Seven years

Being as it's generally taken as a sign that you're out of your first youth when you begin to scant your birthdays, I suppose the fact that the seventh anniversary of this blog slipped past without my noticing earlier this month is a signal: middle age, surely, has arrived for IBRL, and I therefore should probably keep a weather eye out for midlife crises and hints of senescence.

With the period of seven years in mind, I turned to Isaac D'Israeli and the Curiosities of Literature. Surely he wouldn't mind if I took a passage completely out of context and applied an account of a young boy to a blog instead, one that could be described as

a child of [my] misfortunes, . . born in trouble, and a stranger to domestic endearments.

Oh, but that's not simply unfair to D'Israeli, but to IBRL, too: it's far from one of misfortune's many children--rather, its parents are enthusiasm and obsession, and though that pair could often be excused for looking askance at their offspring, I like to think that in this case they're at least not embarrassed.

If that passage isn't quite suitable, even when repurposed, then how about this one, from D'Israeli's later (and, one assumes, less successful) work, The Literary Character, Illustrated by the History of Men of Genius, Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions. The quotation is attributed to Boccaccio, praising himself as a prodigy while watering the grounds of his Decameron with modesty:

Before seven years of age, when as yet I had met with no stories, was without a master and hardly knew my letters, I had a natural talent for fiction, and produced some little tales.

There's been precious little fiction on this blog, but I do like the idea that seven years is the point at which one can say that he's begun to know some stories. In the Anatomy of Melancholy Robert Burton points out that, for a scholar, seven years is essentially nothing:

Most other Trades and Professions, after seven years' Prenticeship, are enabled by their craft to live of themselves. . . . only scholars, methinks, are most uncertain, unrespected, subject to all casualties and hazards.

Since I'm ripping quotations out at their roots and appropriating them inappropriately, I'll close with a few lines found in Holbrook Jackson's wonderfully strange and deliberately Burton-like Anatomy of Bibliomania. Nineteenth-century English scholar and librarian Henry Bradshaw, Jackson writes, donated his "famous collection of Irish books" to the Cambridge University library in gratitude for, Bradshaw explained,

the liberal manner in which the University enabled him for more than seven years to pursue the studies which he had most at heart.

Bradshaw's situation, of course, differed from mine in many ways, but the one that is perhaps the most salient is his gratitude that during that time  "no report during that time was ever demanded of him." No one, mind you, has been demanding the casual, modest, often silly reports I've been making here for seven years, but I've enjoyed writing them and hope you've enjoyed reading them. Thanks for taking the time to stop by over the years..

"How many secrets may the man of genius learn from literary anecdotes!", or, Isaac D'Israeli and the fortunate limits of method

The impressively unsystematic nature of Isaac D'Israeli's thought and writing is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that his clearest defense of his method doesn't appear until near the end of the first edition of his enormous (and ever-expanding) Curiosities of Literature. In the essay "Literary Anecdotes," he writes,

A writer of penetration sees connexions in literary anecdotes which are not immediately perceived by others; in his hands anecdotes, even should they be familiar to us, are susceptible of deductions and inferences, which become novel and important truths. Facts of themselves are barren; it is when these facts pass through our reflections, and become interwoven with our feelings, or our reasonings, that they are the finest illustrations; that they assume the dignity of “philosophy teaching by example;” that, in the moral world, they are what the wise system of Bacon inculcated in the natural knowledge deduced from experiments; the study of Nature in her operations. . . . For this reason, writers and artists should, among their recreations, be forming a constant acquaintance with the history of their departed kindred.

But D'Israeli doesn't rest his claims there--instead, he ups the ante a bit:

What perhaps he had in vain desired to know for half his life is revealed to him by a literary anecdote; and thus the amusements of indolent hours may impart the vigour of study; as we find sometimes in the fruit we have taken for pleasure the medicine which restores our health. How superficial is that cry of some impertinent pretended geniuses of these times, who affect to exclaim, “Give me no anecdotes of an author, but give me his works!” I have often found the anecdotes more interesting than the works.

