Part 60

Mr. Hill Burton, in his Book-hunter, relates the following incident of Heber's experience in the rarity-market. A celebrated dealer in old books was passing a chandler's shop, where he was stopped by a few filthy old volumes in the window. One of them he found to be a volume of old English poetry, which he--a practised hand in that line--saw was utterly unknown as existing, though not unrecorded. Three and sixpence was asked; he stood out for a half-a-crown, on first principles, but, not succeeding, he paid the larger sum, and walked away, book in pocket, to a sale, where the first person he saw was Heber. Him the triumphant bookseller drew into a corner, with "Why do you come to auctions to look for scarce books, when you can pick up such things as this in a chandler's shop for three and sixpence?" "Bless me, ----, where did you get this?" "That's tellings! I may get more there." "----, I must have this." "Not a penny under thirty guineas!" A cheque was drawn, and a profit of 17,900 per cent. cleared by the man who had his eyes about him, in whose estimation such a sum was paltry compared with the triumph over Heber.

Mr. Heber's taste strengthened as he grew older. Not only was his collection of old English literature unprecedented, but he brought together a larger number of fine copies of Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese books than had ever been possessed by a private individual. His house at Hodnet, in Shropshire, was nearly all library. His house in Pimlico (where he died in 1833) was filled with books from top to bottom: every chair, table, and passage containing "piles of erudition." A house in York Street, Westminster, was similarly filled. He had immense collections of books in houses rented merely to contain them, at Oxford, Paris, Antwerp, Brussels, and Ghent. When he died, curiosity was naturally excited to know what provision he had made in reference to his immense store of books; but when his will was discovered, after a long and almost hopeless search among bills, notes, memoranda, and letters, it was found, to the astonishment of every one on reading it, that the library was not even mentioned! It seemed as if Heber cared nothing what should become of the books, or who should possess them, after his decease; and as he was never married, or influenced greatly by domestic ties, his library was considered by the executors of his will as merely so much "property," to be converted into cash by the aid of the auctioneer. What was the number of books possessed by him or the amount of money paid for them, appears to have been left in much doubt. Some estimated the library at 150,000 volumes, formed at a cost of 100,000l.; others reckoned it at 500,000 volumes, at an aggregate value of 250,000l. The truth was, his executors did not know in how many foreign towns his collections of books were placed. Thus it could not accurately be ascertained what portion of the whole was sold by auction in London in 1834-6; but the mere catalogue of that portion fills considerably more than two thousand printed octavo pages. The sales were conducted by Mr. Evans, Messrs. Sotheby, and other book-auctioneers, and occupied two hundred and two days, extending through a period of upwards of two years from April 10, 1834, to July 9, 1836. One copy of the catalogue has been preserved, with marginal manuscript notes, relating to almost every lot; and from this a summary of very curious information is deducible. It appears that, whatever may have been the number of volumes sold by auction, or otherwise got rid of abroad, those sold at this series of auctions in London were 117,613 in number, grouped into 52,672 lots. As regards the ratio borne by the prices obtained, to those which Mr. Heber had paid for the books in question, the account as rendered showed that the auctioneer's hammer brought 56,775l. for that which had cost 77,150l. It would appear, therefore, that the losses accruing to Mr. Heber's estate through his passion for book-collecting, amounted to upwards of 20,000l., and this irrespective of the fate of the continental libraries.

Sir John Soane Lampooned.

Sir John Soane, who bequeathed to the country his Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields, which cost him upwards of 50,000l., was the son of a bricklayer, and was born at Reading in 1753; he was errand-boy to Dance, the architect, and subsequently his pupil. He rose to great eminence, grew rich and liberal; he gave for Belzoni's elaborate sarcophagus in the Soane Museum, 2,000 guineas; paid large sums for art rarities; subscribed 1,000l. for the Duke of York's monument, was contended with his knighthood, and declined to receive a baronetcy. Yet he was a man of overweening vanity, and was much courted by legacy-hunters; whilst his alienation from his son assisted in raising up many enemies, in addition to those which Soane's remarkable success brought against him. From the latter section may have proceeded the following curious and popular squib of the day, said to have been found under the plates at one of the artistic or academic dinners. It is headed:--

"THE MODERN GOTH.

