to this day that it ain't there. I think likely all this seems foolish to you?"

farmers from their appearance, who seem to meet in this place now and then for the purpose of talk

"I'm pretty sure I picked me out a different kind of wife from what I should if I hadn't fallen in love with Ellen Douglas for my first sweetheart. I didn't choose her jest because she was pretty or smart, or could make good butter an' cheese. An' when I'd got her mother liked her, an' they lived happy together. Then, pretty soon, the war broke out. We lived 'way off here where we didn't hear much, an' we didn't get newspapers very often, an' father thought the main thing was to stay here on the farm an' raise a good crop o' potatoes an' apples; but I was uneasy. I didn't think war was goin' to be all romance an' troubadours, but I kept sayin' to myself that here was my chance to show what kind of a man I was.

"One day I had to go part way up Cedar Mountain, there, to hunt after a steer 't had strayed off; an' when I looked away off an' saw the mountains all around the sky, an' the sun shinin' on the fields an' ponds, an' the trees wavin' their tops as if they was banners, I broke right out an' hollered:

'Where's the coward that would not dare
To fight for such a land?'

"That settled it. I enlisted, an' stayed in the army till the war was over. 'T wa'n't all poetry, but there ain't any part o' my life 't I feel any better satisfied with. I was lucky. I didn't get hurt to speak of till the Rebs put a bullet into my shoulder at Gettysburg-an' that reminds me o' somethin'. The third day o' the fight, when our boys was waitin' for orders, and we could see the regiments all around us goin' into action, there was somethin' goin' through my mind over 'n' over as if it was wound up and went by machinery; an' that night, when I was layin' there wounded an' mighty uncomfortable, it come to me like a flash what it was. You know how a thing 'll get into your head an' keep buzzin' there. I was sayin' to myself:

'The stubborn spearmen still made good
Their dark impenetrable wood,

Each stepping where his comrade stood
The instant that he fell.'

This man who knew about critics and criticism, had involutarily chosen, in his moment of high impulse and emotion, the very passage which the authorities have pronounced as Homeric as anything in Homer. I doubt if it would have meant half as much to him if he had ever pulled it to pieces, to ask himself why it moved him, or if he had any rhetorical right to be moved by it at all.

It has been my good fortune, on one or two occasions, to wait for a car in a little station which is evidently a rendezvous for two plain-looking men,

them discuss Thomson's "Seasons," Young's "Night Thoughts," and poems of Goldsmith, Crabbe, Collins, and others. One of them finds his greatest enjoyment in reading Rogers's "Pleasures of Memory"; the other, on a bright winter day, discoursed so lovingly of Cowper's "Task" that I came home and read it with a new comprehension. They search out the beauties, and not the flaws, of their favorite authors; they never-apparentlystop to ask themselves whether these are the writers that persons of trained literary taste ought to enjoy ; and they will probably go down to their graves in happy oblivion of the fact that they have never chosen the "highest" poetry.

I do not wish to be understood as condemning the training that helps the student to distinguish between good and bad literature, but I do mean to say that if the reader has not that within his own soul which interprets to him the indefinable something which we call genius, it will never be revealed to him by catechisms and anatomical processes. "I hate to be tied down," Tennyson once said, "to say that 'this' means 'that, 'because the thought within the image is much more than any one interpretation."

There are, at present, a multitude of woman's clubs in America, most of which are studying the works of some author or authors. For their use and profit and that of similar seekers after truth, Outline Studies have been provided. I have before me, as I write, such a handbook on Lowell, of which Mr. Lowell himself wrote (we are told), "The little book both interested and astonished me." I choose some questions from it at random, asking the reader to supply the answers which naturally occur to the mind as he reads:

"To whom was the Invitation addressed? The objects and requirements of travel? Could the small portmanteau hold Lowell's outfit?" (And if not, why did he not take a bigger one?) "Have Americans, especially Western Americans, any genuine love of trees? How is it with Lowell? Have you seen his Genealogical Tree? In what month is Lowell happiest? And you? In what seasons and moods can Lowell 'bear nothin' closer than the sky'? What hint does he give of a home not far from Boston?" and so on, indefinitely.

It hardly seems that Lowell's poetry could have the juice taken out of it more thoroughly, if one went on to inquire: "Does Lowell say anywhere that he had been vaccinated? Which are New Englanders said generally to prefer, pies or puddings? Compare Barlow's 'Hasty Pudding' and Whittier's "The Pumpkin' with Lowell's reference in "The Courtship' to Huldy parin' apples. Would

you gather from the text that Lowell had an especial preference for apple pies? And you?"