A handful of writers featured in Javier Marias's catty, addictive Written Lives come to mind, though really one need only read D'Israeli to see his point: he tells of many a writer whose well-deserved literary obscurity does nothing to lessen the pleasures of the anecdotes retailed about him.

What makes this essay particularly interesting, however, is where D'Israeli carries his argument in subsequent paragraphs. First he recruits Dr. Johnson, avowed fan of anecdotes, to argue for his side, then he pivots on Johnson's acknowledgment that collectors "are not always so happy as to select the most important" in order to launch into a series of examples of anecdotes that offer little in the way of illumination:

Dr. J. Warton has informed the world that many of our poets have been handsome. This, certainly, neither concerns the world, nor the class of poets. It is trifling to tell us that Dr. Johnson was accustomed "to cut his nails to the quick." I am not much gratified by being informed, that Menage wore a greater number of stockings than any other person, excepting one, whose name I have really forgotten. The biographer of Cujas, a celebrated lawyer, says that two things were remarkable of this scholar. The first, that he studied on the floor, lying prostrate on a carpet, with his books about him; and, secondly, that his perspiration exhaled an agreeable smell, which he used to inform his friends he had in common with Alexander the Great!

It seems to me that D'Israeli gives the game away by that exclamation point at the end, if not by the earlier "I have really forgotten." Try as he might to make an argument that will bring him in line with Johnson and acknowledge a criticism he must surely have heard often from friends and acquaintances, he can't overcome his eye for a story: these tidbits are too good not to share--even when he's trying to select inanities, he can't help but choose entertaining ones.

In the essay's closing paragraph, D'Israeli even seems to acknowledge, if not the spirit of his disagreement with the point he claims to be trying to make, then at least a practical reason to object to overly assiduous weeding:

Yet of anecdotes which appear trifling, something may be alleged in their defence. It is certainly safer for some writers to give us all they know, than to try their discernment for rejection. Let us sometimes recollect that the page over which we toil will probably furnish materials for authors of happier talents.

Which seems worthy of a Friday night toast: to the literary magpies; long may they quest for shiny things in the quietest precincts of our libraries!

"He himself always remained a man of the eighteenth century," or, Powell weighs in on D'Israeli

{Portrait of Isaac D'Israeli, by Daniel Maclise, circa 1832.}

I can't believe I've been writing about Isaac D'Israeli for more than a week without checking in with my old friend Anthony Powell! Who, after all, is more likely to appreciate D'Israeli's towering piles of anecdote and gossip and oddity than that inveterate collector of same? Powell's love of pattern and recurrence, as well as his appreciation of self-willed complexity, is enough to have landed him in Robert Burton's melancholy camp rather than D'Israeli's cheerier one, but these are less warring armies than different regiments in the same, working together--if in styles as different as the cavalry and the infantry--to demonstrate the centrality of literature to the inner life of man.

Powell wrote about D'Israeli only once, in a review for the Daily Telegraph in 1969 of a biography by James Ogden, but even that brief account offers some new angles, as well as a pleasant dose of Powell's own preoccupations, such as D'Israeli's relatively scant references to John Aubrey.

From Benjamin Disraeli's introduction to his father's Curiosities of Literature, I knew that Isaac's father (also named Benjamin) had been a successful businessman, but from Powell I learned that he was one of the founders of the London Stock Exchange, his legacy substantial enough to keep his son in books and leisure despite his preferring the library over work. As Powell puts it,

Isaac seems to be a classic case of a young man given every opportunity for making a successful business career who for no particular reason decided he wanted to "write."

In the face of that--as I wrote on Sunday for the Constant Conversation, the new blog of the Quarterly Conversation--his father sent him away to Europe, which was of no use: Dizzy, as Powell calls him, was not destined to be any sort of businessman.

Powell also informs us that D'Israeli, as will not be surprising to anyone who's noted his skepticism about religion, was far from an observant Jew:

D'Israelie contributed liberally to synagogue funds and had certainly caused Benjamin to be given instruction in the Jewish faith, but he was not ardent in his religious observances. Accordingly the governors of the synagogue, as a call to order and much to his own annoyance, elected him as Warden; when he refused, they tried to fine him £40. This appears to be why Benjamin Disraeli was baptized at the age of twelve.

