering and obscure disease; nor of those who, having crept to some brick-kiln at night, in hope of preserving life by its warmth, are found there dead in the morning. Not a winter passes in which some poor wretch does not actually die of cold and hunger in the streets of London! With all your public and private eleemosynary establishments, with your eight million of poor-rates, with your numerous benevolent associations, and with a spirit of charity in individuals which keeps pace with the wealth of the richest nation in the world, these things happen, to the disgrace of the age and country, and to the opprobrium of humanity, for want of police and order! You are silent!
Montesinos. — Some shocking examples occurred to me. The one of a poor Savoyard boy with his monkey starved to death in St. James’s Park. The other, which is, if that be possible, a still more disgraceful case, is recorded incidentally in Rees’s Cyclopædia under the word “monster.” It is only in a huge overgrown city that such cases could possibly occur.
Sir Thomas More. — The extent of a metropolis ought to produce no such consequences. Whatever be the size of a bee-hive or an ant-hill, the same perfect order is observed in it.
Montesinos. — That is because bees and ants act under the guidance of unerring instinct.
Sir Thomas More. — As if instinct were a superior faculty to reason! But the statesman, as well as the sluggard, may be told to “go to the ant and the bee, consider their ways and be wise!” It is for reason to observe and profit by the examples which instinct affords it.
Montesinos. — A country modelled upon Apiarian laws would be a strange Utopia! the bowstring would be used there as unmercifully as it is in the seraglio, to say nothing of the summary mode of bringing down the population to the means of subsistence. But this is straying from the subject. The consequences of defective order are indeed frightful, whether we regard the physical or the moral evils which are produced.
Sir Thomas More. — And not less frightful when the political evils are contemplated. To the dangers of an oppressive and iniquitous order, such, for example, as exists where negro slavery is established, you are fully awake in England; but to those of defective order among yourselves, though they are precisely of the same nature, you are blind. And yet you have spirits among you who are labouring day and night to stir up a bellum servile, an insurrection like that of Wat Tyler, of the Jacquerie, and of the peasants in Germany. There is no provocation for this, as there was in all those dreadful convulsions of society: but there are misery and ignorance and desperate wickedness to work upon, which the want of order has produced. Think for a moment what London, nay, what the whole kingdom would be, were your Catilines to succeed in exciting as general an insurrection as that which was raised by one madman in your own childhood! Imagine the infatuated and infuriated wretches, whom not Spitalfields, St. Giles’s, and Pimlico alone, but all the lanes and alleys and cellars of the metropolis would pour out — a frightful population, whose multitudes, when gathered together, might almost exceed belief! The streets of London would appear to teem with them, like the land of Egypt with its plague of frogs: and the lava floods from a volcano would be less destructive than the hordes whom your great cities and manufacturing districts would vomit forth!
Montesinos. — Such an insane rebellion would speedily be crushed.
Sir Thomas More. — Perhaps so. But three days were enough for the Fire of London. And be assured this would not pass away without leaving in your records a memorial as durable and more dreadful.
Montesinos. — Is such an event to be apprehended?
Sir Thomas More. — Its possibility at least ought always to be borne in mind. The French Revolution appeared much less possible when the Assembly of Notables was convoked; and the people of France were much less prepared for the career of horrors into which they were presently hurried.
COLLOQUY XIV. — THE LIBRARY.
I was in my library, making room upon the shelves for some books which had just arrived from New England, removing to a less conspicuous station others which were of less value and in worse dress, when Sir Thomas entered. You are employed, said he, to your heart’s content. Why, Montesinos, with these books, and the delight you take in their constant society, what have you to covet or desire?
Montesinos. — Nothing, except more books.
Sir Thomas More. —
“Crescit, indulgens sibi, dirus hydrops.”
Montesinos. — Nay, nay, my ghostly monitor, this at least is no diseased desire. If I covet more, it is for the want I feel and the use which I should make of them. “Libraries,” says my good old friend George Dyer, a man as learned as he is benevolent, “libraries are the wardrobes of literature, whence men, properly informed, might bring forth something for ornament, much for curiosity, and more for use.” These books of mine, as you well know, are not drawn up here for display, however much the pride of the eye may be gratified in beholding them, they are on actual service. Whenever they may be dispersed, there is not one among them that will ever be more comfortably lodged, or more highly prized by its possessor; and generations may pass away before some of them will again find a reader. It is well that we do not moralise too much upon such subjects.
“For foresight is a melancholy gift,
Which bares the bald, and speeds the all-too-swift.”
H. T.
But the dispersion of a library, whether in retrospect or in anticipation, is always to me a melancholy thing.
Sir Thomas More. — How many such dispersions must have taken place to have made it possible that these books should thus be brought together here among the Cumberland mountains.
