Books and Bookmen - Andrew Lang 2 стр.

A few examples may be given of the prices brought by Le Pastissier in later days. Sensiers copy was but 128 millimetres in height, and had the old ordinary vellum binding,  in fact, it closely resembled a copy which Messrs. Ellis and White had for sale in Bond Street in 1883. The English booksellers asked, I think, about 1,500 francs for their copy. Sensiers was sold for 128 francs in April, 1828; for 201 francs in 1837. Then the book was gloriously bound by Trautz-Bauzonnet, and was sold with Potiers books in 1870, when it fetched 2,910 francs. At the Benzon sale (1875) it fetched 3,255 francs, and, falling dreadfully in price, was sold again in 1877 for 2,200 francs. M. Dutuit, at Rouen, has a taller copy, bound by Bauzonnet. Last time it was sold (1851) it brought 251 francs. The Duc de Chartres has now the copy of Pieters, the historian of the Elzevirs, valued at 3,000 francs.

About thirty years ago no fewer than three copies were sold at Brighton, of all places. M. Quentin Bauchart had a copy only 127 millimetres in height, which he swopped to M. Paillet. M. Chartener, of Metz, had a copy now bound by Bauzonnet which was sold for four francs in 1780. We call this the age of cheap books, but before the Revolution books were cheaper. It is fair to say, however, that this example of the Pastissier was then bound up with another book, Vlacqs edition of Le Cuisinier François, and so went cheaper than it would otherwise have done. M. de Fontaine de Resbecq declares that a friend of his bought six original pieces of Molières bound up with an old French translation of Garths Dispensary. The one faint hope left to the poor book collector is that he may find a valuable tract lurking in the leaves of some bound collection of trash. I have an original copy of Molières Les Fascheux bound up with a treatise on precious stones, but the bookseller from whom I bought it knew it was there! That made all the difference.

But, to return to our Pastissier, here is M. de Fontaine de Resbecqs account of how he wooed and won his own copy of this illustrious Elzevir. I began my walk to-day, says this haunter of ancient stalls, by the Pont Marie and the Quai de la Grève, the pillars of Hercules of the book-hunting world. After having viewed and reviewed these remote books, I was going away, when my attention was caught by a small naked volume, without a stitch of binding. I seized it, and what was my delight when I recognised one of the rarest of that famed Elzevir collection whose height is measured as minutely as the carats of the diamond. There was no indication of price on the box where this jewel was lying; the book, though unbound, was perfectly clean within. How much? said I to the bookseller. You can have it for six sous, he answered; is it too much? No, said I, and, trembling a little, I handed him the thirty centimes he asked for the Pastissier François. You may believe, my friend, that after such a piece of luck at the start, one goes home fondly embracing the beloved object of ones search. That is exactly what I did.

Can this tale be true? Is such luck given by the jealous fates mortalibus ægris? M. de Resbecqs find was made apparently in 1856, when trout were plenty in the streams, and rare books not so very rare. To my own knowledge an English collector has bought an original play of Molières, in the original vellum, for eighteenpence. But no one has such luck any longer. Not, at least, in London. A more expensive Pastissier than that which brought six sous was priced in Bachelin-Deflorennes catalogue at £240. A curious thing occurred when two uncut Pastissiers turned up simultaneously in Paris. One of them Morgand and Fatout sold for £400. Clever people argued that one of the twin uncut Pastissiers must be an imitation, a facsimile by means of photogravure, or some other process. But it was triumphantly established that both were genuine; they had minute points of difference in the ornaments.

M. Willems, the learned historian of the Elzevirs, is indignant at the successes of a book which, as Brunet declares, is badly printed. There must be at least forty known Pastissiers in the world. Yes; but there are at least 4,000 people who would greatly rejoice to possess a Pastissier, and some of these desirous ones are very wealthy. While this state of the market endures, the Pastissier will fetch higher prices than the other varieties. Another extremely rare Elzevir is LIllustre Théâtre de Mons. Corneille (Leyden, 1644). This contains Le Cid, Les Horaces, Le Cinna, La Mort de Pompée, Le Polyeucte. The name, LIllustre Théâtre, appearing at that date has an interest of its own. In 164344, Molière and Madeleine Béjart had just started the company which they called LIllustre Théâtre. Only six or seven copies of the book are actually known, though three or four are believed to exist in England, probably all covered with dust in the library of some lord. He has a very good library, I once heard some one say to a noble earl, whose own library was famous. And what can a fellow do with a very good library? answered the descendant of the Crusaders, who probably (being a youth light-hearted and content) was ignorant of his own great possessions. An expensive copy of LIllustre Théâtre, bound by Trautz-Bauzonnet, was sold for £300.