Which, given that Benjamin became Prime Minister of England, is quite a revenge.

Sadly, Powell also passes on a judgment that I'd rather not have heard:

There are indications that D'Israeli was regarded at times as a bore in his ceaseless asking of questions at dinner-parties.

Much as I'd have preferred to learn that D'Israeli was sparkling company, however, I'm selfish enough to be glad that he bored his contemporaries in order to entertain us, rather than vice-versa. To his dinner companions, I raise a grateful glass.

Angel urine is not conducive to spiritual growth, or, How not to create devotional paintings, courtesy of Isaac D'Israeli

While Isaac D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature is more frequently witty and wry than straight-up funny, one entry that made me laugh out loud was "Religious Nouvellettes." D'Israeli opens the essay by describing an illustrated prayer book from the fifteenth century, entitled Hortulus Animae, cum Oratiunculis aliquibus, superadditis quae in prioribus Libris non habentur (which my Internet Latin tells me means roughly "A Little Garden of the Spirit, with added short speeches not found in previous books").

The book's author calls his work "A garden, which abounds with flowers for the pleasure of the soul"--but, writes D'Israeli,

[T]hey are full of poison. In spite of his fine promises, the chief part of these meditations are as puerile as they are superstitious.

He saves his real scorn, however, for the accompanying illustrations--which, in their insipid mix of eras and beliefs, remind him of some truly hilarious-sounding devotional paintings:

We have had many gross anachronisms in similar designs. There is a laughable picture in a village in Holland, in which Abraham appears ready to sacrifice his son Issac by a loaded blunderbuss; but his pious intention is entirely frustrated by an angel urining in the pan. . . . [A]nother happy invention, to be seen on an alltar-piece at Worms, is that in which the Virgin throws Jesus into the hopper of a mill, while from the other side he issues changed into little morsels of bread, with which the priests feed the people. Matthison, a modern traveller, describes a picture in a church in Constance, called the Conception of the Holy Virgin. An old man lies on a cloud, whence he darts out a vast beam, which passes through a dove hovering just below; at the end of the beam appears a large, transparent egg, in which is seen a child in swaddling clothes with a glory round it. Mary sits leaning in an arm chair, and opens her mouth to receive the egg.

Is it just me, or does this all call to mind some definitely unholy mix of prog rock album cover art and these overly literal (and certainly overly competitive) depictions of Jesus?

Spider, spider, spinning bright . . .

{Photo by rocketlass.}

In my post the other day that drew on Isaac D'Israeli's accounts of how some literary luminaries spent their leisure time, I didn't point out the one that I found the strangest: Spinoza's habit of relaxing by setting spiders to fight each other. An admirer of Spinoza, I tend to glorify him a bit, thinking of him as an essentially gentle, bookish soul much put upon by the world, but learning of this oddly violent pastime has made me wonder whether I might have him all wrong. For a placid soul, what fun could there possibly be in watching spiders fight?

These spideatorial combats also led me to another question: how on earth did Spinoza find spiders whenever he happened to need a break from his labors? Maybe the Lords of the Ma'amad were right about his "monstrous deeds" after all--maybe a man who can conjure spiders at will should be cursed by day and by night, when he rises up and when he lies down, when he comes in and when he goes out.

Fortunately, further reading in D'Israeli restored my faith in Spinoza, at least so far as conjuring fighting spiders was concerned. Apparently spiders were just more readily at hand back in ye olden days, as they make two other appearances in the Curiosities of Literature.

The first example comes from the essay "Medical Music," which features an account of an unnamed officer who, confined to the Bastille, charmed his non-human cellmates with his lute:

At the end of a few days, this modern Orpheus, playing on his lute, was greatly astonished to see frisking from their holes great numbers of mice, and descending from their woven habitations crowds of spiders, who formed a circle about him, while he continued breathing his soul-subduing instrument. He was petrified with astonishment. Having ceased to play, the assembly, who did not come to see his person, but to hear his instrument, immediately broke up. As he had a great dislike to spiders, it was two days before he ventured again to touch his instrument. At length, having overcome, for the novelty of his company, his dislike of them, he recommenced his concert, when the assembly was by far more numerous than at first, and in the course of farther time, he found himself surrounded by a hundred musical amateurs.