"Glory to thee, great Artist! soul of taste! For mending pigsties where a plank's misplaced: Whose towering genius plans from deep research Houses and temples fit for Master Birch To grace his shop on that important day, When huge twelfth-cakes are raised in bright array. Each pastry pillar shows thy vast design-- Hail! then, to thee, and all great works of thine. Come, let me place thee, in the foremost rank, With him whose dullness discomposed the bank; [A line illegible.] Thy style shall finish what his style begun. Thrice happy Wren! he did not live to see The dome that's built and beautified by thee. Oh! had he lived to see thy blessed work, To see plaster scored like loins of pork; To see the orders in confusion move: Scrolls fixed below, and pedestals above: To see defiance hurled at Rome and Greece, Old Wren had never left the world in peace. Look where I will, above, below, is shown A pure disordered order of thine own; Where lines and circles curiously unite, A base, confounded, compound Composite: A thing from which, in truth it may be said, Each lab'ring mason turns abash'd his head; Which Holland reprobates, and Dance derides, Whilst tasteful Wyatt holds his aching sides. Here crawl, ye spiders! here, exempt from cares, Spin your fine webs above the bulls and bears! Secure from harm enjoy the charnell'd niche: No maids molest you, for no brooms can reach; In silence build from models of your own, But never imitate the works of Soane!"

Soane is described by his biographer as "one of the vainest and most self-sufficient of men, who courted praise and adulation from every person and source, but dreaded, and was even maddened by, anything like impartial and discriminating criticism." But he grew so disgusted with his flatterers, that a short time before his death he shut himself up in a house at Richmond, to get out of the way of their attentions.

Numeros memini. VIRGIL.]

Extraordinary Calculators.

On the 3rd of July, 1839, some of the eminent members of the Academy of Sciences at Paris, including MM. Arago, Lacroix, Libri, and Sturm, met to examine a remarkable boy whose powers of mental calculation were deemed quite inexplicable. This boy, named Vito Mangiamele, a Sicilian, was the son of a shepherd, and was about eleven years old. The examiners asked him several questions which they knew, under ordinary circumstances, to be tedious of solution--such as, the cube root of 3,796,416, and the 10th root of 282,475,249; the first of these he answered in half-a-minute, the second in three minutes. One question was of the following complicated character--"What number has the following proportions, that if its cube is added to 5 times its square, and then 42 times the number, and the number 42 be subtracted from the result, the remainder is equal to 0 or zero." M. Arago repeated this question a second time, but while he was finishing the last word, the boy replied--"The number is 5!"

In the same year, Master Bassle, who was only thirteen years of age, went through an extraordinary mnemonic performance at Willis's Rooms, London. Five large sheets of paper, closely printed with tables of dates, specific gravities, velocities, planetary distances, &c., were distributed among the visitors, and every one was allowed to ask Master Bassle a question relating to these tables, to which was received a correct answer. He would also name the day of the week on which any day of the month had fallen in any particular year. He could repeat long series of numbers backwards and forwards, and point out the place of any number in the series; and to prove that his powers were not merely confined to the rows of numbers in the printed tables, he allowed the whole company to form a long series, by contributing each two or three digits in the order in which they sat; and then, after studying this series for a few minutes, he committed it to memory, and repeated it entire, both backwards and forwards, from the beginning to the end. These performances are believed to have been not the result of any natural mnemonic power, but of a method to be acquired by any person in the course of twelve lessons.

Zerah Colburn, who excited much interest in London in 1812, was a native of Vermont, in the United States. At six years old, he suddenly showed extraordinary powers of mental calculation. By processes which seemed to be almost unconscious to himself, and were wholly so to others, he answered arithmetical questions of considerable difficulty. When eight years old, he was brought to London, where he astonished many learned auditors and spectators by giving correct solutions to such problems as the following: raise 8 up to the 16th power; give the square root of 106,929; give the cube root of 268,336,125; how many seconds are there in 48 years? The answers were always given in very few minutes--sometimes in a few seconds. He was ignorant of the ordinary rules of arithmetic, and did not know how or why particular modes of process came into his mind. On one occasion, the Duke of Gloucester asked him to multiply 21,734 by 543. Something in the boy's manner induced the Duke to ask how he did it, from which it appeared that the boy arrived at the result by multiplying 65,202 by 181, an equivalent process; but why he made this change in the factors, neither he nor any one else could tell. Zerah Colburn was unlike other boys also in this, that he had more than the usual number of toes and fingers; a peculiarity observable also in his father and in some of his brothers.

