mired the former and that he himself admired the latter. He had spent years of labor upon it, but destroyed the manuscript because a pedantical friend assured him that a scientific treatise of this nature should be written in Latin and not in English. Nathaniel Hawthorne made a holocaust of a number of his early tales which we can ill afford to lose, for even the despised "Fanshawe," the earliest of his printed books, which he did his best to suppress, has a personal interest that makes us rejoice over its rescue from oblivion. Molière, it may not be generally known, had almost completed a translation of Lucretius, but one of his servants whom he had ordered to dress his wig took some pages of his manuscript to make curl-papers, and Molière in a rage threw the remainder into the fire. An accident destroyed the result of the labors of Newton's declining years. He had left his manuscripts upon the table beside a lighted candle. His dog Diamond, playing around the table, overthrew the candle and set fire to the papers. Newton was more patient than Molière : he merely shook his head at the dog. "Ah, Diamond, Diamond," he cried, "thou little knowest what damage thou hast done!" A curious heap of scorched leaves, looking like a monster wasps'-nest, may be seen in a glass case in the British Museum. It is a relic of a fire that occurred in 1731 at Ashburnham House, Westminster, and partly destroyed the Cotton manuscripts. By the exercise of much skill a portion was restored, though apparently charred past recognition. The remnants were carefully separated, leaf by leaf, soaked in a chemical solution, and then pressed between leaves of transparent paper. The library of Dr. Priestley was burned by the mob in the Birmingham riots, and the celebrated collection of Lord Mansfield, which contained untold manuscript treasures, was destroyed in the same way in the Gordon riots. The conflagration of Moscow consumed many literary relics, and the shells of the German army in 1870 fired the great Strasburg library, when many manuscripts and printed books of great value were destroyed, among others the earliest-printed Bible, and the records of the famous lawsuits between Gutenberg, the first printer, and his partners, upon which depended the claim of Gutenberg to the invention of the art of printing. Even in the quiet of a library, undisturbed by calamity, books of great value have been quietly and surely destroyed by natural causes. A broken pane of glass in a cathedral library in England admitted the tendril of an ivy branch, which grew and grew until it attached itself to a row of books worth hundreds of pounds. Then in rainy weather it conducted water as though it were a pipe along to the tops of the books, and soaked them through and through. The rain coming in over a skylight in one library of rare books rotted some Caxtons and other early English books, one of which, in spite of its rotten condition, was sold for one thousand dollars. Paper rots under the influence of moisture until it is reduced to a white decay, which crumbles into powder when handled. Damp attacks both the inside and outside of books. The mould-spots which are so often seen upon the edges of leaves and upon the sides of the binding are seen under a microscope to be miniature forests of lovely trees covered with a beautiful white foliage. "They are upastrees," says a bibliophile, "whose roots are embedded in the leather and destroy its texture." Disasters by sea have been as fatal as disasters by land. In the early part of the fifteenth century, Guarino Veronese lost a ship-load of classical manuscripts while crossing from Constantinople to Italy. The unhappy owner survived the wreck, but his grief was so great that his hair turred white in a few hours. When Vincentio Pinelli died, in 1600, a London bookseller purchased his library, at that time the most celebrated in the world. It had been collected through many generations, and comprised numerous manuscripts, dating from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, and an extraordinary number of Greek, Latin, and Italian works, many of them first editions. The bookseller put them in three vessels for transportation. One of these ships was captured by pirates, who flung the books overboard. The freight of the two vessels which escaped their hands was sold for about forty thousand dollars. The sea has also swallowed up all the books and manuscripts which were contained in the churches and libraries of Constantinople when Mohammed II. captured that city in the fifteenth century. In the year 1698 a Dutch burgomaster named Hudde started on a voyage of discovery through China, disguised as a mandarin. He travelled for thirty years through the length and breadth of the Celestial Empire, and collected great literary treasures; but the ship which contained them foundered, and they were irrecoverably lost. Ignorance has cost the world priceless treasures in books and manuscripts. Just before the French Revolution a fine copy of the first edition of the Golden Legend" was used leaf by leaf to light the librarian's fires. A copy of Caxton's "Canterbury Tales," with wood-cuts, worth at least two thousand dollars, was used to light the vestry fire of the French Protestant Church in St. Martin's le Grand in London some thirty years ago. The memory of John Bagford, an antiquarian shoemaker, is held in deserved execration by bibliophiles. When the name of John Bagford is mentioned, book-lovers hiss through their teeth, "Biblioclast!" and in that lies the secret of his misdoing. He spent his life in collecting materials for a history of printing which he never wrote. His materials were title-pages which he tore out and mounted with others in a book. It is said he collected about twentyfive thousand title-pages in