library of the British Museum form a striking in LETTERS TO MY SON AT ROME. stance of his zeal and indefatigable attention. LETTER VII. NOTICE OF THE REV. SAMUEL AYSCOUGH. Aldine Chambers, Paternoster Row, - MY DEAR SON, He soon acquired that slight degree of knowledge in several languages, and that technical knowledge of old books and their authors, and particularly that skill in deciphering difficult writing, which amply answered the most useful purposes of the librarian as well as the visiting scholar. He assisted also in the adjustment of the records in the Tower, and in the formation of many useful indexes and catalogues, some of which will be noticed hereafter. By these By way of addendum to my third letter, means his situation became very comfortable; and let me observe that, in prosecuting my account about a year before his death it was rendered yet of booksellers and their establishments, I shall, more so, by his being presented with the small vicaragreeably to my original design, include notices He wrote a very accurate account of that parish for age of Cudham, in Kent, by Lord Chancellor Eldon. of the most remarkable personages connected the Gentleman's Magazine a few weeks before he with them, especially of those who, from their died; and, by an affecting coincidence, it appeared own merit, have risen from obscurity to emi- in that excellent repository the same month in which nence. Among this number the world are his death was announced. This event happened perhaps indebted to the Messrs. Rivington for Oct. 30, 1804, at his apartments in the British Muthe valuable and useful labours of that extraor- cough was a man of a benevolent and charitable disseum, in the fifty-ninth year of his age. Mr. Aysdinary individual, Samuel Ayscough, Clerk, position, and frequently consulted how he might exF.S.A., &c., of whom his only faithful biogra-ercise these virtues, without reflecting that his means pher says were circumscribed. Having experienced much dis almost before he ceased to be a dependant. În his ready to alleviate it in others, and became a patron office in the Museum he will long be remembered for the pleasure he seemed to take in assisting the researches of the curious, and imparting the knowledge he had acquired of the vast resources in that national repository. With somewhat of roughness or bluntness in his manner, he delighted in volunteering his services in all cases where the visitors wished for information; and there was a preciseness and regularity in all the arrangements he had made, which enabled him to do this with a facility which often cannot be acquired by veteran bibliographers.* "This very useful contributor to the literary his-tress himself from pecuniary matters, he was ever tory of his country was the son of George Ayscough, of Nottingham, a respectable tradesman, who unfortunately launched into speculations which impaired his fortune. His son Samuel, after a school education, assisted his father in the business of a farm for some time, and afterwards was reduced to work as a labouring miller for the maintenance of his father and sister. While at this humble occupation, which did not procure the very moderate advantage he expected, Mr. Eamer, an old schoolfellow and friend, (afterwards Sir John Eamer, an alderman and lord mayor of London,) hearing of his distress about 1770, invited him to the metropolis, and obtained for him at first the office of an overlooker of some paviours in the street. Soon after, however, he assisted in the shop of Mr. Rivington, in St. Paul's Churchyard, and then obtained an employment in the British Museum, at a small weekly stipend. Here he discovered a degree of knowledge, which if not profound was highly useful, in arranging and cataloguing books and M.SS., and his services soon recommended him to an increase of salary, and to some extra employment in regulating the libraries of private gentlemen, the profits of which he shared with his father, whom he sent for to town, and maintained comfortably till his death, Nov. 18, 1783. About 1785 he was apthe establishment; and soon after, entering into holy orders, was ordained to the curacy of Normanton upon Soar, in Nottinghamshire. He was also appointed assistant curate at St. Giles's in the Fields, and in all those situations conducted himself in such a manner as to gain the friendship of many distinguished characters. In 1790 he was appointed to preach the Fairchild Lecture, on Whit Tuesday, at Shoreditch church, before the Royal Society, which he continued to do till 1804, when he completed the series of discourses in fifteen sermons. His labours in literature were of the most useful cast, and manifested a patience and assiduity seldom to be met with. And his laborious exertions in the vast