And in her MS. note, she suggests that this should be altered into

"A tub of common form and size,

Such as each rustic home supplies;"

adding, "Mr. W. might recast the whole stanza, so as to avoid the sudden jerk downwards into the mean and trivial, still keeping the original incident. The nine new stanzas might be preserved in an appendix. This I ventured to suggest to the venerable author at Bath, March 1847. He did not reject the notion altogether. S. C." Another note also refers to a poem of Mr. Wordsworth, "The Gipsies." It occurs at p. 154 of the same volume. In a printed note here, Mrs. Coleridge says: "I hope it is not mere poetic partiality, regardless of morality, that makes so many readers regret the sublime conciseness of the original conclusion:

"Oh better wrong and strife,

Better vain deeds or evil than such life.”

And at the foot of the page she has written as follows:- Mr. Wordsworth promised me that this should be restored, at Bath, March 1847. He said that he had made the alteration against his own judgment, in deference to an objection of Charles Lamb's. S. C." Both of these are interesting little bits of literary history. The other notes are principally mere verbal corrections of the text, and could scarcely be of much interest to the reader. They ought all, however, to be used in the event of a new edition of the book being called for.

No. 6 is a copy of the poems of the Rev. John Logan, which formerly belonged to John Miller, Esq., of Lincoln's Inn. Over against the "Ode to the Cuckoo," Mr. Miller has inserted a slip of paper containing the following curious piece of information:"The following note relative to the 'Ode to the Cuckoo' was found among the papers of Dr. Grant, one of Logan's executors:

"Alas, sweet bird! not so my fate:

Dark scowling skies I see,

Fast gathering round and fraught with woe
And wintry years to me."

"I find that after the stanza 'sweet bird!' he had written the above, but as he did not express a wish to have it inserted, I have omitted it. And it is perhaps too solemn for the tone of the rest of the poem, but it is expressive of that predictive melancholy which was with him constitutional."

Now, of course, Dr. Grant must have been much better qualified to judge than we are as to Logan's disposition to " predictive melancholy." But it is at least remarkable that the "Ode

Marginalia-Logan and Michael Bruce.

89

to the Cuckoo" should thus be ascertained to have included a stanza so strikingly characteristic of Michael Bruce, who is, on other grounds, strongly suspected to have been the real author of the poem. The singularly close parallelism of the above with the well-known lines

"Now spring returns, but not to me returns

The vernal joy my better years have known," etc.

must necessarily strike every one. The stanza we have now given has never, so far as we know, been printed before, and it is a little unaccountable that it should not have reached the hands of Dr. Mackelvie, who published a carefully edited edition of Bruce's poems about thirty years ago, and who, as we remember, mentions that he had applied to Mr. Miller of Lincoln's Inn for any information that might be in his possession, bearing upon the question as to the authorship of the several poems which have been variously attributed both to Bruce and Logan.1

One other example of the curious value and interest often attachable to books, in consequence of their association with

1 In this and the previous instance (of the Biographia Literaria) we have examples of new and interesting information being sometimes obtainable from the MS. notanda of previous possessors of a volume. Another curious case of the same kind is given by Dr. John Brown in his letter to Dr. Cairns, published as a supplement to the life of his father. A copy of Richard Baxter's Life and Times belonging to the late Rev. Dr. Brown, contained the autograph of Anne Countess of Argyll, the widow of Archibald Earl of Argyle, who died on the scaffold in 1685, together with a most affecting note by her, on that passage in Baxter (p. 220), where he brings a charge of want of veracity against her eldest daughter who had unfortunately been perverted to Popery, and carried off to a convent in France by her spiritual advisers. The note, according to Dr. Brown, is written "in a hand tremulous with age and feeling." It is as follows:-"I can say wt truth I neuer in all my lyff did hear hir ly, and what she said, if it was not trew, it was by others sugested to hir, as yt she wold embak on Wedensday. She belived she wold, bot thy took hir, alles! from me who never did sie her mor. The minester of Cuper, Mr. John Magill, did sie hir at Paris in the convent. Said she was a knowing and vertuous person, and hed retined the living principels of our relidgon, which made him say it was good to grund young persons weel in ther religion, as she was one it appired weel grunded." On the volume being shown to Lord Lindsay (whose ancestrix Lady Argyll was, by her previous marriage with the Earl of Balcarres), he wrote to say, that the information it contained was unknown to him at the time when he wrote the Lives of the Lindsays. “I had always been under the impression," he remarked, "that the daughter had died very shortly after her removal to France, but the contrary appears from Lady Argyll's memorandum. That memorandum throws also a pleasing light on the later life of Lady Anna, and forcibly illustrates the undying love and tenderness of the aged mother, who must have been very old when she penned it, the book having been printed as late as 1696."

some previous possessor, we must give from the little work whose title we have placed at the head of this Article. One day M. de Latour picked up at a stall in Paris a copy of Thomas A'Kempis' De Imitatione Christi, with the autograph of Jean Jacques Rousseau on the title-page. It contained only two marginal notes, neither of them of much interest. But it had evidently been read with extraordinary care, and more than half the book was underlined with the pencil. It bore marks too of having been the constant pocket-companion of the unhappy misanthrope. It had been read in the evenings, for there were drops of grease from the candle upon its pages, and it had accompanied him in his country walks, for there were dried flowers stuck here and there between the leaves. It became of interest to ascertain at what period of Rousseau's life he had thus given himself up to the study of the Imitatio; and M. de Latour, after much unsuccessful inquiry, was at last able to get some light on the point. In a letter to a Paris bookseller, written from Motiers de Travers, in January 1763, the following sentence was found: "Voici des articles que je vous prie de joindre à votre premier envoi: Pensées de Pascal, Euvres de La Bruyère, Imitation de Jésus Christ, latin." The fact then was plain, that he had begun to make his acquaintance with A'Kempis shortly after he had finished his principal works, about the time he had received, through the kindness of Marshal Keith, a sort of temporary asylum in the Val de Travers in Neuchatel, and when those outcries and persecutions against him had commenced, which by and by seem to have driven him into a state of mind little removed from insanity.

