Томас де Квинси
The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1
7.—Pagan Literature
We must never forget, that it is not impar merely, but also dispar. And such is its value in this light, that I protest five hundred kings' ransoms, nay, any sum conceivable as a common contribution from all nations would not be too much for the infinite treasure of the Greek tragic drama alone. Is it superior to our own? No, nor (so far as capable of collation) not by many degrees approaching to it. And were the case, therefore, one merely of degrees, there would be no room for the pleasure I express. But it shows us the ultimatum of the human mind mutilated and castrated of its infinities, and (what is worse) of its moral infinities.
You must imagine not only everything which there is dreadful in fact, but everything which there is mysterious to the imagination in the pariah condition, before you can approach the Heracleidæ. Yet, even with this pariah, how poorly do most men conceive it as nothing more than a civil, a police, an economic affair!
Valckenaer, an admirable Greek scholar, was not a man of fine understanding; nor, to say the truth, was Porson. Indeed, it is remarkable how mean, vulgar, and uncapacious has been the range of intellect in many first-rate Grecians; though, on the other hand, the reader would deeply deceive himself if he should imagine that Greek is an attainment other than difficult, laborious, and requiring exemplary talents. Greek taken singly is, to use an indispensable Latin word, instar, the knowledge of all other languages. But men of the highest talents have often beggarly understandings. Hence, in the case of Valckenaer, we must derive the contradictions in his diatribe. He practises this intolerable artifice; he calls himself φιλενριπιδειος; bespeaks an unfair confidence from the reader; he takes credit for being once disposed to favour and indulge Euripides. In this way he accredits to the careless reader all the false charges or baseless concessions which he makes on any question between Euripides and his rivals. Such men as Valckenaer it is who are biased and inflected beforehand, without perceiving it, by all the commonplaces of criticism. These, it is true, do not arise out of mere shadows. Usually they have a foundation in some fact or modification. What they fail in is, in the just interpretation of these truths, and in the reading of their higher relations. 'The Correggiosity of Correggio' was precisely meant for Valckenaer. The Sophocleity of Sophocles he is keen to recognise, and the superiority of Sophocles as an artist is undeniable; nor is it an advantage difficult to detect. On the other hand, to be more Homeric than Homer is no praise for a tragic poet. It is far more just, pertinent praise, it is a ground of far more interesting praise, that Euripides is granted by his undervalues to be the most tragic (τραγιχοτατος) of tragic poets. After that he can afford to let Sophocles be 'Ὁμεριχωτος, who, after all, is not 'Ὁμεριχωτυτος, so long as Æschylus survives. But even so far we are valuing Euripides as a poet. In another character, as a philosopher, as a large capacious thinker, as a master of pensive and sorrow-tainted wisdom, as a large reviewer of human life, he is as much beyond all rivalship from his scenic brethren as he is below one of them as a scenic artist.
Is the Nile ancient? So is Homer. Is the Nile remote and hiding its head in fable? So is Homer. Is the Nile the diffusive benefactor of the world? So is Homer.36
The Æneid.—It is not any supposed excellence that has embalmed this poem; but the enshrining of the differential Roman principle (the grand aspiring character of resolution), all referred to the central principle of the aggrandizement of Rome.
The sublime of wrath is nowhere exhibited so well as in Juvenal. Yet in Juvenal pretty glimpses of rural rest—
'… infans cum collusore catello.'37
That is pretty! There is another which comes to my mind and suggests his rising up and laying aside, etc., and shows it to be an occasional act, and, ergo, his garden is but a relaxation, amusement.
Glances which the haughty eyes of Rome threw sometimes gently and relentingly aside on man or woman, children or the flowers.
Herodotus is as sceptical as Plutarch is credulous. How often is now and at this time applied to the fictitious present of the author, whilst a man arguing generally beforehand would say that surely a man could always distinguish between now and then.
8.—Historical, etc
Growth of the House of Commons.—The House of Commons was the power of the purse, and what gave its emphasis to that power? Simply the growing necessity of standing forces, and the growing increase of war, so that now out of twenty millions, fifteen are applied to army and navy.
