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THE BOOK-LOVERS' ANTHOLOGY
THE BOOK-LOVERS' ANTHOLOGY
EDITED BY
R. M. LEONARD
'Here I have but gathered a nosegay of strange floures, and have put nothing of mine into it but the thred to binde them.'
Montaigne (Florio's translation)
HENRY FROWDE
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON, NEW YORK, TORONTO AND MELBOURNE
1911
OXFORD: HORACE HART
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
PREFACE
One of the most delightful of the Last Essays of Elia isentitled 'Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading',a title which would serve very well to indicate the contentsof this anthology. In bringing together into one volumethe tributes and opinions of a galaxy of writers, my objecthas been the glorification of books as books, a book beingregarded as a real and separate entity, and often as an endin itself. There is a wide circle to whom this collectionshould appeal, in addition to bibliomaniacs or mere collectorsof first or rare editions to whom the contents are oftenanathema, for the love of books is not confined to scholarsor great readers. This love is incommunicable: it comes,but happily seldom goes, as the wind which bloweth whereit listeth; it is perfectly sincere, and knows nothing ofconventions and sham admirations.
No greater lover of books has ever lived than that Englishmanwho was born at Bury St. Edmunds seven hundredand thirty years ago—Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham,author of Philobiblon, and, as Lord Campbell said, undoubtedlythe founder of the order of book-lovers in England.Centuries passed, and then the more modern worship ofbooks was promoted by one of even higher station thanthis lord chancellor and lord high treasurer of England—byKing James, whom sycophants and cynics called theBritish Solomon. The sixteenth century saw also the births[vi]of Bacon, Burton, and Florio, the inspired translator ofMontaigne, and Ben Jonson, who all deserved well of theorder. Milton, with prose and poetry, handed down thesacred fire in the seventeenth century, and his
Dr. Johnson, nearly a hundred years later, filled a niche ofhis own, irreverent though he was to books except for theirmessage. The latter half of the eighteenth century isespecially memorable, for it synchronized with the earlyyears of Southey, Lamb, and Leigh Hunt, the very templesof the spirit which I have sought to enshrine in these pages,and of Hazlitt, and of two who should be dear to librarians,Crabbe and John Foster. I should like to claim an honouredplace in the nineteenth century for Bulwer Lytton, who,although he understood 'the merits of a spotless shirt',understood books also and appreciated them thoroughly;and for the Brownings, especially the author of AuroraLeigh. Emerson is conspicuous, not only as a book-lover,but also a