I was once present at the session of a Bible class in a country church, where the topic under discussion was the story of Daniel in the lions' den. The teacher asked each member of the class, one after the other, "What do you suppose Daniel's thoughts were, when he found himself in this dangerous position?" The answers given varied more or less according to the gifts of imagination possessed by different individuals, but the last person to whom the question was addressed, a heavy-looking man, who seemed to have been painfully anticipating the moment when the demand should be made on his intellect, replied slowly, as if struggling with the depth of his thought, "Why-I s'pose-he thought -he was in-a den of lions!"

It seems to me that the attempt to interpret genius by the Socratic method must frequently bring forth replies as concise and practical as that of the man in the Bible-class. The most perfect piece of literature may be rendered absurd by such a catechism.

We go to a physician for advice about diet, but when he has given it we do not expect him to digest our food for us. So, when the student has been taught in a general way what is adimirable in literature, it is not necessary for the teacher to go on labeling every page with, "This is a fine passage." "Do not admire this line; the metaphor is faulty," and so on. If the reader is ever to develop into a thinker, he must learn to dispense with such literary guide-posts.

When I was a pupil in the high school, translating Virgil, I remember how my spirit rose in rebellion when the footnotes gushed like this:

"Suffusa oculos: wet as to her shining eyes with tears. Female beauty never appears so engaging, and makes so deep an impression on the reader, as when suffused with tears and manifesting a degree of anxious solicitude. The poet therefore introduces Venus in that situation, making suit to her father. The speech is of the chastest kind, and cannot fail to charm the reader."

Indeed,

I had it in me to have had some dim appreciation of the Eneid, if I had been let alone. there comes clearly to my mind at this moment the memory of a sunny morning, when, in a day-dream, I beheld a certain Sicilian youth, clad in an embroidered cloak of Iberian purple, stand forth to be shot down by a Tuscan arrow. He lived somewhere in the ninth book of the Eneid; and when I found that the emotional commentator was not suffused as to his shining eyes with tears, I felt at liberty to mourn for the fair youth whose violet mantle faded so long ago. I am still distinctly grateful to the compiler of footnotes for omitting to deliver a funeral oration. There are no beauties like those one

discovers for one's self, and no emotion so sweet as those which are never put into words.

Every real work of genius holds in it much more than the author himself knew, and each reader interprets it, as he interprets God, according to the poverty or riches of his own nature; yet, even so, that interpretation, meagre though it may be, which comes to him out of the struggle of his spirit is worth more to him than all the rest.

It is a great step gained when one has shaken off the bondage of feeling obliged to comprehend at once everything that one admires. It is perfectly possible to enjoy a thing, even to get some degree of good out of it, before one has arrived at any accurate understanding of its meaning. "No complex or very important truth," De Quincey tells us, "was ever yet transferred in full development from one mind to another. Truth of that character is not a piece of furniture to be shifted; it is a seed which must be sown and pass through the several stages of growth. No doctrine of importance can be transferred in a matured state into any man's understanding from without; it must arise from an act of genesis within the understanding itself."

There is nothing strange in the fact that an ordinary mind cannot at once comprehend the message of an extraordinary one; but one may be caught at first by mere beauty of language, by rhythm and swing, by some faint glimmer of significance, elusive but divine; and by and by, when experience and love and joy and sorrow and pain have gone on day by day offering their commentaries on all the meanings of life, one may wake suddenly to know that the interpretation that he vainly sought has come while he was unconscious of it. Your message may not be mine, mine may not be as richly full as that of another, but sooner or later each one comes to its own.

"It's all nonsense to talk about enjoying what you don't understand," a gruff old professor of rhetoric said to me once. After the finality of this dictum, it was a pleasure to find, soon after, a book written by another distinguished authority on rhetoric, in which he quotes a few lines from "A Grammarian's Funeral," with the confession that, although he likes them very much, he does not know what they mean.

Such an admission on the part of an accomplished scholar encourages one to hope that, after all, even rhetoricians-some of them-are but men, and that they too may acquire a reprehensible appetite for odds and ends of prose and poetry which-to speak accurately choose themselves, by one knows not what principle of selection, and persist in clinging in the mind and attaching themselves to it like burs.

What real lover of reading has not such a collection of tramp quotations, which haunt him, apropos, frequently, of nothing at all? Right gypsies they

are; but all the joy of their vagabondage would be lost, if one felt obliged to sort them, analyze their charm, and store them away, each in its own pigeon hole, labeled "Hope," "Memory," and so on.