One great evil, as in practice it had begun to show itself, pressed with equal injustice on the party who suffered from it (viz., the nation), and the party who seemed to reap its benefit. This was the fact that as yet no separation had taken place between the royal peculiar revenue, and that of the nation. The advance of the nation was now (1603, 1st of James I.) approaching to the point which made the evil oppression, and yet had not absolutely reached the point at which it could be undeniably perceived. Much contest and debate divided the stage of incipient evil from the stage of confessed grievance. In spending £100,000 upon a single fête, James I. might reasonably allege that he misapplied, at any rate, his own funds. Wise or not, the act concerned his own private household. Yet, on the other hand, in the case of money really public, the confusion of the two expenditures invited and veiled the transfer of much from national objects that could wait, and were, at any rate, hidden from effectual scrutiny to the private objects which tempted the king's profusion. When Mr. Macaulay speaks so often of England sinking under this or that Stuart to a third-rate power, he is anachronizing. There was no scale of powers. Want of roads and intercommunication forbade it. And hence until the Thirty Years' War there was no general war. Austria, as by fiction the Roman Empire, and always standing awfully near to North Italy, had a natural relation and gravitation towards Rome. France, by vainglory and the old literary pretensions of Anjou, had also a balancing claim upon Italy. Milanese formed indeed (as Flanders afterwards) the rendezvous for the two powers. Otherwise, only Austria and Spain (and Spain not till joined to Austria) and France—as great powers that touched each other in many points—had ever formed a warlike trio. No quadrille had existed until the great civil war for life and death between Popery and Protestantism. It was another great evil that the functions towards which, by inevitable instincts and tendency of progress, the House of Commons was continually travelling,—not, I repeat, through any encroaching spirit as the Court and that House of Commons itself partially fancied,—were not yet developed: false laws of men, i.e., laws framed under theories misunderstood of rights and constitutional powers, having as much distorted the true natural play of the organic manifestation and tendency towards a whole, as ever a dress too tight, or a flower-pot too narrow, impeded the development of child or plant. Queen Elizabeth, therefore, always viewed the House of Commons as a disturber of the public peace, as a mutineer and insurrectionist, when any special accident threw it upon its natural function; she spoke of State affairs, and especially of foreign affairs, as beyond their 'capacity,' which expression, however, must in charity be interpreted philosophically as meaning the range of comprehension consistent with their total means of instruction and preparation, including, therefore, secret information, knowledge of disposable home resources as known to the official depositaries of State secrets, etc., and not, as the modern reader will understand it, simply and exclusively the intellectual power of appreciation. Since, with all her disposition to exalt the qualities of princely persons, she could not be so absurdly haughty as to claim for princes and the counsellors whom interest or birth had suggested to them a precedency in pure natural endowments.
Charles was a sincere believer but not an earnest believer of the Roman Catholic faith. James was both sincere and preternaturally earnest.
The Reformation.—This seems to show two things: 1st, that a deep searching and 'sagacious-from-afar' spirit of morality can mould itself under the prompting of Christianity, such as could not have grown up under Paganism. For it was the abominations in point of morality (en fait de moralité?)—indulgences, the confessional, absolution, the prevalence of a mere ritual—the usurpation of forms—these it was which Rome treated violently; and if she draw in her horns for the present, still upon any occasion offering, upon the cloud of peril passing away, clearly she would renew her conduct. It was a tendency violently and inevitably belonging to the Roman polity combined with the Roman interest, unless, perhaps, as permanently controlled by a counter-force. 2ndly, the synthesis of this curative force is by apposition of parts separately hardly conscious of the danger or even of their own act. For we cannot suppose the vast body of opposition put forward was so under direct conscious appreciation of the evil and by an adequate counter-action—doubtless it was by sympathy with others having better information. These last burned more vividly as the evil was fiercer. That more vivid sympathy drew increase of supporters.
Memorandum.—In my historical sketches not to forget the period of woe, anterior to the Siege of Jerusalem, which Josephus describes as occurring in all the Grecian cities, but which is so unaccountably overlooked by historians.