Among Elzevirs desirable, yet not hopelessly rare, is the Virgil of 1636. Heinsius was the editor of this beautiful volume, prettily printed, but incorrect. Probably it is hard to correct with absolute accuracy works in the clear but minute type which the Elzevirs affected. They have won fame by the elegance of their books, but their intention was to sell good books cheap, like Michel Lévy. The small type was required to get plenty of copy into little bulk. Nicholas Heinsius, the son of the editor of the Virgil, when he came to correct his fathers edition, found that it contained so many coquilles, or misprints, as to be nearly the most incorrect copy in the world. Heyne says, Let the Virgil be one of the rare Elzevirs, if you please, but within it has scarcely a trace of any good quality. Yet the first edition of this beautiful little book, with its two passages of red letters, is so desirable that, till he could possess it, Charles Nodier would not profane his shelves by any Virgil at all.

Equally fine is the Cæsar of 1635, which, with the Virgil of 1636 and the Imitation without date, M. Willems thinks the most successful works of the Elzevirs, one of the most enviable jewels in the casket of the bibliophile. It may be recognised by the page 238, which is erroneously printed 248. A good average height is from 125 to 128 millimetres. The highest known is 130 millimetres. This book, like the Imitation, has one of the pretty and ingenious frontispieces which the Elzevirs prefixed to their books. So farewell, and good speed in your sport, ye hunters of Elzevirs, and may you find perhaps the rarest Elzevir of all, LAimable Mère de Jésus.

BALLADE OF THE REAL AND IDEAL

CURIOSITIES OF PARISH REGISTERS

CURIOSITIES OF PARISH REGISTERS

There are three classes of persons who are deeply concerned with parish registers namely, villains, antiquaries, and the sedulous readers, parish clerks and others, of the second or agony column of the Times. Villains are probably the most numerous of these three classes. The villain of fiction dearly loves a parish register: he cuts out pages, inserts others, intercalates remarks in a different coloured ink, and generally manipulates the register as a Greek manages his hand at écarté, or as a Hebrew dealer in Moabite bric-à-brac treats a synagogue roll. We well remember one villain who had locked himself into the vestry (he was disguised as an archæologist), and who was enjoying his wicked pleasure with the register, when the vestry somehow caught fire, the rusty key would not turn in the door, and the villain was roasted alive, in spite of the disinterested efforts to save him made by all the virtuous characters in the story. Let the fate of this bold, bad man be a warning to wicked earls, baronets, and all others who attempt to destroy the record of the marriage of a heros parents. Fate will be too strong for them in the long run, though they bribe the parish clerk, or carry off in white wax an impression of the keys of the vestry and of the iron chest in which a register should repose.

There is another and more prosaic danger in the way of villains, if the new bill, entitled The Parish Registers Preservation Act, ever becomes law. The bill provides that every register earlier than 1837 shall be committed to the care of the Master of the Rolls, and removed to the Record Office. Now the common villain of fiction would feel sadly out of place in the Register Office, where a more watchful eye than that of a comic parish clerk would be kept on his proceedings. Villains and local antiquaries will, therefore, use all their parliamentary influence to oppose and delay this bill, which is certainly hard on the parish archæologist. The men who grub in their local registers, and slowly compile parish or county history, deserve to be encouraged rather than depressed. Mr. Chester Waters, therefore, has suggested that copies of registers should be made, and the comparatively legible copy left in the parish, while the crabbed original is conveyed to the Record Office in London. Thus the local antiquary would really have his work made more easy for him (though it may be doubted whether he would quite enjoy that condescension), while the villain of romance would be foiled; for it is useless (as a novel of Mr. Christie Murrays proves) to alter the register in the keeping of the parish when the original document is safe in the Record Office. But previous examples of enforced transcription (as in 1603) do not encourage us to suppose that the copies would be very scrupulously made. Thus, after the Reformation, the prayers for the dead in the old registers were omitted by the copyist, who seemed to think (as the contractor for sandwich men said to the poor fellows who carried the letter H), I dont want you, and the public dont want you, and youre no use to nobody. Again, when Laurence Fletcher was buried in St. Saviours, Southwark, in 1608, the old register described him as a player, the Kings servant. But the clerk, keeping a note-book, simply called Laurence Fletcher a man, and (in 1625) he also styled Mr. John Fletcher a man. Now, the old register calls Mr. John Fletcher a poet. To copy all the parish registers in England would be a very serious task, and would probably be but slovenly performed. If they were reproduced, again, by any process of photography, the old difficult court hand would remain as hard as ever. But this is a minor objection, for the local antiquary revels in the old court hand.