An exceptional instance is presented in the case of Mr. Bidder, of this faculty being cultivated to a highly useful purpose. George Parker Bidder, when six years old, used to amuse himself by counting up to 100, then to 1,000, then to 1,000,000: by degrees he accustomed himself to contemplate the relations of high numbers, and used to build up peas, marbles, and shot, into squares, cubes, and other regular figures. He invented processes of his own, distinct from those given in books on arithmetic, and could solve all the usual questions mentally more rapidly than other boys with the aid of pen and paper. When he became eminent as a civil engineer, he was wont to embarrass and baffle the parliamentary counsel on contested railway bills, by confuting their statements of figures almost before the words were out of their mouths. In 1856, he gave to the Institution of Civil Engineers an interesting account of this singular arithmetical faculty--so far, at least, as to show that memory has less to do with it than is generally supposed; the processes are actually worked out seriatim, but with a rapidity almost inconceivable.

The most famous calculator in the last century was Jedediah Buxton, who, in 1754, resided for several weeks at St. John's Gate, Smithfield. This man, though he was the son of a schoolmaster, and the grandson of the vicar of his native parish, Elmeton, in Derbyshire, had never learned to write, but he could conduct the most intricate calculations by his memory alone; and such was his power of abstraction that no noise could disturb him. One who had heard of his astonishing ability as a calculator, proposed to him for solution the following question:--In a body whose three sides measure 23,145,789 yards, 5,642,732 yards, and 54,965 yards, how many cubical eighths-of-an-inch are there? This obtuse reckoning he made in a comparatively short time, although pursuing the while, with many others, his labours in the fields. He could walk over a plot of land and estimate its contents with as much accuracy as if it had been measured by the chain. His knowledge was, however, limited to figures. In 1754, Buxton walked to London, with the express intention of obtaining a sight of the King and Queen, for beyond figures, royalty formed the only subject of his curiosity. In this intention he was disappointed: he was, however, introduced to the Royal Society, whom he called the "volk of the Siety Court." They tested his powers, and dismissed him with a handsome gratuity.

He was next taken by his hospitable entertainer at St. John's Gate, to see Garrick in the character of Richard III. at Drury Lane Theatre, when undazzled by the splendour of the stage appointments, and unmoved by the eloquent passion of the actor, the simple rustic employed himself in reckoning the number of words he heard, and the sum total of the steps made by the dancers; and after the performance of a fine piece of music, he declared that the innumerable sounds had perplexed him.

To these feats may be added the following:--Buxton multiplied a sum of thirty-nine places of figures into itself and even conversed whilst performing it. His memory was so great, that he could leave off and resume the operation at the distant period of a week, or even several months. He said that he was drunk once with reckoning by memory from May 17 until June 16, and then recovered after sleeping soundly for seven hours. The question which occupied him so intensely was the reduction of a cube of upwards of 200,000,000 of miles into barleycorns, and then into hairs'-breaths of an inch in length. He kept an account of all the beer which he had drunk for forty years, which was equal to five thousand one hundred and sixteen pints: of these two thousand one hundred and thirty-two were drunk at the Duke of Kingston's and only ten at his own house.

There was a portrait of Buxton at Rufford Abbey, Nottinghamshire. A print of him was engraved in the Gentleman's Magazine, June, 1754, with this subscription: "Jedediah Buxton. Ætat. 49.--Numeros memini. Virgil." He was married and had several children, and died at the age of 70, in the year 1777.

Charles Lamb's Cottage at Islington.

In a very pleasant paper on "Ideal Houses," in No. 4 of the Cornhill Magazine, we find this clever sketch of a few of the amiable eccentricities of our famous Essayist, Charles Lamb:--

"I believe," says the contributor, "more in the influence of dwellings upon human character than in the influence of authority on matters of opinion. The man may seek the house, or the house may form the man; but in either case the result is the same. A few yards of earth, even on this side of the grave, will make all the difference between life and death. If our dear old friend, Charles Lamb, was now alive (and we must all wish he was, if only that he might see how every day is bringing him nearer the crown that belongs only to the Prince of British Essayists), there would be something singularly jarring to the human nerves in finding him at Dalston, but not so jarring in finding him a little farther off at Hackney. He would still have drawn nourishment in the Temple and in Covent Garden; but he must surely have perished if transplanted to New Tyburnia. I cannot imagine him living at Pentonville (I cannot, in my uninquiring ignorance, imagine who Penton was, that he should name a ville?), but I can see a certain appropriate oddity in his cottage at Colebrook Row, Islington.