The rule is to speak like the foolish, and think like the wise, and therefore I agree to call our worthy old mother 'little'—our 'little island'—as that seems to be the prevailing notion; otherwise I myself consider Great Britain rather a tall island. A man is not called short because some few of his countrymen happen to be a trifle taller; and really I know but of two islands, among tens of thousands counted up by gazetteers on our planet, that are taller; and I fancy, with such figures as theirs, they are neither of them likely to think of any rivalship with our dear old mother. What island, for instance, would choose to be such a great fat beast as Borneo, as broad as she is long, with no apology for a waist? Talk of lacing too tight, indeed! I'm sure Borneo does not injure herself in that way. Now our mother, though she's old, and has gone through a world of trouble in her time, is as jimp about the waist as a young lass of seventeen. Look at her on any map of Europe, and she's quite a picture. It's an old remark that the general outline of the dear creature exactly resembles a lady sitting. She turns her back upon the Continent, no doubt, and that's what makes those foreigneering rascals talk so much of her pride. But she must turn her back upon somebody, and who is it that should have the benefit of her countenance, if not those people in the far West that are come of her own blood? They say she's 'tetchy' also. Well, then, if she is, you let her alone, good people of the Continent. She'll not meddle with you if you don't meddle with her. She's kind enough, and, as to her person, I do maintain that she's quite tall enough, rather thin, it's true, but, on the whole, a bonny, elegant, dear old fighting mamma.
Mora Alexandrina.—Note on Middleton's affected sneer. A villa of Cicero's, where probably the usual sound heard would be the groans of tormented slaves, had been changed for the cells of Christian monks. Now mark: what the hound Middleton means is, how shocking to literary sensibilities that where an elegant master of Latinity had lived, there should succeed dull, lazy monks, writing (if they wrote at all) in a barbarous style, and dreaming away their lives in torpor. Now permit me to pause a little. This is one of those sneers which Paley38 and Bishop Butler39 think so unanswerable, that we must necessarily lie down and let the sneer ride rough-shod over us all. Let us see, and for this reason, reader, do not grudge a little delay, especially as you may 'skip' it.
Dr. Conyers ought to have remembered, in the first place, that the villa could not long remain in the hands of Cicero. Another owner would succeed, and then the chances would be that the sounds oftenest ascending in the hour of sunset or in the cool of the dawn would be the shrieks of slaves under torture. By their own poor miserable fare contrasted with the splendour reeking around them, these slaves had a motive, such as our tenderly-treated (often pampered) servants can never know the strength of, for breaking the seal of any wine cask. From the anecdote told of his own mother by the wretched Quintus Cicero, the foul brother of Marcus, it appears that generally there was some encouragement to do this, on the chance of 'working down' on the master that the violated seal had been amongst the casks legitimately opened. For it seems that old Mrs. Cicero's housewifely plan was to seal up all alike, empty and not empty. Consequently with her no such excuse could avail. Which proves that often it did avail, since her stratagem is mentioned as a very notable artifice. What follows? Why, that the slave was doubly tempted: 1st, by the luxury he witnessed; 2ndly, by the impunity on which he might calculate. Often he escaped by sheer weight of metal in lying. Like Chaucer's miller, he swore, when charged with stealing flour, that it was not so. But this very prospect and likelihood of escape was often the very snare for tempting to excesses too flagrant or where secret marks had been fixed. Besides, many other openings there were, according to the individual circumstances, but this was a standing one, for tempting the poor unprincipled slave into trespass that irritated either the master or the mistress. And then came those periodical lacerations and ascending groans which Seneca mentions as the best means of telling what o'clock it was in various households, since the punishments were going on just at that hour.
After, when the gracious revolution of Christianity had taught us, and by a memento so solemn and imperishable, no longer to pursue our human wrath, that hour of vesper sanctity had come, which, by the tendency of the Christian law and according to the degree in which it is observed, is for us a type and a symbol and a hieroglyphic of wrath extinguished, of self-conquest, of charity in heaven and on earth.
Now, the monks, it is supposable, might be commonplace drones. Often, however, they would be far other, transmitters by their copying toils of those very Ciceronian works which, but for them, would have perished. And pausing duly here, what sense, what propriety would there be in calling on the reader to notice with a shock the profanation of classical ground in such an example as this: 'Mark the strange revolutions of ages; there, where once the divine Plato's Academus stood, now rises a huge printing-house chiefly occupied for the last two years in reprinting Plato's works.' Why, really Plato himself would look graciously on that revolution, Master Conyers. But next, the dullest of these monks would hear the Gloria in Excelsis.
Oh, how pitiful it is to hear B– alleging against Mahomet that he had done no public miracles. What? Would it, then, alter your opinion of Mahomet if he had done miracles? What a proof, how full, how perfect! That Christianity, in spirit, in power, in simplicity, and in truth, had no more hold over B– than it had over any Pagan Pontiff in Rome, is clear to me from that. So, then, the argument against Mahomet is not that he wants utterly the meekness—wants? wants? No, that he utterly hates the humility, the love that is stronger than the grave, the purity that cannot be imagined, the holiness as an ideal for man that cannot be approached, the peace that passeth all understanding, that power which out of a little cloud no bigger than a man's hand grows for ever and ever until it will absorb the world and all that it inherit, that first of all created the terror of death and the wormy grave; but that first and last she might triumph over time—not these, it seems by B–, are the arguments against Mahomet, but that he did not play legerdemain tricks, that he did not turn a cow into a horse!