It is often claimed that the spirit of our age is a reaction from Puritanism, but it seems to me that there are still a good many people who feel that there must be something sinful in reading anything that one really enjoys. They grind away at the chosen volume, whatever it may be, trembling, as they ask themselves: "Ought I to like this? Is it the sort of thing a truly intellectual person would approve?" Their eyes are blinded, so that they never realize how, all the while, other happy souls are led on little by little, from flowery peak to peak, until they find themselves unconsciously treading with serene footsteps the heights where the masters dwell, the paths where duty is transfigured into delight.

The reader who begins by enjoying Longfellow may end with a genuine appreciation of Milton and Browning; in the meantime, if he ever attains to that proud pre-eminence, there is no law making the offense punishable with death. In literature, as in life, one has a right to choose one's own friends. The man who has poetry enough in his soul to thrill when King Olaf's horns ring is is not wholly without knowledge of the mystic voices. that call. Charles Lamb tells us that the names of Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden and Cowley-minor poets all-carry a sweeter perfume to him than those of Milton and Shakespeare. A man whom I once knew, a German

scholar of some repute, entitled also to add D. D. and Ph. D. to his name, sent me Rider Haggard's "Dawn" as his notion of a really good story. His taste and mine differed widely, yet I was willing that he should live. I was even able to understand how a man of naturally active and adventurous spirit, compelled by force of circumstances to content himself with a confined and quiet life, might find some sort of outlet in this rampant sensationalism.

There are good authors and eloquent authors and "high" authors to go around amongst us all, and allow us one or two decently creditable favorites apiece; and occasionally, in this bleak world of duty, it ought to be permitted us to go browsing over the whole field of literature just for the very deliciousness of it, searching out the forgotten. nooks, cropping the tender herbage, and drinking the golden filter where the sunlight drips through the thick branches of hidden trees. Let us cast aside our literary consciences, and taking our authors to our hearts, laugh with them, cry with them, struggle and strive and aspire and triumph with them, and refrain from picking their bones.

This is a stern and exacting and workaday world; it demands analysis and accuracy and purpose; it expects every one of us to be able to reduce life to a mathematical quantity and extract the square root therefrom. The man who works and exacts and analyzes and purposes is the man who succeedsas the world counts success.

MARTHA BAKER DUNN in Atlantic.

CHAPTER II.

Bibliomania, book-madness, as it has been reproachfully called, and which is no madness at all unless, indeed Omnis amans amens be a truthful adage, has been handed down from a great antiquity. It antedates the Christian era. But that phase of bibliomania which is made the subject of this monograph-private illustrating-is emphatically a modern discovery. Its origin does not lie beyond the memory of persons now living. It has no archaeology, no ancient history, no venerable precedents, no primary, secondary or tertiary-it is all of the most recent quatenary. There was probably in England some slight symptoms of the malady during the latter half of the eighteenth century in the illustrating of Granger's "Bibliographical History of England"; and Dibdin also refers to it. In American, however, there seem to have been no incipient stages of the infection, no precursors, no embryo state, and no long circulation of evolution

ary processes. It appears to have burst upon the world full-grown and equipped like Pallas Athena from the brain of Jupiter.

The library as an institution has been developmental, and so have art and art collections; there was with them a period of small beginnings. Not so with privately illustrated books. The work of the first American illustrator has not probably been excelled. The vast millions (which will never be footed up) to-day invested in that pleasurable diversion are unprecedented in the history of hobbies; there is no parallel in the world of extravagance. Men who collect books or who collect works of art and virtu are generally men of culture; they bear a small proportion to the mass of the population, and indulge in these luxuries for the love they have for the beautiful. Yet I know men who are collectors of books and paintings, and who love them, but whose dominant passion is speculation. They possess marvelous knowledge of their values,

and hence fortunes are sometimes realized. This applies to books and works of art; no golden visions disturb the slumbers of the private illustrator. The man who illustrates books with the idea of profit will be left. You can't bull that market. Of the collectors of books and libraries not one in ten thousand attains to the degree of private illustrator, although no man ever became an illustrator who was not a lover of books.

The publication of the catalogue of the great library of Johu Allan was a revellation to the booklovers of America. Its vastness and its quality took every one by surprise. Even his most intimate friends had greatly underestimated his accumulations. It has not been excelled to the present time, and as an individual collection, or as representing the labor of one man and one lifetime, it stands preeminent. John Allan and Mrs. Mary Jane Morgan were pioneers, and will long remain unrivaled in their respective departments. It seems to us that as collectors of works of art and virtu they stand alone in their eclecticism. John Allan's collection of illustrated books may be excelled in time; Mrs. Morgan's collections of paintings, in its thorough completeness, will never be.