It is surely most curious and interesting thus to find (and this little volume is the sole record of the fact) that at such a time poor Rousseau sought such pure and elevated consolation from his sorrows as that which is to be found in the pages of Pascal and of A'Kempis, and that the latter of these authors at least he had studied with the most devoted attention. It throws a new and tender light on the character of Jean Jacques, and revives a feeling of sympathy and kindness towards him, which his own follies and perversities had nearly destroyed in all our minds. All this was enough to give the greatest interest to the volume, but another curious mark of its old possessor was still to be discovered. In his "Confessions," Rousseau mentions the vivid delight which the finding of a flower of the periwinkle once gave him when ascending a hill near Crossier, in consequence of its recalling to him some interesting circumstance in his connexion with Mad. de Warens thirty years before, not having seen the plant during all that intervening period. His sentimental transport on the occasion forms the subject of a

Difficulties of the Book-Collector in Scotland.

91

well-known passage in the "Confessions," and on turning over the leaves of the Imitatio, M. de Latour found a dried specimen of the periwinkle among the other flowers which, as we have mentioned, the volume contained. Well, the finding of the little flower at Crossier is stated in the "Confessions" to have been in 1764, while the purchase of the Imitatio is proved to have been in 1763, and as it had evidently been carried about in his pocket for a long time afterwards, there was no small probability that it was still his companion when at Crossier, and that this was the identical periwinkle which so powerfully affected him, and of which he makes so much.

But there is a limit to this sort of thing, and we must now have done. We submit, however, that though we have thus touched on but a very small corner of the subject, we have sufficiently made out our case-that book-collecting really has some solid basis of intelligent interest, that it may legitimately call forth some degree of fervour and enthusiasm, that it cannot altogether be regarded as the pursuit of a mind verging on fanaticism or insanity, and that it must be classed in a totally different category from the taste for old china, old snuff-boxes, old oak chairs, or old swords and daggers. Without such knowledge as the true book-collector generally possesses, and such care and solicitude as he is accustomed to exercise, it is evident from what we have shown, that we shall be pretty certain to miss something that is best in the works of great authors of past times. And so also, the most curious information, the most solid instruction, and the most unexpected and interesting insight both into the character, habits, and tastes of men of genius, and into other matters not less important, will often be the reward of that quick scent and taste which the zealous book-collector seldom fails to acquire in the exercise of his pursuit.

Before concluding, we may refer to one great difficulty in the way of the book-collector in Scotland, which seems to us too remarkable and characteristic of her people to be passed over. All our best old books have been read nearly out of existence. Printing was not introduced into Scotland till so recently as about 1507 or 1508, but the productions of the Scottish press are infinitely more rare than books printed at a much earlier period in England by Caxton or Wynkyn de Worde. One of the earliest books published in this country was a collection of the poems of some of the Scottish "Makars" of the time. But only one copy1 has survived the tear and wear of ceaseless turning over

1 Even this is very imperfect. It is now in the Advocates' Library, which can boast of a noble collection of specimens of early Scottish typography, many of them beautifully executed, and in singularly fine preservation.

of the leaves by entranced readers. During the later years of the same century, the numerous works of the reformer Knox and his coadjutors, the dramas and satires of Sir David Lyndsay, the grand old national epics of "the Bruce" and "the Wallace," and others, must have been circulated by thousands through the country. But the bibliomaniac is fortunate above his fellows who can light on any chance trace of them. In the succeeding century it is little better. Calderwood, Robert Bailie, Cowper, the Bishop of Galloway, Forbes of Corse, Hugh Binning, Rutherford, Guthrie of Fenwick, Durham, Dickson, Brown of Wamphray, the authors of "Naphtali" and the " Hind let Loose," with Leighton, Henry Scougal, and many others, all published more or less extensively. But the only form in which most of their works now generally present themselves to us is in that of stained, worn, dirty, decayed fragments, one-half of the book having frequently disappeared, and often only a few disconnected leaves remaining. Even of the popular theological and other publications of the last century, nothing is more difficult than to obtain passably good copies. Thomas Boston's chief works, Willison of Dundee's, Ralph and Ebenezer Erskine's, Hallyburton's of St. Andrews, John Brown of Haddington's, and the thousand and one reprints of earlier authors which the Edinburgh and Glasgow presses poured forth, have been read and re-read, thumbed, leant on, dog's-eared, and wept over, till the paper has been fretted almost to wool by black and horny hands, and till the original shape, binding, and colour of the volumes have almost entirely disappeared. Whatever may be the value of Scottish thought as expressed in its popular literature and theology, assuredly it cannot be said that the people of Scotland have not made the most of it. All this is in marked contrast to the state of things in England where works even of the seventeenth century, intended for popular instruction or entertainment, and thoroughly adapted to their purpose, may easily be met with in perfect order, and with the leaves, to all appearance, never separated since they passed out of the hands of the old binder. Perhaps in nothing that we could adduce does the dissimilarity between the two nations more remarkably appear: the one having a peculiarly ignorant, untrained, and unprogressive peasantry; the other a singularly well-educated, thoughtful, and religious one: the one with the mass of the people extremely indifferent to literature of any kind, and with a strong and ready spirit of empirical practicality characterizing almost all classes; the other with a devotion to and belief in books rising sometimes very nearly to superstition.