and invaluable pointed assistant librarian to the British Museum on In 1783 Mr. Ayscough published a small political pamphlet-" Remarks on the Letters of an American Hector St. John; pointing out the pernicious TendFarmer; or, a Detection of the Errors of Mr. J. ency of those Letters to Great Britain." But among his more useful labours must be particularly distinguished his "Catalogue of the Manuscripts preserved in the British Museum, hitherto undescribed, conCollections of Sir Hans Sloane, Bart., and the Rev. sisting of Five Thousand Volumes, including the Thomas Birch, D.D., and about Five Hundred Volumes bequeathed, presented, or purchased at various is on a new plan, for the excellence of which an aptimes-1782, 2 vols. 4to." This elaborate catalogue peal may safely be made to every visitor to the Museum since the date of its publication. Mr. Ayscough assisted afterwards in the catalogue of printed books, 2 vols. folio, 1787, of which about two-thirds were compiled by Dr. Maty and Mr. Harper, and * At the present day, the intelligence which is evinced in the assistant librarians, and even in the porters of those assistants, at the British Museumand at the same time the sedulous and obliging attention which is paid by them to the reading visitors of the library-cannot be known or imagined but by those who frequent the noble and recently enlarged reading rooms at this great national establishment. the remainder by Mr. Ayscough. He was also at the time of his death employed in preparing a new catalogue of the printed books; and had completed a catalogue of the ancient charters of the Museum, amounting to about 16,000.† "As an index maker his talents are well known by the indexes he made to the Monthly Review, the Gentleman's Magazine, the British Critic, &c., (for which he had strictly to search almost every line of nearly two hundred volumes!) and especially a verbal index to Shakespear, a work of prodigious labour. It remains to be added that his knowledge of topographical antiquities was very considerable, and that perhaps no man, in so short a space of time, emerging too from personal difficulties, and contending with many disadvantages, ever acquired so much general knowledge, or knew how to apply it to mora useful purposes. The leading facts in this sketch (which has had the benefit, and revisal and correction from Mr. Alexander Chalmers) were thrown out with affection by the venerable and worthy Mr. Nichols, in the Gentleman's Magazine for December, 1804. To that miscellany he was a frequent contributor; and what he wrote was in a style which would not have discredited talents of which the world has a higher opinion." When I view the advantages to be derived from Ayscough's index to the Monthly Review, the Gentleman's Magazine, (and the work's review in them,) together with WATT's Biographia Bibliotheca, that great index to all works in various languages from the earliest printers in the fifteenth to the latest in the eighteenth century, I consider them a key to literature for upwards of 350 years. Of the latter book Mr. Dibdin observes-" That wonderful work of the late Mr. Watt-such a compendium of labour was hardly ever beheld: its uses and advantages are manifold and indispensable; and it should never fail to be a library companion' in all collections of extent or import ance." THE ALDINE TRIUMVIRATE.* We have brought down our rapid and sketchy memoir of Aldus Manutius Romanus to the period of that distinguished printer's death, in 1515; but we have additional matter to offer before we can proceed with our proposed notice of his successors. "The name of Aldus," remarks the editor of The Bibliographical and Retrospective Miscellany, published a few years since, "will live in the memory of man as long as there survives in the world the love of literature, of which he has shewn himself so deserving by his honourable labours. Whether Aldus was descended from a noble family or not is of little consequence; if he were really the son of a converted Jew, the greater honour doth it confer on him, who, in that case, was the founder and architect of his own fame: and the remark made by Lipsius of the two Scaligers, will apply with equal truth to the Alduses-that if they were not princes they deserved to be, on account of their extraordinary genius and wonderful erudition. For every man of superior talent and learning we must expect to find an envious Scoppius; yet were all that Ciofani has urged on this point against Aldus Manutius, strictly correct, how entirely is this pardonable vanity eclipsed by his patient and unwearied assiduity in rescuing the literature of Greece and Rome from the dark oblivion of the middle ages; devoting the best years of his life, and the whole of his fortune to the accomplishment