Montesinos. — Many, indeed; and in many instances most disastrous ones. Not a few of these volumes have been cast up from the wreck of the family or convent libraries during the late Revolution. Yonder “Acta Sanctorum” belonged to the Capuchins, at Ghent. This book of St. Bridget’s Revelations, in which not only all the initial letters are illuminated, but every capital throughout the volume was coloured, came from the Carmelite Nunnery at Bruges. That copy of Alain Chartier, from the Jesuits’ College at Louvain; that Imago Primi Sæculi Societatis, from their college at Ruremond. Here are books from Colbert’s library, here others from the Lamoignon one. And here are two volumes of a work, not more rare than valuable for its contents, divorced, unhappily, and it is to be feared for ever, from the one which should stand between them; they were printed in a convent at Manila, and brought from thence when that city was taken by Sir William Draper; they have given me, perhaps, as many pleasurable hours (passed in acquiring information which I could not otherw
ise have obtained), as Sir William spent years of anxiety and vexation in vainly soliciting the reward of his conquest.
About a score of the more out-of-the-way works in my possession belonged to some unknown person, who seems carefully to have gleaned the bookstalls a little before and after the year 1790. He marked them with certain ciphers, always at the end of the volume. They are in various languages, and I never found his mark in any book that was not worth buying, or that I should not have bought without that indication to induce me. All were in ragged condition, and having been dispersed, upon the owner’s death probably, as of no value, to the stalls they had returned; and there I found this portion of them just before my old haunts as a book-hunter in the metropolis were disforested, to make room for the improvements between Westminster and Oxford Road. I have endeavoured without success to discover the name of their former possessor. He must have been a remarkable man, and the whole of his collection, judging of it by that part which has come into my hands, must have been singularly curious. A book is the more valuable to me when I know to whom it has belonged, and through what “scenes and changes” it has passed.
Sir Thomas More. — You would have its history recorded in the fly-leaf as carefully as the pedigree of a racehorse is preserved.
Montesinos. — I confess that I have much of that feeling in which the superstition concerning relics has originated, and I am sorry when I see the name of a former owner obliterated in a book, or the plate of his arms defaced. Poor memorials though they be, yet they are something saved for a while from oblivion, and I should be almost as unwilling to destroy them as to efface the Hic jacet of a tombstone. There may be sometimes a pleasure in recognising them, sometimes a salutary sadness.
Yonder Chronicle of King D. Manoel, by Damiam de Goes, and yonder “General History of Spain,” by Esteban de Garibay, are signed by their respective authors. The minds of these laborious and useful scholars are in their works, but you are brought into a more personal relation with them when you see the page upon which you know that their eyes have rested, and the very characters which their hands have traced. This copy of Casaubon’s Epistles was sent to me from Florence by Walter Landor. He had perused it carefully, and to that perusal we are indebted for one of the most pleasing of his Conversations; these letters had carried him in spirit to the age of their writer, and shown James I. to him in the light wherein James was regarded by contemporary scholars, and under the impression thus produced Landor has written of him in his happiest mood, calmly, philosophically, feelingly, and with no more of favourable leaning than justice will always manifest when justice is in good humour and in charity with all men. The book came from the palace library at Milan, how or when abstracted I know not, but this beautiful dialogue would never have been written had it remained there in its place upon the shelf, for the worms to finish the work which they had begun. Isaac Casaubon must be in your society, Sir Thomas, for where Erasmus is you will be, and there also Casaubon will have his place among the wise and the good. Tell him, I pray you, that due honour has in these days been rendered to his name by one who as a scholar is qualified to appreciate his merits, and whose writings will be more durable than monuments of brass or marble.
Sir Thomas More. — Is there no message to him from Walter Landor’s friend?
Montesinos. — Say to him, since you encourage me to such boldness, that his letters could scarcely have been perused with deeper interest by the persons to whom they were addressed than they have been by one, at the foot of Skiddaw, who is never more contentedly employed than when learning from the living minds of other ages, one who would gladly have this expression of respect and gratitude conveyed to him, and who trusts that when his course is finished here he shall see him face to face.
Here is a book with which Lauderdale amused himself, when Cromwell kept him prisoner in Windsor Castle. He has recorded his state of mind during that imprisonment by inscribing in it, with his name, and the dates of time and place, the Latin word Durate, and the Greek Οιστέον και ελπιστέον. Here is a memorial of a different kind inscribed in this “Rule of Penance of St. Francis, as it in ordered for religious women.” “I beseech my deare mother humbly to accept of this exposition of our holy rule, the better to conceive what your poor child ought to be, who daly beges your blessing. Constantia Francisco.” And here in the Apophthegmata, collected by Conrad Lycosthenes, and published after drastic expurgation by the Jesuits as a commonplace book, some Portuguese has entered a hearty vow that he would never part with the book, nor lend it to any one. Very different was the disposition of my poor old Lisbon acquaintance, the Abbé, who, after the old humaner form, wrote in all his books (and he had a rare collection) Ex libris Francisci Garnier, et amicorum.
Sir Thomas More. — How peaceably they stand together — Papists and Protestants side by side.