all. His collection, in sixty folio volumes, is deposited in the British Museum, a melancholy yet, professionally, an interesting collection. It is said that the closing hours of this arch-mutilator were embittered because he had been unable to discover and destroy a Caxton; but this was only because title-pages were unknown in England in Caxton's day. Was Lady Burton's also, though in another way, a case of mistaken zeal? She is the widow of Sir Richard Burton, the translator of the unexpurgated "Arabian Nights" which raised a howl of indignation among strait-laced moralists. On the completion of that work he gave himself up entirely to translating "The Scented Garden." It treated of a certain passion. The day before his sudden and unexpected death he called Lady Burton into his room, and told her that the work was now all but completed, and that he purposed to set apart the proceeds as an annuity for her. Next day he was no more. When she came to look over his manuscripts she for the first time fully understood the nature of "The Scented Garden." A publisher had offered her six thousand pounds for it. For three days she was in a state of torture. Finally she decided to destroy it. She has told the story herself in pure and womanly wise. Two motives actuated her,-a reluctance to give anything to the world whose effect should be for evil rather than for good, and the belief of a devout Christian that the welfare of her husband's soul would be imperilled thereby : I sat down on the floor before the fire at dark to consult my own heart, my own head. How I wanted a brother! My head told me that sin is the only rolling stone that gathers moss; that what a gentleman, a scholar, a man of the world may write when living, he would see very differently to what the poor soul would see standing naked before its God, with its good or evil deeds alone to answer for, and their consequences visible to it for the first moment, rolling on to the end of time. Oh for a friend on earth to stop and check them! What would he care for the applause of fifteen hundred men now-for the whole world's praise-and God offended? My heart said, "You can have six thousand guineas; your husband worked for you, kept you in a happy home with honor and respect for thirty years. How are you going to reward him? That your wretched body may be fed, and clothed, and warmed for a few miserable months or years, will you let that soul, which is part of your soul, be left out in cold and darkness till the end of time, till all those sins which may have been committed on account of reading those writings have been expiated, or passed away, perhaps forever? Why, it would be just parallel with the original thirty pieces of silver." I fetched the manuscript and laid it on the ground before me,-two large volumes' worth. Still my thoughts were, Was it a sacrilege? It was his magnum opus,-his last work, that he was so proud of, that was to have been finished on the awful morrow-that never came. Will he rise up in his grave and curse me or bless me? The thought will haunt me to death, but Sadi and El Shaykh el Nafzawih, who were pagans, begged pardon of God and prayed not to be cast into hell-fire for having written them, and implored their friends to pray for them to the Lord that he would have mercy on them. And then I said, "Not only not for six thousand guineas, but not for six million guineas, will I risk it." Sorrowfully, reverently, and in fear and trembling, I burnt sheet after sheet until the whole of the volume was consumed. Then came a storm of criticism. Robert Buchanan gave expression to the feeling of scholars when he wrote, Lady Burton feared that the work, if published, would cause incalculable mischief and corruption; her nature revolted against it, and in acting as she did she felt herself a savior of society. The destruction of the manuscript was vandalism pure and simple, and vandalism is vandalism whether perpetrated by a Torquemada or a John Knox, by a fanatic or a gentle enthusiast, by a pure, high-souled woman or the public hangman. Excess of love in such a matter is as perilous as excess of hate. A curious occurrence took place in the year 1840. An antiquary bought some soles from one Jay, a fishmonger in Old Hungerford Market, Yarmouth. The soles were wrapped in a large stiff sheet of paper torn from a folio volume which stood at the fishmonger's elbow. When the purchaser unwrapped his purchase, his eye caught the signatures of Lauderdale, Godolphin, Ashley, and Sunderland on the large stiff sheet of paper. The wrapper was a sheet of the victualling-charges for prisoners in the Tower in the reign of James II. The signatures were those of his ministers. The antiquary went back at once to Jay's shop. "That is good paper of yours," he said, assuming an air of indifference. "Yes, but too stiff. I've got a lot of it, too. I got it from Somerset House. They had ten tons of waste paper, and I offered seven pounds a ton, which they took, and I have got three tons of it in the stables. The other seven they keep till I want it." "All like this?" asked the antiquary, his heart in his mouth. "Pretty much," replied Jay; "all odds and ends." Jay obligingly allowed the antiquary to carry home an armful of rubbishy papers. His head swam as he looked on accounts of the Exchequer Office signed by Henry VII. and Henry VIII., wardrobe accounts of Queen Anne, dividend receipts signed by Pope and Newton, a treatise on the Eucharist in the boyish hand of Edward VI., and another on the Order of the Garter in the scholarly handwriting of Elizabeth. The government in selling the papers to Jay had disposed of public documents which contained much of the history of the country from Henry VII. to George IV. The antiquary went back to Jay. Little by little he was acquiring