In which position B– is precisely on a level with those Arab Sheikhs, or perhaps Mamelukes, whom Napoleon so foolishly endeavoured to surprise by Chinese tricks: 'Aye, all this is very well, but can you make one to be in Cairo and in Damascus at the same moment?' demanded the poor brutalized wretches. And so also for B– it is nothing. Oh, blind of heart not to perceive that the defect was entirely owing to the age. Mahomet came to a most sceptical region. There was no semblance or shadow among the Arabs of that childish credulity which forms the atmosphere for miracle. On the contrary, they were a hard, fierce people, and in that sense barbarous; but otherwise they were sceptical, as is most evident from all that they accomplished, which followed the foundation of Islamism. Here lies the delusion upon that point. The Arabs were evidently like all the surrounding nations. They were also much distinguished among all Oriental peoples for courage. This fact has been put on record in (1) the East Indies, where all the Arab troops have proved themselves by far more formidable than twelve times the number of effeminate Bengalese and Mahrattas, etc. (2) At Aden, where as rude fighters without the science of war they have been most ugly customers. (3) In Algeria, where the French, with all advantage of discipline, science, artillery, have found it a most trying and exhausting war. Well, as they are now, so they were before Mahomet, and just then they were ripe for conquest. But they wanted a combining motive and a justifying motive. Mahomet supplied both these. Says he, 'All nations are idolaters; go and thrust them into the mill that they may be transformed to our likeness.'
Consequently, the great idea of the truth, of a truth transcending all available rights on the other side, was foreign to Mahometanism, and any glimmering of this that may seem to be found in it was borrowed, was filched from Christianity.
9.—Literary
The three greatest powers which we know of in moulding human feelings are, first, Christianity; secondly, the actions of men emblazoned by history; and, in the third place, poetry. If the first were represented to the imagination by the atmospheric air investing our planet, which we take to be the most awful laboratory of powers—mysterious, unseen, and absolutely infinite—the second might be represented by the winds, and the third by lightning. Napoleon and Lord Byron have done more mischief to the moral feelings, to the truth of all moral estimates, to the grandeur and magnanimity of man, in this present generation, than all other causes acting together. But how? Simply by throwing human feelings into false combinations. Both of them linked the mean to the grand, the base to the noble, in a way which often proves fatally inextricable to the poor infirm mind of the ordinary spectator. Here is Napoleon, simply because he wields a vast national machinery, throwing a magic of celerity and power into a particular action which absolutely overpowers the genus attonitorum, so that they are reconciled by the dazzle of a splendour not at all in Napoleon, to a baseness which really is in Napoleon. The man that never praised an enemy is shown to this vile mob by the light thrown off from the radiant power of France as the greatest of men; he is confounded with his supporting element, even as the Jupiter Olympus of Phidias, that never spared a woman in his lust, seemed the holiest of deities when his rottenness was concealed by ivory and gold, and his libidinous head was lighted up by sunbeams from above. Here is Lord Byron connecting, in the portrait of some poor melodramatic hero possibly, some noble quality of courage or perseverance with scorn the most puerile and senseless. Prone enough is poor degraded human nature to find something grand in scorn; but, after this arbitrary combination of Lord Byron's, never again does the poor man think of scorn but it suggests to him moral greatness, nor think of greatness but it suggests scorn as its indispensable condition.
Wordsworth is always recording phenomena as they are enjoyed; Coleridge as they reconcile themselves with opposing or conflicting phenomena.
W. W.'s social philosophy is surely shallow. It is true the man who has a shallow philosophy under the guidance of Christianity has a profound philosophy. But this apart, such truths as 'He who made the creature will allow for his frailties,' etc., are commonplace.
Invention as a Characteristic of Poets.—I happened this evening (Saturday, August 3rd, '44) to be saying of W. W. to myself: 'No poet is so free from all cases like this, viz., where all the feelings and spontaneous thoughts which they have accumulated coming to an end, and yet the case seeming to require more to finish it, or bring it round, like a peal of church bells, they are forced to invent, and form descants on raptures never really felt. Suddenly this suggested that invention, therefore, so far from being a differential quality of poetry, was, in fact, the polar opposite, spontaneousness being the true quality.