Regarding him as a collector simply, John Allan was a most remarkable man. Nothing appears to have escaped him; he had the keenest sense for rarities, judging from what he secured, of any man we have ever known; his accumulations covered all the territory from porcelains to Highland costumes;1 and he was the Nestor of the book illustrating passion in America. He displayed great judgment and delicacy of taste in the selection and make-up of his illustrated books; they were the work of his own hands, and were to him more than mere vehicles of entertainment-they were articles of faith. His collection first became known to the world after his death in 1864, when it was catalogued for sale by Bangs, Merwin & Co. This great sale, which was the first of its kind in America, appears to have established standards, not only there but abroad, from which to estimate the value of literary and artistic rarities; and the priced catalogue of John Allan's sale (the first ever printed in America) has been consulted as the criterion of values for nearly thirty years.

The first book we present to our readers is from the Allan collection, and is a book on "Book-mad

1 John Allan was a Scotchman, the son of an Ayrshire farmer, who, becoming discontented with the modest sphere to which Providence had assigned him in his native land, resolved to try his fortunes in the New World, and, accordingly, emigrated to the United States about the beginning of the present century. Taking up his abode in New York City, his inflexible honesty, his industry and shrewd intelligence, always enabled him to obtain lucrative employment. From an humble beginning he accumulated the means to gratify his taste for books. And many years before his death he was known as a collector through the principal book-haunts of Europe and America.-Bibliopolist.

ness, or Bibliomania" a romance in six parts, by Thomas F. Dibdin, extended by illustrations to two volumes imperial octavo, by William Turner, containing two hundred and ninety-seven portraits added by the illustrator, bound in green morocco, extra tooled inside and out, by Charles Lewis, Sr., of London. These magnificent volumes belonged to Mr. Allan and were sold with his collection; they brought $720. Also, Thomas F. Dibdin's "Bibliophobia," with eighty-eight portraits; and another copy of the same work, both privately illustrated. Also, Dibdin's "Typographical Antiquities, or a History of Printing in England, Scotland, and Ireland," extended to four volumes by illustrations. The thirty-two volumes of Dibdin in Mr. Allan's collection sold for $1,200. It was a beautiful set.

Washington Irving's "Knickerbocker's History of New-York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty," a very difficult book to illustrate, was also in this collection. Into it Mr. Allan had inserted two hundred and seventyfive prints and etchings, and he had extended the text to folio. Many of the illustrations were in proof, and all were good impressions. It was an encyclopedia of Knickerbockerian art. This work was purchased by James Lennox (French) for $1,250, and now (1880) worthily adorns his noble collection. Also, "A Humorous History of NewYork," by W. Irving, extended to folio, one hundred and seven portraits and many other prints. added. It fetched $400. There was another copy of the same work in this library, also illustrated.

Doctor Francis's "Old New-York, or Reminiscences of the Past Sixty Years," replete with illustrations, fetched $150. "Life of John Trumbull," in two folio volumes, with one hundred and ten inserted prints, fetched $180. Here also was Irving's "Life of Washington," in five volumes, illustrated by hundreds of portraits and prints; it sold for $275.

We next have the Pickering edition of Isaac Walton's "Complete Angler," with Nichols's notes, extended to four volumes by the insertion of two hundred and sixty portraits, forty-eight head and tail pieces on India paper, besides a number of original drawings. "It was," says Dr. Bethune, "an exquisite book. I have nothing to equal it." It fetched $600. There was another edition, a largepaper, with Hawkins's notes, sold at this sale.

We now have Vertue's description of the works of Hollar, illustrated with a great number of Hol

1 Mr. Allan's library consisted of about 7,500 volumes, 5,278 titles, among which were many Bibles, some in manuscript and vellum of the fourteenth century. Eliot's Bible, Breeches Bible, Gospel of the Four Evangelists, in Saxon and English black-letter, 1571; "Tractatus Verborum," a small tract printed by Wynken De Worde, bound by Mackenzie; the "Byrthe of Mankynde," in black-letter, 1540; and about 100 volumes of scrap-books.

lar's own engravings and etchings;' also John Jack son on "Wood-engraving," extended to four volumes, three hundred and twenty prints having been added; and another copy, extended to four volumes, with several hundred prints; and Chatto on "Wood Engraving," two hundred and seventy prints inserted, extending the one volume to three. There was also Gilbert Burnet's history of "My Own Times," two volumes extended to four, folio, three hundred and twenty-six prints added. It sold for $160. Of this book Johnson said: "I do not think that Burnet intentionally lied; but he was so much prejudiced that he took no pains to find out the truth." The "Life of Humphrey Davy," by Paris, illustrated by autograph letters and portraits of the most eminent literary and scientific men, including Count Benjamin Thompson Rumford, Dr. Samuel Parr, Dr. John Fothergill, Lord Cornwallis, Sir John Herschel, Dr. Ralph Milbank, Sir John Pringle, Duke of Sussex, Sir Edward Horne, Earl Spencer, and others, in two volumes, octavo, was also in the list. Of the "Life of Mary Queen of Scots" there were two copies, both elegantly illustrated with different sets of prints.'