of this grand object. Let any person who entertains for one moment the aspersions of a writer but little known, compare the undoubted compositions of the Venetian printer,-both the friend and companion of the great and the learned,-with the charge of ignorance and plagiarism, contained in the letters of Ciofani, and we feel assured that the suspicion against Aldus will immediately vanish. Mr. Hartshorne* declares these letters to be genuine :—we have examined their authority, and are convinced that they are atrocious libels, unworthy of the slightest credit.” It was chiefly through the example of Aldus Manutius, that the art of Greek Printing became familiar to many of the Cisalpine cities and universities early in the sixteenth century; it was through his labour and enterprise that Greek impressions, which had been antecedently very rare, were brought into com+ There is still greatly wanted, however, a Classed paratively general usage. A further illustration Catalogue of the books in the British Museum. of this interesting subject will be found in the Thus, if a person wish to consult the work or works of any particular author, he has only to refer to the subjoined cursory view of the origin and proauthor's name in the regular alphabetic catalogue;gress of Greek typography in Italy, condensed but if desirous of learning what works have been by Timperley, from GRESWELL'S Early Parisian written, and by whom, upon any specific subject-Greek Press. Pharmacy, or Meteorology, for instance--there is no channel open through which he can obtain the required information. Without a recollection of the names of the authors, nothing can be done. * Vide pages 2 and 52. "It is agreed that the oldest specimens of Greek printing consist of detached passages and citations, * Book of Rarities of the University of Cambridge. found in a very few of the first printed copies of Latin authors, such as Lactantius, in Monast. Sublacensi, anni 1465; the Aulus Gellius and Apuleius of Sweynheim and Pannartz of 1469; and some works of Bessarion, Roma, sine anno. In all these, it is remarkable that the Greek typography is legibly and creditably executed, whereas the Greek introduced into the Officia and Paradoxa of Cicero, Mediolani, per Ani. Zarotum, anni 1474, is so deformed as to be scarcely legible. The first printed entirely Greek book is Luscarsis Grammatica Gr. "Thus Greek typography seemed already to have attained in a measure its akun maturity; as was evinced by the specimens we have enumerated. It had already forced its way through the difficulties of so novel and extraordinary an undertaking. Nothing now remained but to secure and amplify the glory which had been acquired: and this object was effected by a new series of adventurers, who soon began to display an honourable emulation in the same career." The remainder of this abtract will be given in our next portion of The Aldine Triumvirate. THE WEEK BEFORE US. Mediolani, ex recognitione Demetrii Cretensis, per Dionysium Paravisinum, 4to. The character of this rare volume is elegant and of a moderate size; resembling that in which the same Grammar again appeared anno 1499. The same work, or a portion MEN, WOMEN, AND EVENTS OF of it, was repeated Grace, et cum Latina inter-MEN, pretatione, at Milan, anno 1480, 4to: and the next year, viz. anno 1481, from the same place and press issued Psalterium Græcum cum Latina recognitione, both these, under the revision of Joannes Crestoni, a monk of Placentia. Mattaire believes the printer of these several impressions of Milan to have been the same Dionysius Paravisinus. "Venice, which had hitherto vied with other cities both in the number and skill of its Latin typographers, had indeed sufficient cause of jealousy on observing the palm of earliest Greek printing thus borne away by Milan; yet she suffered ten years to elapse before the commencement of an actual rivalship in the same department. In 1486, that city produced in sacred literature a Psalterium Græcum, in profane, Homeri Batrachomyomachia. The first was executed by Alexander, and the latter by Leonicus, both Cretans. Mettaire describes the character of the Psalter as exhibiting a very antique and singular appearance. The Batrachomyomachia, nothing more legible than the former, is, however, furnished with accents and breathings. It also exhibits certain Greek scholia found in no early edition besides; and what is more singular, they are arranged between the lines of the poem, ut singulis carminibus interlineare superstet scholium. Both these scholia and the title page are printed en rouge. Such an intermixture of red and black in every page Mattaire thinks not unpleasing. Of this rare volume he procured in his own time a kind of fac-similie impression, which is known