Tragedy.—I believe it is a very useful thing to let young persons cultivate their kind feelings by repeated indulgences. Thus my children often asked when anything was to be paid or given to any person, that they might have the satisfaction of giving it. So I see clearly that young boys or girls allowed to carry abroad their infant brothers and sisters, when the little creature feels and manifests a real dependence upon them in every act and movement, which matre præsente they would not have done, which again seen and felt calls out every latent goodness of the elder child's heart. So again (here I have clipped out the case). However, feeding rabbits, but above all the action upon women's hearts in the enormous expansion given by the relation to their own children, develops a feeling of tenderness that afterwards sets the model for the world, and would die away, or freeze, or degenerate, if it were generally balked. Now just such an action has tragedy, and if the sympathy with calamities caused to noble natures by ignobler, or by dark fates, were never opened or moved or called out, it would slumber inertly, it would rust, and become far less ready to respond upon any call being made. Such sensibilities are not consciously known to the possessor until developed.
Punctuation.—Suppose an ordinary case where the involution of clauses went three deep, and that each was equally marked off by commas, now I say that so far from aiding the logic it would require an immense effort to distribute the relations of logic. But the very purpose and use of points is to aid the logic. If indeed you could see the points at all in this relation
then indeed all would be clear, but the six commas will and must be viewed by every reader unversed in the logical mechanism of sentences as merely a succession of ictuses, so many minute-guns having no internal system of correspondence, but merely repeating and reiterating each other, exactly as in men, guns, horses, timbrels, baggage-waggons, standards.
Sheridan's Disputatiousness.—I never heard of any case in the whole course of my life where disputatiousness was the author of any benefit to man or beast, excepting always one, in which it became a storm anchor for poor Sheridan, saving him from sudden shipwreck. This may be found in Mr. Moore's life, somewhere about the date of 1790, and in chapter xiii. The book is thirty-seven miles off, which is too far to send for water, or for scandal, or even for 'extract,' though I'm 'fond of extract.' Therefore, in default of Mr. Moore's version, I give my own. The situation was this: Sheridan had been cruising from breakfast to dinner amongst Jews, Christians, and players (men, women, and Herveys),40 and constantly in the same hackney coach, so that the freight at last settled like the sand-heap of an hour-glass into a frightful record of costly moments. Pereunt et imputantur, say some impertinent time-pieces, in speaking of the hours. They perish and are debited to our account. Yes, and what made it worse, the creditor was an inexorable old Jarvie, who, though himself a creditor, had never heard the idea of credit. A guinea might be owing, and Sheridan, seldom remembering his purse, had but a shilling, which even in a court of Irish law seemed too small a compromise to offer. Black looked the horizon, stormy the offing, and night was coming on, whilst the port of consignment was now within thirty minutes' sail. Suddenly a sight of joy was described. Driving before the wind, on bare poles, was a well-known friend of Sheridan's, Richardson, famed for various talent, but also for an invincible headlong necessity of disputing. To pull the check-string, to take his friend on board, and to rush into fierce polemic conversation was the work of a moment for Sheridan. He well understood with this familiar friend how to bring on a hot dispute. In three minutes it raged, yard-arm to yard-arm. Both grew warm. Sheridan grew purple with rage. Violently interrupting Richardson, he said: 'And these are your real sentiments?' Richardson with solemnity and artificial restraint replied: 'Most solemnly they are.' 'And you stand to them, and will maintain them?' 'I will,' said Richardson, with menacing solemnity and even mournfulness. 'I will to my dying day.' 'Then,' said Sheridan furiously, 'I'm hanged if I'll stay another minute with a man capable of such abominable opinions!' Bang went the door, out he bounced, and Richardson, keeping his seat, pursued him with triumphant explosions. 'Ah, wretch! what? you can't bear the truth. You're obliged to hate the truth. That is why you cut and run before it. Huzza! Mr. Sheridan, M. P. for Stafford, runs like a hare for fear that he should hear the truth.' Precisely so, the truth it was that he ran from. The truth at this particular moment was too painful to his heart. Sheridan had fled; the awful truth amounted to eighteen shillings.
