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I

MY RARE BOOK.

WISH I could say it was my diligence that discovered it, and

that I hunted it out of some fifth-rate bookstall of Goswell Street or of the New Road-"all this lot at 6d. apiece." But no, it has no romantic story as far as I am concerned. Given perhaps,

eighty years ago, by friend to friend, or by lover to sweetheart, in days when our great-grandmothers were beautiful and our greatgrandfathers devoted, it got to be neglected, it got to be soldsomebody ceased to care for it, or somebody wanted the few shillings it then would bring-somehow it tossed about the world, till a keen bookseller or keen book-buyer rescued it, and took it to a binder of note, and then it was arrayed in seemly dress, and safer for the future. Afterwards, but not for very long, I think, it was a rich man's possession: one thing, and quite a little thing, in a great library of English classics, from Defoe and Sterne to Dickens and Tennyson. Then it came to be sold, along with most or all of its important companions, and so I got it, in most prosaic fashion. I bought it under the hammer at Sotheby's-or rather, Mr. Ellis bought it there on my behalf-on the 3rd of March, in this present year of grace. And now it takes up its position on insignificant shelves, by the side of the Rogers with the Turner illustrations; by the side of a few things-but the collector knows them not.

This is how it figures in the auctioneer's catalogue: "Wordsworth (W), Lyrical Ballads, with a few other Poems (including Rime of the Ancyent Marinere by Coleridge), FIRST EDITION, green morocco extra, g, e, by Riviere, 1798." The "g, e," means nothing more mysterious than "gilt edges." The morocco is of a rich and sunny green-the "good" green of modern artistic speech, which rightly enough, I suppose, endows colour and line with moral qualities. I am thankful to the rich man for having saved me both money and trouble in binding, completely to my taste, it happens, my rare book.

And few things, perhaps, deserve a more careful guardianship. The "Lyrical Ballads" were a starting-point in the new English literature, which addressed itself to study in the field of Nature more than in academies, and which taught us the beauty and interest of

common life and of every-day incident; and it is a delight to me to see the pages of these simple lyrics and pastorals as Wordsworth's own eye was content with them when Cottle, the Bristol bookseller, passed them through the press, and printed them as well as might be, on pleasantly toned paper, bearing here and there on its water-mark the date of its making, "1795." On the whole, it is a well-printed book; two hundred and ten pages, tastefully arranged, and of errata there are but five. Those were days when centralisation had not brought the best work all to London, and even concentrated it in certain quarters of London; and of what is sometimes called provincial, but of what there is better reason to define as suburban, clumsiness-for nothing is done so ill in the world as what is done in London suburbs-there is only a trace in the gross inequality of the size of the figures in the table of contents: they are taken, it appears, from different founts. But generally the book is printed with smoothness and precision, and, even apart from the high literature which it enshrines, is worthy of its good green coat, joyful of hue, pleasant of smell, and grateful of touch to the fingers that pass over it. And nothing that comes now, even from the Chiswick Press, or from Jouaust or whoever may be the fashionable printing man today in Paris, can be much neater than its title-page; the mention of which brings me to a point of interest to the bibliographer.

The book has two title-pages; or, rather, like many of the books of its day, there belong two title-pages to the same edition of it, the custom having been for a second bookseller, who bought what the first bookseller was minded to get rid of, to print his own title-page. This is the course that the thing followed in the matter of the "Lyrical Ballads." The book was printed, as we shall see in detail presently, by Cottle, in Bristol, in the year 1798. Five hundred copies were printed, but they did not sell. "As a curious literary fact," says Cottle, in his "Recollections," "I might mention that the sale of the First Edition of the 'Lyrical Ballads' was so slow, and the severity of most of the reviews so great, that its progress to oblivion seemed ordained to be as rapid as it was certain." "I had given," he further adds, "thirty guineas for the copyright; but the heavy sale induced me to part with the largest proportion of the impression of 500, at a loss, to Mr. Arch, a London bookseller." Mr. Arch printed his own title-page. My copy has his title-page, "London, printed for F. & A. Arch, Gracechurch Street," and so I think had the copy sold at Mr. Dew Smith's sale about four years ago. The date, of course, remains the same, 1798, and all else remains the

same.

The British Museum copy-it was Southey's copy-has the

Bristol title-page, and the Museum may possibly acquire a copy with Mr. Arch's when opportunity occurs. In the only copy of the First Edition which they have at present, the words are," Bristol, printed by Biggs and Cottle, for T. N. Longman, Paternoster Row, London." Thus the First Edition of five hundred was divided-say two hundred for Mr. Cottle, say three hundred for Mr. Arch, when the Bristolian found the sale was 66 slow" and "heavy." Where have they all gone to? It was only eighty-four years ago. But where have all the copies of the big edition of the "Christmas Carol" gone to? That was hardly forty years ago. How indeed do these things vanish? And where are the snows of yester-year?

