BOOKS.
RARIORA.* Ir it were necessary to tabulate the varieties of collectors, we might say roughly that the principal groups into which they fall are : those who collect for delight in the article collected, and therefore acquire only such things as please themselves: those who for joy in the result collect along definite lines with some historical or illustrative purpose; and those who love the joy of the hunt, and can resist nothing. Of these groups the first is the most human and companionable, the second the most useful, and the third the most common. In looking over the acquisitions of a collector of the first kind we are not necessarily instructed, except in knowledge. of their owner's mind and character, but we are probably considerably enter- tained. Such a collector, for example, if interested in first editions of books, would retain only such books as he liked. If he did not care for an author, he would reject his works, whatever might be their value. The late Mr. Locker- Lampson belonged to this class, and hence the peculiar fascination of the Rowfant Catalogue, as much a work of its compiler as was Patchwork or My Confidences.
The author of the three sumptuous volumes before us, Mr. John Eliot Hodgkin, may be said to belong to all three groups, but much more to the second and third than to the first. We seek in vain to discover his aesthetic taste. In-all these crowded pages he offers no guide. His range is un- bounded, and we lay the book on one side in ignorance as to whether he prefers his Hypnerotomachia (Manutius, 1499) to the trade-card of Ann Buck, or the Ireland forgeries to an autograph letter of Lucrezia Borgia. Perhaps it is right that the collector should have this all-embracing tolerance. It might, indeed, be held that the third group which we have described contains the only true collectors ; the others are not genuine, not complete. The complete collector opens his arms to whatever is collectable, viewing all with equal appro- bation. Of these collectors Mr. Hodgkin is the Alexander.
Such a collector must have far more than man's legitimate share of pleasure in this world. He is continually enjoying the ardour of the chase ; he enjoys also the rapture of attain- ment; and more than all he knows the enduring satisfaction of having made, under the guidance of his knowledge and sense of order, something new and true and -valuable. Mr. Hodgkin, having always had a purpose in view in his acquisi- tiveness, has reduced chaos to cosmos in a hundred different ways. Take, for example, his collection of Pepys papers. One day while reading Pepys he decided to have a copy of every broadside and historical document mentioned in the Diary. At that time these papers were scattered over the country, one in one house, one in another, each individually of little or merely fragmentary interest. Slowly but surely they converged upon Mr. Hodgkin, in whose hands they have gained.'new life and purpose, making the second volume of Rariora an important possession for any historian of those times. We are not satisfied that all Mr. Hodgkin's ambitions have been as interesting or worthy as this; we fail to be excited, for example, by his extraordinary accumulation of books on fire- works, nor can his specimens of marqueterie in straw accelerate our pulse; but we can understand the fascination attaching to the pursuit of such game, and envy him his temperament,— not envy unalloyed, perhaps. "Davy, Davy," said Dr. Johnson, upon Garrick's display of his possessions, " these are the things that make a death-bed terrible." There are some feasts at which the skeleton will intrude, and Rariora is one of them. It is impossible to turn over these varied pages, as it is impossible to look at the darling treasures amassed and cherished by any collector, without some such • Rariora being Notes of Some of the Printed Books, Manuecrtpts, Historical Documents, Broadsides, -Engravings, Coins, Medals, Pottery, and Curia's of aU Sorts Collected (1858-1000) by John Eliot Hodgkin, FAA. 3 vols. , London : Saga•,, On Low, Marston, ma Cr. [i5 &Xi
thought. They exemplify the old issue between simplicity and luxury, between Diogenes and Alexander. We do not say
that a collector cannot be philosophic ; but the collector's
mind is opposed utterly to that of the philosopher. The philosopher lives in a tub, the collector in a treasure-dome.
The one reduces his property to a minimum, the other adds to it daily. The philosopher is concerned with elemental verities, the collector with superficial details; where one asks : "What is truth ? " the other inquires : " Is there a water- mark ? "
Rariora is the most extraordinary and curious work that has come under our eyes for many years. It is everything—
and nothing. It is a mixture of the beautiful and the bizarre, the interesting and the triviaL It describes typographical treasures almost beyond price, and such fanciful nothings as luaus natures ; it facsimiles autographs of the great and august of the earth, and offers a page of leaden bale-clips. It is a wonderful scrap-book, and a bewildering proof of how much a busy man in the intervals of business may accumulate and appreciate. The catholicity of one type of the collecting mind never was better illustrated. But variety is the book's undoing, as a book. We cannot call Rariora a book. It is a museum. Every book, not less the catalogue of a collection than a volume of essays or poetry, ought to have personal unity ; but Mr. Hodgkin's work has none. It might be a fortuitous collection of catalogues edited by a cultured dilet- tante, and made precious by superb plates and curious wood- cuts. Rariora will, however, be the cause of books in others.