At this point, it all seems like a scene from Disney short--music hath charms and all, right? Ah, but this soldier hath more of the Nuge than of Saint Francis about him:

Having thus succeeded in attracting this company, he treacherously contrived to get rid of them at his will. For this purpose he begged the keeper to give him a cat, which he put in a cage, and let loose at the very instant when the hairy people were most entranced by the Orphean skill he had displayed.

Now if you want to talk about someone who deserves to be cursed when he rises up and cursed when he lies down, &tc. . . .

But rather than blacken our souls with curses, let us turn to an act of kindness toward spiders, from D'Israeli's account of Anthony Magliabechi, a reader so voracious as to be nicknamed "the Glutton of Literature." D'Israeli describes him thus:

His habits of life were uniform. Ever among his books, he troubled himself with no other concern whatever, and the only interest he appeared to take for any living thing was his spiders. While sitting among his literary piles, he affected great sympathy for these weavers of webs, and perhaps in contempt of those whose curiosity appeared impertinent, he frequently cried out, "to take care not to hurt his spiders!"

I don't know whether D'Israeli was a fan of spiders--though his attention to them in his book is suggestive--but the rest of that description could easily apply to the compiler of the Curiosities himself.

"For a last proof of the stranger's constancy and attachment, he extracts more clothes and more dogs," or, D'Israeli on odd customs

One of the many, many great pleasures of Isaac D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature (about which I'll be writing soon for the Second Pass) is the author's decided skepticism, generated less by experience (for it seems he barely left his study) than by the receding waves of the Age of Reason. A lifetime of reading in history and philosophy left him with a healthy distrust of unlikely assertions, and in the Curiosities almost no area of human endeavor escapes unscathed, be it religion, history, science, myth, or even tales of "savage" cultures. Fortunately for us, in the battle between D'Israeli's desire for accuracy and his love of strange anecdote, the latter almost always wins--accompanied, perhaps, by a raised eyebrow, but retailed with zest nonetheless.

A reader of the Curiosities quickly becomes accustomed to D'Israeli's impressive eye for flummery, which makes the occasional instance of seemingly unwarranted credulity stand out. The most striking one I've encountered thus far is this bit of wild traveler's lore about hospitality rituals in Kamchatka, from "Singularities Observed by Various Nations in Their Repasts":

No customs seem more ridiculous than those practised by a Kamschatkan, when he wishes to make another his friend. He first invites him to eat. The host and his guest strip themselves in a cabin which is heated to an uncommon degree. While the guest devours the food with which they serve him, the other continually stirs the fire. The stranger must bear the excess of the heat as well as of the repast. He vomits ten times before he will yield; but, at length obliged to acknowledge himself overcome, he begins to compound matters. he purchases a moment's respite by a present of clothes or dogs; for his host threatens to heat the cabin, and oblige him to eat till he dies. The stranger has the right of retaliation allowed to him: he treats in the same manner, and exacts the same presents. Should his host not accept the invitation of him whom he had so handsomely regaled, in that case the guest would take possession of his cabin, till he had the presents returned to him which the other had in so singular a manner obtained.

Now, I suppose this could be an accurate depiction of Kamchatkan custom, but it sure sounds more like travelers' nonsense--unless, that is, one replaces "Kamschatkan," "cabin," and "eat" with "frat boy," "party," and "drink."

D'Israeli's unusual credulity about the Kamchatkans does give him an opportunity to display his surprising--for a late-eighteenth-century man--tolerance and openness to other cultures (a characteristic perhaps rooted in his own consciousness of being a Jew in a Christian kingdom). Immediately after parading the strangeness of this ritual before us, he makes a serious attempt to explain how it might have developed and what useful tests of true friendship it might entail, then closes with this thought:

The most singular customs would appear simple, if it were possible for the philosopher to understand them on the spot.