"In the first place, we may agree that this London suburb is very odd, without going into the vexed question of whether it was very 'merry.' In the second place, this same Colebrook Row was built a few years before our dear old friend was born--I believe, in 1770. In the third place, it was called a 'Row,' though 'Lane' or 'Walk' would have been as old and as good; but 'Terrace' or 'Crescent' would have rendered it unbearable. The New River flowed calmly past the cottage walls--as poor George Dyer found to his cost--bringing with it fair memories of Isaak Walton and the last two centuries. The house itself had also certain peculiarities to recommend it. The door was so constructed that it opened into the chief sitting-room; and this, though promising much annoyance, was really a source of fun and enjoyment to our dear old friend. He was never so delighted as when he stood on the hearth-rug receiving many congenial visitors as they came to him on the muddiest-boot and the wettest-of-umbrella days. His immediate neighbourhood was also peculiar.

"It was there that weary wanderers came to seek the waters of oblivion. Suicide could pitch upon no spot so favourable for its sacrifice as the gateway leading into the river inclosure before Charles Lamb's cottage. Waterloo Bridge had not long been built, and was not then a fashionable theatre for self-destruction. The drags were always kept ready in Colebrook Row, at a small tavern a few doors from the cottage. The landlord's ear, according to his own account, had become so sensitive by repeated practice, that when aroused at night by a heavy splash in the water, he could tell by the sound whether it was an accident or a wilful plunge. He never believed that poor George Dyer tumbled in from carelessness, though it was no business of his to express an opinion on the matter. After the eighth suicide within a short period, Charles Lamb began to grow restless.

"'Mary,' he said to his sister, 'I think it's high time we left this place;' and so they went to Edmonton."

Thomas Hood.

This remarkable man of genius whose wit and humour entitle him to high rank in English literature, was born in 1798, in the Poultry, London, where his father was, for many years, acting partner in the firm of Vernor, Hood, and Sharpe, extensive booksellers and publishers. "There was a dash of ink in my blood," he writes: "my father wrote two novels, and my brother was decidedly of a literary turn, to the great disquietude, for a time, of an anxious parent." Thomas Hood was sent to a school in Tokenhouse Yard, in the City, as a day-boarder. The two maiden sisters, who kept the school, and with whom Hood took his dinner, had the odd name of Hogsflesh, and they had a sensitive brother, who was always addressed as "Mr. H.," and who subsequently became the prototype of Charles Lamb's unsuccessful farce, called "Mr. H."

In 1812, Hood was sent to a day-school, his account of which is as follows:--"In a house formerly a suburban seat of the unfortunate Earl of Essex, over a grocer's shop, up two pair of stairs, there was a very select day-school, kept by a decayed Dominie, as he would have been called in his native land. In his better days, when my brother was his pupil, he had been master of one of those wholesale concerns in which so many ignorant men have made fortunes, by favour of high terms, low ushers, gullible parents, and victimized little boys. Small as was our college, its principal maintained his state, and walked gowned and covered. His cap was of faded velvet, of black, or blue, or purple, or sad-green, or, as it seemed, of altogether, with a sad nuance of brown; his robe of crimson damask lined with the national tartan. A quaint, carved, high-backed elbowed article, looking like an émigré from a set that had been at home in an aristocratical drawing-room under the ancien régime, was his professional chair, which, with his desk, was appropriately elevated on a dais some inches above the common floor. From this moral and material eminence he cast a vigilant yet kindly eye over some dozen of youngsters: for adversity, sharpened by habits of authority, had not soured him, or mingled a single tinge of bile with the peculiar red-streak complexion so common to the wealthier natives of the north...." "In a few months, my education progressed infinitely farther than it had done in as many years under the listless superintendence of B.A. and LL.D. and assistants. I picked up some Latin, was a tolerable grammarian, and so good a French scholar, that I earned a few guineas--my first literary fee--by revising a new edition of Paul et Virginie for the press. Moreover, as an accountant, I could work a summum bonum, that is, a good sum."

Young Hood finished his education at Wanostrocht's Academy at Camberwell; and removed thence to a merchant's counting-house in the City, where he realized his own inimitable sketch of the boy "Just set up in Business:"--

"Time was I sat upon a lofty stool, At lofty desk, and with a clerkly pen Began each morning at the stroke of ten To write in Bell and Co.'s commercial school, In Warnford Court, a shady nook and cool, The favourite retreat of merchant men; Yet would my quill turn vagrant even then, And take stray dips in the Castalian pool. Now double entry--now a flowery trope-- Mingling poetic honey with trade wax: Blogg, Brothers--Milton--Grote and Prescott--Pope-- Bristles and Hogg--Glyn, Mills, and Halifax-- Rogers and Towgood--Hemp--the Bard of Hope-- Barilla--Byron--Tallow--Burns, and Flax."