Now comes "Robert Burns's Life and Works," by James Currie, bound by Mackenzie, in nine volumes, two hundred and thirty-six portraits and prints, with sixty different portraits of Burns, inserted. These volumes sold for $200. There were nine editions of the Bard of Ayrshire, or "unregenerated heathen," as he calls himself, in this collection, not including the Kilmarnock edition, and all privately illustrated. Also "Horace Walpole," in seven volumes, which fetched $257. Lord Byron's "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," inlaid to folio, contained one hundred and forty-five portraits and many other prints, and all the portraits of Byron, forty-four autographs and original letters of Wordsworth, Lamb, Sydney Smith, Fox, Rogers, Gifford, Cobbett, Duke of Portland, R. Payne

5

1 A set of these valuable prints sold at the Tite sale for $340, and a finer set at the sale of Mr. Corser for $700. 2 These went to the collection of J. Carter Brown of Providence, R. I.

3 There have been one hundred and twenty-nine editions of Burns' works published in London, seventy in Edinburgh, thirty-six in New York, forty in Glasgow, and twenty in Philadelphia, and about sixty in all other places.

4 The esteem in which Burns is held is evidenced by the sale of his autograph, "Bruce's Address to His Troops at Bannockburn," commencing "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled," and signed by "Rob. Burns." This address sold for $100 at the Tite sale in London, 1874. Either Burns must have made more than one copy of this address. or the Tite copy was not genuine, for Robert Thallon, Esq., of Brooklyn, possesses an undoubted original.

5 We missed two of his lordship; one, taken by Cruikshank, representing him in his arm-chair with a fluid suggestive of brandy at his elbow, and engaged in disturbing the equilibrium of the terrestrial globe-in other words, kicking an artificial globe out of the window. There is another which I did not find in this work; it is the apotheosis of Byron and Hook by "Punch."

Knight, Lord Hervey, and many others. This book was gotten up in London by William Upcott, and was purchased by Mr. Allan, and at his sale was sold to Alexander Farnham, of Providence, for $130, and now (1884) is catalogued with Mr. Farnham's collection for sale.

Shakespeare was represented in this emporium of illustrated literature by eleven titles, ninety-one volumes, and all privately illustrated, containing many thousands of prints.

The "Works and Lives" of Pope, Scott, Ramsay, Moore, Campbell, and a great many others, all privately illustrated, were also to be found here, including Gilman's "Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge," which is worthy of more than mere mention, it being uniquely illustrated by a great many autograph letters and unpublished poems in manuscript. in Coleridge's handwriting, besides many other autograph letters of contemporaneous literary men and their portraits.

Coleridge left a great deal of unfinished work. His "Kubla Kahn" and "Christabel" were wonderful productions. But he was a man, says Collier, whose life was a succession of beginnings of which he never saw the end. He went to college, but took no degree. He prepared for emigration, but never started. He got married, and left others to support his wife and children. At twenty-five he planned an epic on the "Destruction of Jerusalem," but to-morrow-to-morrow-to-morrow. And yet there are many names that we could better afford to spare, and which we could more gladly miss, from the roll than Coleridge. He left no school of poetry, but he left a philosophy.

For bindings Mr. Allan indulged in the luxuries of Tarrant, Bedford, Payne, Mackenzie, Lewis, Matthews and Riviere. There was a remarkable book about Robert Fulton in this illustrated library. It was a "Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation," exhibiting the many advantages of small canals and boats from two to five feet wide and from two to five tons burden. In it were examples of Fulton's original drawings, water-colors, etc., and autograph letters of Chancellor Livingston, Benjamin West, Joel Barlow, Gouverneur Morris, Andrew Jackson, Count Volney, Pierre Simon La Place, and Gaspard Monge; also newspaper cuttings from the contemporaneous press. There were one hundred volumes of scrap-books in this collection, and hundreds of other curious things for which no place can be assigned in this monograph.

Mr. Allan was one of the few kind, generous and simple-hearted men whose life was made happy, beautiful, and worthy of imitation through the enduring qualities of sincerity and truthfulness by which it was characterized, and his epitaph is not only inscribed upon the memories of the men of his