Yes, virtuous Richardson, you were right; truth it was that he fled from; truth had just then become too painful to his infirm mind, although it was useless to tell him so, as by this time he was out of hearing. 'Yes,' said Richardson meditatively to himself, 'the truth has at last become insupportable to this unhappy man.' Right, it had so. And in one minute more it became insupportable even to the virtuous Richardson, when the coachman revealed the odious extent of the truth, viz., that the fare now amounted to two-and-twenty shillings.
As I hate everything that the people love, and above all the odious levity with which they adopt every groundless anecdote, especially where it happens to be calumnious, I beg not to be supposed a believer in the common stories current about Sheridan's carelessness of pecuniary obligations. So far from 'never paying,' which is what public slander has not ceased to report of him, he was (in Mr. Moore's language) 'always paying;' and for once that he paid too little, a thousand times he paid a great deal too much. Had, indeed, all his excesses of payment been gathered into one fund, that fund would have covered his deficits ten times over. It is, however, true that, whilst he was continually paying the hundred-pound demands against him, with all their Jewish accumulations of interest, he was continually unfurnished with money for his 'menus plaisirs' and trifling personal expenses.
By strong natural tendency of disposition, Sheridan was a man of peculiarly sensitive honour, and the irregularities into which he fell, more conspicuously after the destruction of Drury Lane by fire, pained nobody so much as himself. It is the sense of this fact, and the belief that Sheridan was never a defaulter through habits of self-indulgence, which call out in my mind a reaction of indignation at the stories current against him.
Bookbinding and Book-Lettering.—Literature is a mean thing enough in the ordinary way of pursuing it as what the Germans call a Brodstudium; but in its higher relations it is so noble that it is able to ennoble other things, supposing them in any degree ministerial to itself. The paper-maker, ergo the rag-maker, ergo the linen cloth-maker, is the true and original creator of the modern press, as the Archbishop of Dublin long ago demonstrated. For the art of printing had never halted for want of the typographic secret; that was always known, known and practised hundreds of years before the Christian era. It halted for want of a material cheap enough and plentiful enough to make types other than a most costly substitute for hand-copying. Do you hear that, gentlemen blockheads, that seldom hear anything but yourselves? Next after the paper-maker, who furnished the sine quâ non, takes rank, not the engraver or illustrator (our modern novelist cannot swim without this caricaturing villain as one of his bladders; all higher forms of literature laugh at him), but the binder; for he, by raising books into ornamental furniture, has given even to non-intellectual people by myriads a motive for encouraging literature and an interest in its extension.
Any specimen of Mr. Ferrar's binding I never saw, but by those who have, it is said to have been magnificent. He and his family were once, if not twice, visited by Charles I., and they presented to that prince a most sumptuous Bible of their own binding; which Bible, a lady once told me, was in that collection gradually formed by George III. at Buckingham House, and finally presented to the nation by his son. I should fear it must be in ruins as a specimen of the Little Gidding workmanship. The man who goes to bed in his coffin dressed in a jewelled robe and a diamond-hilted sword, is very liable to a visit from the resurrection-man, who usually disarms and undresses him. The Bible that has its binding inlaid with gold, sowed with Oriental pearl, and made horrent with rubies, suggests to many a most unscriptural mode of searching into its treasures, and too like the Miltonic Mammon's mode of perusing the gorgeous floors of heaven. Besides that, if the Bible escaped the Parliamentary War, the true art of the Ferrar family would be better displayed in a case of less cost and luxury. Certainly, in no one art was the stupidity of Europe more atrociously recorded than in this particular art practised by the Ferrars. Boundless was the field for improvement. And in particular, I had myself drawn from this art, as practised of old, one striking memorial of that remarkable genius for stupidity, which in all ages alike seems to haunt man as by an inspiration, unless he is roused out of it by panic. It is this. Look at the lettering—that is, the labels lettered with the titles of books—in all libraries that are not of recent date. No man would believe that the very earliest attempt to impress a mark of ownership upon some bucket of the Argonauts, or the rudest scrawl of Polyphemus in forging a tarry brand upon some sheep which he had stolen, could be so bad, so staggering and illegible, as are these literary inscriptions. How much better to have had a thin tablet or veneering of marble or iron adjusted to the back of the book. A stone-cutter in a rural churchyard once told me that he charged a penny per letter. That may be cheap for a gravestone, but it seems rather high for a book. Plato would cost you fivepence, Aristotle would be shocking; and in decency you must put him into Latin, which would add twopence more to every volume. On a library like that of Dresden or the Vatican, it would raise a national debt to letter the books.
