V

PHILOBIBLON

MY DEAR X,

I hope you will forgive me for occasionally privateering among the galleots of the past. Now the publisher who will again reprint Richard de Bury's Philobiblon will deserve well of his country. Many writers have sung the praise of books, but none like Richard de Bury. He alone is among the prophets; he is the patriarch of book-lovers, and Erasmus and Southey and Lamb are mere commentators beside him. He lived between 1281 and 1345, and was a devoted and distinguished public servant of Prince Edward of Windsor and Queen Isabella, receiving as his due the bishopric of Durham. He was the friend of Petrarch. But these things, and the fact that he was Treasurer and High Chancellor of England, are trifles. He was, first and foremost, a lover and collector of books. He had more books than all the other English bishops put together. He had a separate library in each of his numerous residences, and so many books lay about his bed-chamber that you could not move or stand without treading on them. Every day at table a book was read to him, and, if a guest were present, he would engage in discussion on the subject of his reading. He felt towards books what Dante

felt towards Beatrice, Sir Thomas Browne towards antiquities, Wordsworth towards his lakes, and Cowley towards word-conundrums. We want manuscripts not moneyscripts," he says; we love "codices more than florins," and prefer "slender pamphlets to pampered palfreys."

The Philobiblon was first published in Latin at Cologne in 1473. It was translated into English (very haltingly) by J. B. Inglis in 1832 and by E. C. Thomas (much better) in 1888. That edition was republished in the King's Classics by the De La More Press in 1902. The first chapter is a lyrical panegyric upon the treasures of wisdom that are contained in books. Nor has this worthiest of bishops a parched, emaciated style wherewith to express his ecstasies." Books," he says, "in respect of which precious stones are worthless; in comparison with which silver is as clay and pure gold is as a little sand; at whose splendour the sun and moon are dark to look upon, compared with whose marvellous sweetness honey and manna are bitter to the taste." Truth without books is a kernel without its nut. "The written truth of books, not transient but permanent, plainly offers itself to be observed, and by means of the pervious spherules of the eyes passing through the vestibule of perception and the courts of imagination enters the chamber of intellect, taking its place in the couch of memory where it engenders the eternal truth of the mind." Reading books is a sublime dedication for the elect:

"Ye are indeed the most delightful ears of corn, full of grain, to be rubbed only by apostolic hands. . . . Ye are the golden pots in which manna is stored, and rocks flowing with honey, nay, combs of honey, most plenteous udders of the milk of life.

. . . Ye are the ark of Noah and the ladder of Jacob. . . . Ye are the stones of testimony and the pitchers holding the lamp of Gideon, the scrip of David, from which the smoothest stones are taken for the slaying of Goliath (so that Arnold did not invent the Philistines !) . . . fruitful olives, vines of Engadi, fig-trees that are never barren, burning lamps always to be held in readiness."

Surely not the most décolleté folio but would swell with pride at such a peroration.

Since the value of books is "unspeakable," how pointed is their indictment against the heretics that regard them not. "A generation of vipers destroying their own parent and base offspring of the ungrateful cuckoo . . . are degenerate clerks with regard to books." You were naked and "we clothed you with philosophy, rhetoric and dialectic"; you cried out and "we gave you the breast of grammar to suck." And you pass us by! Therefore may you “be sewn up in sacks to be carried out to Neptune, or planted in the earth to fructify for Pluto, or offered amid the flames as a fattened holocaust to Vulcan, or at least hung up as a victim to Juno." But woman is the very devil-" that biped beast whose cohabitation with the clergy was forbidden of old, from which we have always taught our nurselings to flee more than from the asp

and cockatrice "-she, certes, would have us converted into "rich caps, sandal and silk, and twice-dyed purple."

We were sick and you visited us not. There is none to give us "a mollifying plaster" for our various diseases. Some of us are " dun and yellow with jaundice," others

are suffering from gout, as our twisted extremities plainly show." "The smoke and dust by which we are continually plagued have chilled the keenness of our

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visual rays, and are now infecting our bleared eyes with ophthalmia." "Within we are devoured by the fierce gripings of our entrails, which hungry worms cease not to gnaw, and we undergo the corruption of the two Lazaruses." (My own books are crying with the selfsame voice!) Nor is there anyone to anoint us with balm of cedar," nor to cry to us who have been "four days dead, and already stink, 'Lazarus, come forth!'" Our purity of race is diminished " by worthless compilers, translators, and transformers "; our propriety of speech is adulterated by" treacherous copyists"; we are handed over to "Jews, Saracens, heretics and infidels, who encourage our ulcers, and whose poison we dread above everything." And " the cushion is withdrawn that should support our evangelical sides." "Ragged and shivering (remember Lamb's "shivering" folios four centuries later), we are flung away into dark corners." There is, indeed, no more health in us, and it is clear, were it not for our reputation, "what infinite invective we could hurl against the clergy."

That is by no means the conclusion of the complaint of books. But I will turn to our good bishop's maxims for the proper custody of books. The race of scholars "indulge in infinite puerilities" to the books under their charge: "He distributes a multitude of straws . . . in different places, so that the harm may remind him of what his memory cannot retain." Worse, "he does not fear to eat fruit or cheese over an open book, or carelessly to carry a cup to and from his mouth; and because he has no wallet at hand he drops into books the fragments that are left." Continually declaiming his "senseless arguments," he "wets the book lying half in his lap with

sputtering showers." There is no end to his destructive faculty. When the flowers have appeared in our land he will "stuff his volumes with violets and primroses, with roses and quatrefoil" (What a modernist is our bishop !), and "will use his wet and perspiring hands to turn over the volumes." Then, behold! "at the sting of the biting flea the sacred book is flung aside and hardly shut for another month, is so full of the dust that has found its way therein that it resists the effort to close it." But there are other foes than the scholar. Often the

smutty scullion, reeking from the stew-pots," will touch "the lily leaves of books." Of the clergy he despairs. They would handle books with greater decency "if it were not that the itch and pimples are characteristic of them!" This, if you please, in face of the fact that "Moses, the gentlest of men, teaches us to make book-cases most neatly," and "the Saviour has warned us by His example against all unbecoming carelessness in the handling of books."

Farewell, thou best of bishops, more devout than Donne, more succulent than Stillingfleet, more truculent than Taylor, more hypnotic than Hooker, more passionate than Perkins, and Providence grant thee a library in heaven!