After which, he proceeds to describe some "barbarous" customs of the French court. Even D'Israeli has to draw the line somewhere!

"A continuity of labour deadens the soul," or, Thoughts for a Friday night

{Photo by rocketlass.}

At the end of what has, for me at least, been a long and busy week, tonight I offer you some thoughts on the importance of leisure, from an entry titled "Amusements of the Learned" in Isaac D'Israeli's inexhaustible Curiosities of Literature (1791):

Among the Jesuits it was a standing rule of the order, that after an application to study for two hours, the mind of the student should be unbent by some relaxation, however trifling. When Petavius was employed in his Dogmata Theologica, a work of the most profound and extensive erudition, the great recreation of the learned father was, at the end of every second hour, to twirl his chair for five minutes. After protracted studies Spinosa would mix with the family-party where he lodged, and join in the most trivial conversations, or unbend his mind by setting spiders to fight each other; he observed their combats with so much interest, that he was often seized with immoderate fits of laughter. A continuity of labour deadens the soul, observes Seneca, in closing his treatise on "The Tranquillity of the Soul," and the mind must unbend itself by certain amusements. Socrates did not blush to play with children. Cato, over his bottle, found an alleviation from the fatigues of government; a circumstance, Seneca says in his manner, which rather gives honour to this defect, than the defect dishonours Cato.

Seneca's take on Cato reminds me of the quip attributed to today's birthday boy, Abraham Lincoln, when people were nattering at him about Ulysses Grant's drinking:

I wish some of you would tell me the brand of whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.

D'Israeli, as is his wont, continues in that vein for a couple of pages, laying example after entertaining example before the reader, and thereby demonstrating the very pleasures of leisure he describes. One other account that's worth pointing out, if only because it presents such a striking contrast to the stern, dangerous character established for the ages by Dumas in The Three Musketeers, is this picture of Cardinal Richelieu unbending a bit:

Cardinal de Richelieu, amongst all his great occupations, found a recreation in violent exercises; and he was once discovered jumping with his servant, to try who could reach the highest side of a wall.

And the very next sentence, too, is worth sharing, for it offers a reminder that we must ever be aware that even as we're playing, we can be sure that someone is working:

De Grammont, observing the cardinal to be jealous of his powers, offered to jump with him; and, in the true spirit of a courtier, having made some efforts which nearly reached the cardinal's, confessed the cardinal surpassed him This was jumping like a politician; and by this means he is said to have ingratiated himself with the minister.

But it is Friday night, and while we may have left the office behind for another brief spell, and leisure may thus appropriately beckon I'll let Seneca have the last word--a reminder that our jobs don't represent the only work to which we should attend, or its paycheck the only rewards on offer:

Seneca concludes admirably, "whatever be the amusements you choose, return not slowly from those of the body to the mind; exercise the latter night and day. The mind is nourished at a cheap rate; neither cold nor heat, nor age itself, can interrupt this exercise; give therefore all your cares to a possession which ameliorates even in its old age!"

And with that, I'll take Seneca's advice--halfway, that is--and twirl in my chair for a while with a book . . . and a martini.

"The writer of half a century has outlived his critics; and, alas! has survived those whom he once had an ambition to please."

One of the most rewarding of my many current fascinations is Isaac D'Israeli's monumental collection of literary opinion, quotation, gossip, and anecdote, Curiosities of Literature, which D'Israeli shepherded through nine editions between 1791 and 1834. The preface to the ninth edition supplies the title to today's post, which finds me looking at Isaac's son, novelist and, later, prime minister Benjamin Disraeli.

Benjamin published his first novel, Vivian Grey (1826), at age twenty, and while it sold well, the critical response was savage. The worst of the reviews, in Blackwood's Magazine, called Disraeli "an obscure person for whom nobody gives a straw," and according to the The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, we can read the following passage from Disraeli's later novel Contarini Fleming (1832) as a lightly fictionalized account of the effect it had on him at the time:

With what horror, with what blank despair, with what supreme appalling astonishment did I find myself for the first time in my life the subject of the most reckless, the most malignant and the most adroit ridicule. I was sacrificed, I was scalped. . . . The criticism fell from my hand. A film floated over my vision, my knees trembled. I felt that sickness of heart that we experience in our first scrape. I was ridiculous. It was time to die.