to collectors. "Milan and Venice, then, produced the earliest impressions; but whilst they were satisfied with such as were of a minor description, Florence contemplated a gigantic project, which was to throw all past efforts into the shade. It was nothing less than that noble edition of the whole works of Homer, Homeri Opera Omnia, Grace, which was finished anno 1488, in two fine volumes, folio, by the skill and industry of the same Demetrius of Crete, (who appears now to have transferred his residence from Milan to Florence,) under the special revision of Demetrius Chalcondyles, and at the expense of two patriotic Florentine citizens. Here then was an instance of art, starting as it were from its first rudiments into sudden and absolute perfection. Whether, says Mattaire, one regards the texture and colour of the paper, the agreeable form of the characters, the regular intervals of the lines, the fine proportion of the margins, or the tout ensemble, the combined execution and effect of the whole, even in later times nothing more elegant and finished has appeared. A Little Great Man.-Lavater.-Physiognomy.— He THE Emperor Maximilian I., grandfather to better silversmith than either. At the Escurial John Gaspar Lavater, the celebrated physiognomist, has now been dead thirty-eight years. He died in consequence of a wound, received when the French troops under Massena took Zurich, his native town, by storm. Lavater was born in 1741. There is much in first im. pressions; indeed, in our humble opinion, they he himself acted the imaginary sick man; but labouring at the time under a pulmonary complaint, and exerting himself with more than usual spirit, he ruptured a blood vessel, and was suffocated, in 1673, on the fourth performance of the piece. are nearly, if not altogether infallible; but they are the result of intuition less than of study; and, as we conceive, physiognomy can never be reduced to a science. Phrenology stands on a very different foundation: in that everything is determined by rule and system. Lavater, however, was an amiable enthusiast; and with him "the human countenance divine" had been long an object of intense and anxious study. To-morrow is the anniversary of the birth of that great Whig statesman, Charles James Fox, the second son of Henry, first Lord Holland. Fox was born in 1749, and died on the 13th of September, 1806, the same year in which the ashes of his great rival William Pitt were consigned to the tomb. In the introduction to one of Sir Walter Scott's poems are some ex-gazine published by Messrs. Longman and Co., quisite lines relating to these eminently distinguished men. To-morrow also forty-nine years will have elapsed since the passing of the decree for the suppression of monasteries in France. Edmund Halley, a name ever dear to astronomical science, will have been dead ninetyseven years on Monday; and on the same day George Berkeley, the learned and metaphysical Bishop of Cloyne, will have been dead eightysix. Berkeley's writings made much noise in their day, and are yet studied by many. Of the virgin Queen Elizabeth, who was crowned on the 15th of January, 1559, two hundred and eighty years ago, it was written"Shee was, shee is, what can there more be said, In earth the first, in heaven the second maid." This of Queen Elizabeth, the murdress of Mary Queen of Scots, and the perpetrator of a thousand other atrocities! Elizabeth understood six languages. Her translation of the "Meditations of the Queen of Navarre" was printed at London in 1548: her translation of Zenophon's Dialogue between Hiero and Simonides" was first printed in 1743, in No. 2 of the "Miscellaneous Correspondence." With her fine learning, Elizabeth was a most acute and profound critic on subjects of art, and we doubt not would have written upon them as well as many of the critics of our own day; in presumptive proof of which it is only necessary to mention her persuasion that shadows were unnatural in painting; and she accordingly ordered Isaac Oliver to paint her without any! Molière, the father of French comedy, and one of the first comic authors that ever wrote, was born on the 15th of January, 1622. His father was valet de chambre and upholsterer to the king. For twenty years Molière wrote for the stage; and during the whole of that period he was also an actor. His Tartuffe and Le Malade Imaginaire are immortal. In the latter Dr. John Aikin, to whom English periodical and general literature is greatly indebted, was born at Kibworth, in Leicestershire, on the 15th of January, 1747. His original destination was medicine; and he graduated as physician at Leyden, about the year 1784. In 1796, the period we believe of its commencement, he became the editor of the Monthly Magazine, which he superintended