the whole pile but he injudiciously whispered his secret about, and it became no longer a secret. The government were aroused to a sense of their loss, and the public clamored for a committee of inquiry. It was then found that the blame lay with Lord Monteagle, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and that the papers which had been sold for seventy pounds were, at the least, worth some three thousand pounds; but most of them had by this time been lost or mutilated, or scattered beyond redemption. Love. No love lost between them. The modern acceptation of this phrase is in exact opposition to its original meaning. In the ballad of "The Babes in the Wood" the expression is used as follows: No love between this two was lost, In love they lived, in love they died, It would appear that Richardson lived in the transition period when the phrase was altering its meaning, for he uses it in both senses in "Clarissa Harlowe :" I kissed her, and so it is for me, my sweet cousin, that you shed tears? There never was love lost between us; but, tell me, what is designed to be done with me, that I have this kind instance of your compassion for me?-Vol. ii. p. 217 (edition of 1811). He must needs say there was no love lost between some of my family.-Vol. iii. p. 150. Love, All for, a phrase which seems to have been first used as the title of a play by Dryden, its meaning being emphasized by the sub-title," or the World Well Lost." Here is a specimen verse: Southey, in his ballad “All for Love, or a Sinner Well Saved” (1829), has these lines: And when my own Mark Antony Against young Cæsar strove, And Rome's whole world was set in arms, The cause was all for love. Dibdin, in "Captain Wattle and Miss Roe," has the same phrase in a less dignified connection: Did you ever hear tell of Captain Wattle? He was all for love and a little for the bottle. Love at first sight. Marlowe, in "Hero and Leander," and Shakespeare, in "As You Like It," ask in precisely the same language the question, Who ever loved that loved not at first sight? -a question that is only a question in form, and carries with it the answer formally made by George Chapman : None ever loved but at first sight they loved. The Blind Beggar of Alexandria. In the fifth act of "As You Like It," Sc. 2, Rosalind describes to Orlando how Oliver and Celia had fallen in love at first sight: Your brother and my sister no sooner met but they looked; no sooner looked but they loved; no sooner loved but they sighed; no sooner sighed but they asked one another the reason; no sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy; and in these degrees have they made a pair of stairs to marriage which they will climb incontinent, or else be incontinent before marriage; they are in the very wrath of love and they will together; clubs cannot part them. And as for this romance of love, this fine picture of Jenny and Jessamy falling in love at first sight, billing and cooing in an arbor, and retiring to a cottage afterwards to go on cooing and billing-Psha! what folly is this! It is good for romances, and for Misses to sigh about; but any man who walks through the world with his eyes open knows how senseless is all this rubbish. I don't say that a young man and woman are not to meet, and to fall in love that instant, and to marry that day year, and love each other till they are a hundred,that is the supreme lot,-but that is the lot which the gods only grant to Baucis and Philemon, and a very, very few besides.—THACKERAY: Vanity Fair. The love-in-a-cottage fallacy is thus laughed at by N. P. Willis : Your love in a cottage is hungry, Your vine is a nest for flies, Your milkmaid shocks the graces, Love free as air. You lie down to your shady slumber, Love in a Cottage. Pope, in his "Eloisa to Abelard," 1. 75, says, Love, free as air, at sight of human ties, Spreads his light wings, and in a moment flies. Butler has the same idea: and Spenser : Love that's too generous t' abide Ne may love ben compel'd by maistery; Faerie Queene, Book iii., Canto i., Stanza 2. But Spenser has boldly plagiarized from Chaucer : Love will not ben constreyned by maystre; The Franklin's Tale. Love is blind, a proverb dating back to the blindfolded Amor of Rome, and signifying not only that love sees no defects in the beloved object, but is oblivious to surroundings and careless of consequences. A Spanish saw runs, "People in love think that other people's eyes are out." Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; SHAKESPEARE: Midsummer Night's Dream, Act i., Sc. 2. But love is blind, and lovers cannot see The pretty follies that themselves commit. Merchant of Venice, Act ii., Sc. 6. Some cynical Frenchman has said that there are two parties to a love-transaction,-the one who loves and the other who condescends to be so treated. Perhaps the love is occasionally on the man's side; perhaps on the lady's. Perhaps some infatuated swain has ere this mistaken insensibility for modesty, dulness for maiden reserve, mere vacuity for sweet bashfulness, and a goose, in a word, for a swan. Perhaps some beloved female subscriber has arrayed an ass in the splendor and glory of her imagination; admired his dulness as manly simplicity; worshipped his selfishness as manly superiority; treated his stupidity as majestic gravity.-THACKERAY: Vanity Fair. Per contra, Faults are thick where love is thin," say the Welsh, a proverb echoed in the English "Where love fails we espy all faults." Love is not only blind, it is insane. "Aimer et savoir n'ont même manoir," says an old French proverb, "To love and to be wise is impossible," says the Spanish, "No folly to being in love," echoes the Welsh. But Calderon explains that lovers only seem mad to those who have never loved : He who far off beholds another dancing, |