Though the elder D'Israeli was, according to Benjamin's most recent biographer, Adam Kirsch, so wrapped up in his books as to be "an almost ethereal presence," Isaac does strike me as the sort who would at least take note of the bad review, and perhaps even think to send his son a note directing him to the wisdom offered in the Curiosities under "Sketches of Criticism."

In that essay, D'Israeli displays his admirable habit of getting straight to the point:

It may perhaps be some satisfaction to show the young writer, that the most celebrated ancients have been as rudely subjected to the tyranny of criticism as the moderns. Detraction has ever poured the “waters of bitterness.”

After which he offers us a ringing catalog of the calumnies under which the most celebrated of ancient authors have suffered, both in their lifetimes and after their deaths. Regarding Plato, for example, we are given a catalog of epithets that gathers momentum as it descends from the heights:

Plato, who has been called, by Clement of Alexandria, the Moses of Athens; the philosopher of the Christians, by Arnobius; and the god of philosophers, by Cicero; Athenæus accuses of envy; Theopompus, of lying; Suidas, of avarice; Aulus Gellius, of robbery; Porphyry, of incontinence; and Aristophanes, of impiety.

An account of Horace, on the other hand, reminds us that, as JT still assures us these many centuries later, what goes around comes around:

Horace censures the coarse humour of Plautus; and Horace, in his turn, has been blamed for the free use he made of the Greek minor poets.

D'Israeli's account of the criticisms of the Attic Nights of Aulus Gelius (who himself, you'll recall, had the temerity to call Plato a robber) are worth including both for their turn of phrase and for their invocation of an old favorite, Robert Burton:

The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, and the Deipnosophists of Athenæus, while they have been extolled by one party, have been degraded by another. They have been considered as botchers of rags and remnants; their diligence has not been accompanied by judgement; and their taste inclined more to the frivolous than to the useful. Compilers, indeed, are liable to a hard fate, for little distinction is made in their ranks; a disagreeable situation, in which honest Burton seems to have been placed; for he says of his work, that some will cry out, “This is a thinge of meere industrie; a collection without wit or invention ; a very toy! So men are valued! their labours vilified by fellowes of no worth themselves, as things of nought; who could not have done as much? some understande too little, and some too much.”

As the ghost of Robert Frost will surely haunt me for writing, one could do worse than be a botcher of rags and remnants.

But perhaps the sweetest consolation came far too late for either father or son to see it: Blackwood's Magazine itself offered praise for Vivian Grey in its February 1905 issue. In an unsigned article titled "Musings without Method," the magazine wrote of a recent rise in the critical opinion of Disraeli's novels--and specifically of Vivian Grey:

That it has the faults of inexperience is obvious. "Books written by boys," said Disraeli, "which pretend to give a picture of manners, and to deal in knowledge of human nature, must be affected." And Vivian Grey is affected in style, in plot, and in character. Nevertheless, it possesses the quality of sincerity--a sincerity to youth and high spirits.

While the journal acknowledges that,

It is Byronic, it is lackadaisical, it is fantastic. Its hero cares not for dinner so long as he is in time for the guava and liqueurs.

--at the same time it admires the fact that

[U]nder the velvet glove of aestheticism there is the iron hand of action, and Vivian Grey, when he is not displaying his eloquence, is ready to manage mankind "by studying their tempers and humouring their weaknesses." In other words, he has always a smile for a friend and a sneer for the world. But to whatever page you turn in this romance you find traces of the life and energy which were characteristic of its author. He tried many things in his life and save in poetry he always succeeded.

I, for one, would be happy with such an epitaph as that last.

Assuming D'Israeli senior continues to hold my interest, I just may have to also dive into the works of Disraeli junior; I'll report back what I learn.