Montesinos. — Their very dust reposes not more quietly in the cemetery. Ancient and modern, Jew and Gentile, Mahommedan and Crusader, French and English, Spaniards and Portuguese, Dutch and Brazilians, fighting their own battles, silently now, upon the same shelf: Fernam Lopez and Pedro de Ayala; John de Laet and Barlæus, with the historians of Joam Fernandes Vieira; Foxe’s Martyrs and the Three Conversions of Father Parsons; Cranmer and Stephen Gardiner; Dominican and Franciscan; Jesuit and Philosophe (equally misnamed); Churchmen and Sectarians; Round-heads and Cavaliers
“Here are God’s conduits, grave divines; and here
Is Nature’s secretary, the philosopher:
And wily statesmen, which teach how to tie
The sinews of a city’s mystic body;
Here gathering chroniclers; and by them stand
Giddy fantastic poets of each land.” — Donne.
Here I possess these gathered treasures of time, the harvest of so many generations, laid up in my garners: and when I go to the window there is the lake, and the circle of the mountains, and the illimitable sky.
Sir Thomas More. —
“Felicemque voco pariter studiique locique!”
Montesinos. —
“ — meritoque probas artesque locumque.”
The simile of the bees,
“Sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes,”
has often been applied to men who have made literature their profession; and they among them to whom worldly wealth and worldly honours are objects of ambition, may have reason enough to acknowledge its applicability. But it will bear a happier application and with equal fitness: for, for whom is the purest honey hoarded that the bees of this world elaborate, if it be not for the man of letters? The exploits of the kings and heroes of old, serve now to fill story-books for his amusement and instruction. It was to delight his leisure and call forth his admiration that Homer sung and Alexander conquered. It is to gratify his curiosity that adventurers have traversed deserts and savage countries, and navigators have explored the seas from pole to pole. The revolutions of the planet which he inhabits are but matters for his speculation; and the deluges and conflagrations which it has undergone, problems to exercise his philosophy, or fancy. He is the inheritor of whatever has been discovered by persevering labour, or created by inventive genius. The wise of all ages have heaped up a treasure for him, which rust doth not corrupt, and which thieves cannot break through and steal. I must leave out the moth, for even in this climate care is required against its ravages.
Sir Thomas More. — Yet, Montesinos, how often does the worm-eaten volume outlast the reputation of the worm-eaten author!
Montesinos. — Of the living one also; for many there are of whom it may be said, in the words of Vida, that —
“ — ipsi
Sæpe suis superant monumentis; illaudatique
Extremum ante diem fætus flevere caducos,
Viventesque suæ viderunt funera famæ.”
Some literary reputations die in the birth; a few are nibbled to death by critics, but they are weakly ones that perish thus, such only as must otherwise soon have come to a natural death. So
mewhat more numerous are those which are overfed with praise, and die of the surfeit. Brisk reputations, indeed, are like bottled twopenny, or pop “they sparkle, are exhaled, and fly” — not to heaven, but to the Limbo. To live among books, is in this respect like living among the tombs; you have in them speaking remembrancers of mortality. “Behold this also is vanity!”
Sir Thomas More. — Has it proved to you “vexation of spirit” also?
Montesinos. — Oh, no! for never can any man’s life have been passed more in accord with his own inclinations, nor more answerably to his own desires. Excepting that peace which, through God’s infinite mercy, is derived from a higher source, it is to literature, humanly speaking, that I am beholden, not only for the means of subsistence, but for every blessing which I enjoy; health of mind and activity of mind, contentment, cheerfulness, continual employment, and therewith continual pleasure. Sua vissima vita indies, sentire se fieri meliorem; and this as Bacon has said, and Clarendon repeated, is the benefit that a studious man enjoys in retirement. To the studies which I have faithfully pursued I am indebted for friends with whom, hereafter, it will be deemed an honour to have lived in friendship; and as for the enemies which they have procured to me in sufficient numbers, happily I am not of the thin-skinned race: they might as well fire small-shot at a rhinoceros, as direct their attacks upon me. In omnibus requiem quæsivi, said Thomas à Kempis, sed non inveni nisi in angulis et libellis. I too have found repose where he did, in books and retirement, but it was there alone I sought it: to these my nature, under the direction of a merciful Providence, led me betimes, and the world can offer nothing which should tempt me from them.
Sir Thomas More. — If wisdom were to be found in the multitude of books, what a progress must this nation have made in it since my head was cut off! A man in my days might offer to dispute de omni scibile, and in accepting the challenge I, as a young man, was not guilty of any extraordinary presumption, for all which books could teach was, at that time, within the compass of a diligent and ardent student. Even then we had difficulties to contend with which were unknown to the ancients. The curse of Babel fell lightly upon them. The Greeks despised other nations too much to think of acquiring their languages for the love of knowledge, and the Romans contented themselves with learning only the Greek. But tongues which, in my lifetime, were hardly formed, have since been refined and cultivated, and are become fertile in authors; and others, the very names of which were then unknown in Europe, have been discovered and mastered by European scholars, and have been found rich in literature. The circle of knowledge has thus widened in every generation; and you cannot now touch the circumference of what might formerly have been clasped.
Complete Poetical Works of Robert Southey Page 238