To recall a little the origin of the book-the circumstances under which Wordsworth and Coleridge planned and produced it. It was in the Nether Stowey and Alfoxden time, when the men were neighbours, three miles of green Somerset country dividing the home of Coleridge from the home of Wordsworth. I saw the place -that is, the neighbourhood and Coleridge's home-a very few years since, much in that summer weather which tempted their own more prolonged wanderings, which followed them in that excursion to "Linton and the Valley of Stones," which was the first cause, Wordsworth says, of the issue of "Lyrical Ballads." Plain living and high thinking they practised then, and from necessity as much as from choice. A yeoman of Somerset would hardly have lived at that time and certainly he would not live to-day-in that cottage which was Coleridge's. Straight from the country road you step to its door in an instant you are in the small square parlour, with large kitchen-like fireplace, with one or, I think, two small windows, and a window-seat from which, on days of evil weather, the stay-athome commanded the prospect of the passing rustic as he walked abroad-perhaps of the occasional traveller on his way to the village inn. But generally, fair weather or foul, the spectacle was scantytime was marked by shifting light and changes in the colour of the sky, or by the movements of beasts at milking-time, or at hours of rest and of labour. Never, I should say, was one hour merely frittered away by either the poet who lived or the poet who visited in that humble cottage. Never a call of ceremony: an interview that bears no fruit-a social necessity, the continual plague of cities. Never an hour that did not tell in some way, by active work, or by "wise passiveness," upon the mind that was to be cultivated and the character that was to be developed. Such a life, led not in actual isolation, but in narrowed and selected companionship, was perhaps about the best preparation men could make for work of the con

centrated and the self-possessed power of the "Ancient Mariner," and of the serene profundity of the lines connected with Tintern Abbey. This was the place, and these were the conditions, for the quietude of life and thought felt as the greatest necessity of existence by Wordsworth, "a worshipper of Nature," "unwearied in that service."

In 1797 came the first thought of the book. Wordsworth's account of it may already be familiar. Prefixed in later editions to the poem of "We are Seven," which was printed for the first time in "Lyrical Ballads," is a note which says: "In reference to this poem I will here mention one of the most noticeable facts in my own poetic history, and that of Mr. Coleridge." And then he tells the story: "In the autumn of 1797, he, my sister, and myself, started from Alfoxden pretty late in the afternoon, with a view to visit Linton and the Valley of Stones near to it; and, as our united funds were very small, we agreed to defray the expense of the tour by writing a poem, to be sent to the New Monthly Magazine, set up by Phillips, the bookseller, and edited by Dr. Aiken. Accordingly, we set off, and proceeded along the Quantock Hills, towards Watchet; and in the course of this walk was planned the poem of the Ancient Mariner,' founded on a dream, as Coleridge said, of his friend Mr. Cruikshank." And then Wordsworth adds some details which are extraordinarily characteristic. "Much the greatest part of the story was Mr. Coleridge's invention," he says, "but certain parts I suggested." Now, what were those parts? They were parts, we shall see, which yield to no other in importance, and which do very much to throw over the work the glamour of noble imagination, the sudden magical charm which was Wordsworth's own, and with which he was accustomed to illumine the commoner themes of his habitual choice. It was Wordsworth's suggestion that the Ancient Mariner should be represented as having killed the Albatross, and that "the tutelary spirits of these regions"--the regions of the South Sea-"should take upon them to avenge the crime." "I also suggested the navigation of the ship by the dead men, but do not recollect that I had anything more to do with the scheme of the poem." A detail, however, he had to do with. "I furnished two or three lines at the beginning of the poem, in particular—

And listened like a three years' child:

The Mariner had his will.

These trifling contributions, all but one, which Mr. C. has with unnecessary scrupulosity recorded, slipped out of his mind, as they

well might." If the contributions themselves were characteristic, so certainly is the manner of speaking of them. But these men, and the men who were more or less their associates, believed much in each other. In no different spirit from Wordsworth's did Coleridge himself write, in his introduction to "Poems on Various Subjects," these words about Charles Lamb: "The effusions signed C. L. were written by Mr. Charles Lamb, of the India House-independently of the signature, their superior merit would have sufficiently distinguished them." And in no different spirit did Coleridge write of Wordsworth, years afterwards, in the "Biographia Literaria," when their ways had parted. He could explain generously then "what Mr. Wordsworth really intended" by the theories put forward in that famous preface which was too much for Coleridge.

But to return to the book, or rather, for the moment, to Wordsworth's account of it. As they endeavoured to proceed conjointly in the construction of the "Ancient Mariner "-it was still that same evening in which the poem was conceived-their respective manners proved so widely different that it would have been, to Wordsworth's mind, "quite presumptuous in me to do anything but separate from an undertaking upon which I could only have been a clog." "The Ancient Mariner' grew and grew," he adds, "till it became too important for our first object, which was limited to our expectation of five pounds; and we began to think of a volume, which was to consist, as Mr. Coleridge has told the world, of poems chiefly on supernatural subjects taken from common life, but looked at, as much as might be, through an imaginative medium." That "imaginative medium" was to distinguish these poems, we have been told elsewhere, from the rhymed stories of Crabbe. realism and prosaic realism, and what a world between then!

Poetic

In April 1798 Wordsworth wrote to his friend, the Bristol bookseller, "You will be pleased to hear that I have gone on adding very rapidly to my stock of poetry. Do come and let me read it to you under the old trees in the park." Definite proposals, too, were to be made, and it was written to Cottle-this time I think by Coleridge "We deem that the volumes offered to you are, to a certain degree, one work in kind.' That same spring, but later on, Cottle did visit Nether Stowey, and he writes of it in his own book of interesting if sometimes illegitimate gossip: "At this interview it was determined that the volume should be published under the title of Lyrical Ballads,' on the terms stipulated." Thirty guineas seems to have been Wordsworth's share. And, furthermore, it was settled that it should not contain the poem of "Salisbury Plain," but only