From the little volume by Mr. Chester Waters, already referred to (Parish Registers in England; printed for the author by F. J. Roberts, Little Britain, E.C.), we proceed to appropriate such matters of curiosity as may interest minds neither parochial nor doggedly antiquarian. Parish registers among the civilised peoples of antiquity do not greatly concern us. It seems certain that many Polynesian races have managed to record (in verse, or by some rude marks) the genealogies of their chiefs through many hundreds of years. These oral registers are accepted as fairly truthful by some students, yet we must remember that Pindar supposed himself to possess knowledge of at least twenty-five generations before his own time, and that only brought him up to the birth of Jason. Nobody believes in Jason and Medea, and possibly the genealogical records of Maoris and Fijians are as little trustworthy as those of Pindaric Greece. However, to consider thus is to consider too curiously. We only know for certain that genealogy very soon becomes important, and, therefore, that records are early kept, in a growing civilisation. After Nehemiahs return from the captivity in Babylon, the priests at Jerusalem whose register was not found were as polluted put from the priesthood. Rome had her parish registers, which were kept in the temple of Saturn. But modern parish registers were discovered (like America) in 1497, when Cardinal Ximenes found it desirable to put on record the names of the godfathers and godmothers of baptised children. When these relations of gossip, or Gods kin (as the word literally means), were not certainly known, married persons could easily obtain divorces, by pretending previous spiritual relationship.

But it was only during the reign of Mary, (called the Bloody) that this rule of registering godfathers and godmothers prevailed in England. Henry VIII. introduced the custom of parish registers when in a Protestant humour. By the way, how curiously has Madame de Flamareil (la femme de quarante ans, in Charles de Bernards novel) anticipated the verdict of Mr. Froude on Henry VIII.! On accuse Henri VIII., dit Madame de Flamareil, moi je le comprends, et je labsous; cétait un cœur généreux, lorsquil ne les aimait plus, il les tuait. The public of England mistrusted, in the matter of parish registers, the generous heart of Henry VIII. It is the fixed conviction of the public that all novelties in administration mean new taxes. Thus the Croatian peasantry were once on the point of revolting because they imagined that they were to be taxed in proportion to the length of their moustaches. The English believed, and the insurgents of the famous Pilgrimage of Grace declared, that baptism was to be refused to all children who did not pay a trybette (tribute) to the king. But Henry, or rather his minister, Cromwell, stuck to his plan, and (September 29, 1538) issued an injunction that a weekly register of weddings, christenings, and burials should be kept by the curate of every parish. The cost of the book (twopence in the case of St. Margarets, Westminster) was defrayed by the parishioners. The oldest extant register books are those thus acquired in 1597 or 1603. These volumes were of parchment, and entries were copied into them out of the old books on paper. The copyists, as we have seen, were indolent, and omitted characteristic points in the more ancient records.

In the civil war parish registers fell into some confusion, and when the clergy did make entries they commonly expressed their political feelings in a mixture of Latin and English. Latin, by the way, went out as Protestantism came in, but the curate of Rotherby, in Leicestershire, writes, Bellum, Bellum, Bellum, interruption! persecution! At St. Bridgets, in Chester, is the quaint entry, 1643. Here the register is defective till 1653. The tymes were such! At Hilton, in Dorset, William Snoke, minister, entered his opinion that persons whose baptism and marriage were not registered will be made uncapable of any earthly inheritance if they live. This I note for the satisfaction of any that do: though we may doubt whether these parishioners found the information thus conveyed highly satisfactory.