"If you love the man of letters, seek him in the privacies of his study."

After a very pleasant, but long, week of meetings, appointments, and professional conversations in my non-blogging life, I'm heartened by the following anecdotes from Isaac D'Israeli's "Men of Genius Deficient in Conversation", found in his Curiosities of Literature (1791).

{Not that I would by any stretch of the imagination ever claim to be a genius, mind you--I'm just tired of hearing myself talk . . .}

The great Peter Corneille, whose genius resembled that of our Shakespeare, and who has so forcibly expressed the sublime sentiments of the hero, had nothing in his exterior that indicated his genius; on the contrary, his conversation was so insipid that it never failed of wearying. Nature, who had lavished on him the gifts of genius, had forgotten to blend with them her more ordinary ones. He did not even speak correctly that language of which he was such a master.

When his friends represented to him how much more he might please by not disdaining to correct these trivial errors, he would smile, and say—“I am not the less Peter Corneille!”

. . . .

The deficiencies of Addison in conversation are well known. He preserved a rigid silence amongst strangers; but if he was silent, it was the silence of meditation. How often, at that moment, he laboured at some future Spectator!

Mediocrity can talk; but it is for genius to observe.

The cynical Mandeville compared Addison, after having passed an evening in his company, to “a silent parson in a tie-wig.” It is no shame for an Addison to receive the censures of a Mandeville; he has only to blush when he calls down those of a Pope.

. . . .

Chaucer was more facetious in his tales than in his conversation; and the Countess of Pembroke used to rally him by saying that his silence was more agreeable to her than his conversation.

And now to the quiet of my house, and the next book on the pile.

"I am persuaded that of all persons in the kingdom, none are more neglected than those who devote themselves entirely to literature."

A couple of weeks ago, after I quoted some lines from Isaac D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature (1791) that I'd come across in The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, a kindly reader sent me a link to the entire text of D'Israeli's volume online. It's separated conveniently into its constituent essays--and with titles such as "The Bibliomania," "Literary Impostures," "Literary Blunders," and "Professors of Plagiarism and Obscurity," how could it not be great? I've only poked around in it a tiny bit, but it's already yielded some great nuggets, many of which I'm sure will find their way here eventually.

The most fun essay I've come across so far is "The Good Advice of an Old Literary Sinner," which D'Israeli opens with the lament that,

Authors of moderate capacity have unceasingly harassed the public; and have at length been remembered only by the number of wretched volumes their unhappy industry has produced.

He then recounts the story of the graphomaniacal Abbé de Marolles,

a most egregious scribbler; and so tormented with violent fits of printing, that he even printed lists and catalogues of his friends. I have even seen at the end of one of his works a list of names of those persons who had given him books. He printed his works at his own expense, as the booksellers had unanimously decreed this.

Along with his 133,124 poems--of which, on being told by the Abbé that they had cost him little to print, a fellow poet sarcastically remarked, "They cost you what they are worth"--the Abbé was also known for his "detestable versions" of works from other languages. D'Israeli notes,

He wrote above eighty volumes, which have never found favour in the eyes of the critics; yet his translations are not without their use, though they never retain by any chance a single passage of the spirit of their originals.

The most remarkable anecdote respecting these translations is, that whenever this honest translator came to a difficult passage, he wrote in the margin, “I have not translated this passage, because it is very difficult, and in truth I could never understand it.”

D'Israeli--who, by the way, was the father of Victorian novelist and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli--seems, at least on short acquaintance, inclined to leaven his harsh criticisms with at least a dollop of kindness. In the case of the Abbé, he acknowledges that, aside from his literary sins, he was a "most estimable and ingenious man." And he even verges on praise for one of the Abbé's productions, writing that his bitter and self-pitying Memoirs are "not destitute of entertainment."

I took the title of this post from D'Israeli's quotations from that book, which offers this line as well:

I have omitted to tell you, that I do not advise any one of my relatives or friends to apply himself as I have done to study, and particularly to the composition of books, if he thinks that will add to his fame or fortune.

But, especially given the news out of the publishing world these days, you all knew that already, didn't you?