No one engaged upon a history of printing can afford, for example, to ignore' Mr. Hodgkin's remarks upon his incu- nabula; his fifteenth-century and English historical broad- sides are priceless, his autographs and historical manuscripts necessarily unique. Rariora, in fact, is a mine for the student to dig in. Incidentally our eye has fallen upon a 1716 tract which would have pleased Charles Lamb : " God's Revenge against Punning, shewing the miserable Fates of Persons addicted to this Crying Sin in Court and Town." One example is given :—" A Devonshire Man of Wit for only saying, in a jesting manner, ' I get Up-Pun a Horse,' instantly fell down and broke his Snuff-Box and Neck, and lost the Horse.'" He deserved worse hardships.
Mr. Hodgkin has a pleasant, mellow literary style, leisurely and copious, and we could wish that he had employed a shorter line in which to embody his remarks. So long is it, however, that one keeps to the matter with difficulty. We could wish also that he had more often permitted himself the indulgence of byway reminiscence. Probably no amateur has explored more old curiosity shops than he, or had more trans- actions with old curio dealers, yet his scheme has allowed of but few glimpses of the fraternity. With all Mr. Hodgkin's chances what would not Dickens have done ? And perhaps Mr. Hodgkin himself may one day encourage his pen into the direction Of odd portraiture. Meanwhile he offers us this :—
" At an early stage in the quest I made the acquaintance of one of the most eccentric antiquarian booksellers known to fame,—a paradoxical dealer who published list after list of rare books at low prices, yet- kept his stock almost intact. It was not till I bearded him in his den in a northern town that I discovered his secret. In the first place he gloated, perhaps for their own sakes, over the dusty volumes which had accrued to him in a long course of foreign travel, and in the second the idea of any, even the feeblest, exertion was so foreign to the bent of his mind that orders for his books, from whatever source, remained unanswered, and no -written entreaty could move him to a response. It was an experience of this kind which drove me, after many such unsuc- cessful efforts, to travel down to his abode, and so come to close quarters. A grimy house, from the interior of which books piled across the windows shut out the light of day, served as the home for the jumble of valuable oddments, none of which could be quainter or look much older than thd stern janitor himself. Him one had to accompany on the hunt, doomed, as it often seemed, to be endless, after each successive volume on which the heart was set. There was no way in this dismal den to divide the living from the dead, the still purchasable volumes from the few sold long years ago out of the tempting catalogues, save to stalk candle in hand through the long perspectives of obscure shelves to the right and bins to the left to the possible hiding-place of each desideratum in turn, and then, if it had been mislaid, to combat the owner's over- whelming desire to make excuse and his suggestions that it must long since have been disposed of. Yet, finally, after hours of patient endurance and entreaty, I was rewarded by the acquisition of the Quintus Curtius of 1470-1, the Livius of 1472, the Cases of the same year, the Horatius of 1476, the Platyna of 1480, the Songs du Vergier of 1491, and, last and best of all, the Poliphiii. Hypnerotomachia of 1499." Mr. Hodgkin concludes his first volume with a page of advice to collectors and some remarks upon •the ethics of collecting, a question upon which the readers of the Spectator recently had much to say in our correspondence columns. Mr. Hodgkin's counsel is summed up in these extracts :— " The technical or expert knowledge and judgment which you possess (or flatter yourself that you possess) is an asset which you are fully entitled to utilise in a straightforward way. It has unquestionably cost you a good deal to acquire, and it furnishes as legitimate an advantage over the trader who has not taken the trouble to master its details as does the cultivated palate of the professional tea-taster over that of the untrained buyer If a seller, even if he be a dealer whose business it should be to know the value of his wares, offer you something at what you consider much below its real worth, takh it without hating, if you take it at all. This may seem self-evident, but the maxim is perhaps not universally acted upon, and in the rare event of his price being very greatly below the well-known market value (an accident which might possibly occur by reason of his entire want of acquaintance with the class of object you are purchasing) you will hardly sleep the less soundly if you allow him to participate to some extent in the abnormal advantage you have reaped from his ignorance. In my own experience, however, the dealer is much more likely to profit by the collector's ardour than the amateur by the incapacity of the dealer Don't entirely despoil the poor man's cottage in the search for curiosities of whatever kind, even if you give him something over the market price for his household gods. Under no circumstances, in these conditions, may you buy even a few pieces at a price much below the market value. He has had no opportunity of acquiring for his protection the expert knowledge which the dealer from whom you buy ought to possess."
The collecting of such articles as can be acquired only by purchase—as in Mr. Hodgkin's case—is of necessity largely a diplomatic exercise, not wholly unlike the game of poker ; and this being the case, we have no fault to find with the counsel given above. We mean no disrespect to collectors when we say that the tenderest and least worldly consciences perhaps find other hobbies or buy only at public sales. But for- tunately there are still left many gentlemen to brave the difficulties of the problem, and, like Mr. Hodgkin, to bring intelligently together into safe and reverent keeping those treasures that otherwise would be dispersed, and, in isolation, be comparatively valueless. We wish that all collectors took the same view of their relation to their possessions—that rather of steward than owner—that Mr. Hodgkin does, and gave the world the same opportunity of seeing them.
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