till 1806. He afterwards conducted the Athenæum, a ma but which, although it was supported in its literature by many of the first writers of the age, and contained numerous articles of sterling merit, failed to establish itself in the favour of the public, and was consequently, after a year or two's trial, discontinued. Dr. Aikin died at Stoke Newington, in the winter of 1822. On Wednesday next it will be thirty years ago since Sir John Moore fell at the battle of Corunna; fifty-nine years since Rodney's victory over Langara's fleet off Cape St. Vincent; forty-five years since the death of Gibbon, the historian; and 257 years since the death of Edmund Spenser, the illustrious author of the "Faery Queene." Spenser's View of the State of Ireland," written in the days of Elizabeth, is almost equally applicable in its truth of description to that wretchedly ill-governed country at the present hour. Then, as now, blood, murder, and burning were the order of the day. In Tyrone's rebellion poor Spenser was compelled to flee with such precipitancy as to be under the necessity of leaving behind him his infant, whom the merciless cruelty of the insurgents burnt with his house. instances speak volumes for the humanity, the honour, the glory of the men of O'Connell's Emerald Isle-that mill-stone for centuries put on the neck of Britain. Such Victor Alfieri, the great Italian poet, who figures in the memoirs of Prince Charles the Pretender, was born at Asti, in Piedmont, on the 17th of January, 1749. He died at Florence in the year 1803. Benjamin Franklin, the American philosopher, printer, statesman, and what not, regarded by some as everything that was great and wonderful, was born on the 17th of January, 1706, 133 years ago. Notwithstanding the parade which has been made about his character, we think lightly of him both morally and politically. His neglect of the woman to whom he was affianced, and who, if we mistake seven. Friday is the anniversary of the birth of that great and popular French writer Montesquieu, in 1689, and of the death of Dr. Sir Samuel Garth, an English poet, standing well in his day, in 1719. THE MARRIAGE SYSTEM. "Too oft by parents join'd, unknowing, innocent, John Ray, F.R.S., a celebrated English na- SOCIAL errors are far more dangerous to the turalist, will have been dead 134 years on peace and well-being of a community than the Thursday nex. He died at the age of seventy-misgovernment of politicians. These social errors are so common in practice, and so certain in effect, that without any great stretch of the use of language, they may be termed "systems." One of these systems has been made matter of comment in these pages,* and its errors were shewn to be detrimental in a serious degree in operation; and I am about to expose another that shakes morality to its foundation, as well as lowers the character of the community at large: I allude to the system of marriage, and often properly characterized as the trade of marriage ! Friday is also the anniversary of the marriage of Henry VII. of the race of Tudor, or Theodore, with Elizabeth of York, by which the two houses of York and Lancaster were united. DEATH'S GREETING. I COME-I come!—Thou loving one, I come-I come!-Thou trusting one, Like chaff to the winds of heaven! I come-I come!-More peace with ME I come-I come!-Thou mother fond, I come-I come!-Ay! build your halls, I come-I come !-Ye guilty tribe, With which the vexed land is rife None but a madman or a fool can look with indifference on the hundred, ay, thousand timestold tale of the abuse of marriage, with the frightful vices which the forced, the convenient, and the fashionable marriage entail on their victims, as daily reported in the public papers. Even now, in the face of evidence, which no art can render less strong-depositions of unerring witnessess, and the recorded decrees of judges which severally have pointed out the entailed miseries of forced marriages—even now too oft "the tender virgin takes A master, not a lover, to her arms.” What an eligible match this would be for my daughter, Harriet;" is often the exclamation of a mother; and the daughter forthwith has to play the part of unbounded affection to my Lord Noodle, who, with an awfully receding forehead and very long hair, takes the pretty maiden cooly by the hand, and makes her "Brutus' mistress, not his wife !" although the marriage ceremony has been gone through. She is destined to live in "the suburbs of his breast," and her office is but to "keep him warm," and "feed him with nourishing dishes," until, perhaps, the arrival of a favourite "danseuse," or Prima Donna, withdraws his appearances of affection, for they were never more, and having satiated his passion he leaves his * Vide "THE CREDIT SYSTEM." |