Part 5

It occurred to the Judge long ago to prepare a list of the names of the famous bald men in the history of human society, and this list has grown until it includes the names of thousands, representing every profession and vocation. Homer, Socrates, Confucius, Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Pliny, Maecenas, Julius Caesar, Horace, Shakespeare, Bacon, Napoleon Bonaparte, Dante, Pope, Cowper, Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Israel Putnam, John Quincy Adams, Patrick Henry--these geniuses all were bald. But the baldest of all was the philosopher Hobbes, of whom the revered John Aubrey has recorded that "he was very bald, yet within dore he used to study and sitt bare-headed, and said he never took cold in his head, but that the greatest trouble was to keepe off the flies from pitching on the baldness."

In all the portraits and pictures of Bonaparte which I have seen, a conspicuous feature is that curl or lock of hair which depends upon the emperor's forehead, and gives to the face a pleasant degree of picturesque distinction. Yet this was a vanity, and really a laughable one; for early in life Bonaparte began to get bald, and this so troubled him that he sought to overcome the change it made in his appearance by growing a long strand of hair upon his occiput and bringing it forward a goodly distance in such artful wise that it right ingeniously served the purposes of that Hyperion curl which had been the pride of his youth, but which had fallen early before the ravages of time.

As for myself, I do not know that I ever shared that derisive opinion in which the unthinking are wont to hold baldness. Nay, on the contrary, I have always had especial reverence for this mark of intellectuality, and I agree with my friend Judge Methuen that the tragic episode recorded in the second chapter of II. Kings should serve the honorable purpose of indicating to humanity that bald heads are favored with the approval and the protection of Divinity.

In my own case I have imputed my early baldness to growth in intellectuality and spirituality induced by my fondness for and devotion to books. Miss Susan, my sister, lays it to other causes, first among which she declares to be my unnatural practice of reading in bed, and the second my habit of eating welsh-rarebits late of nights. Over my bed I have a gas-jet so properly shaded that the rays of light are concentrated and reflected downward upon the volume which I am reading.

Miss Susan insists that much of this light and its attendant heat falls upon my head, compelling there a dryness of the scalp whereby the follicles have been deprived of their natural nourishment and have consequently died. She furthermore maintains that the welsh-rarebits of which I partake invariably at the eleventh hour every night breed poisonous vapors and subtle megrims within my stomach, which humors, rising by their natural courses to my brain, do therein produce a fever that from within burneth up the fluids necessary to a healthy condition of the capillary growth upon the super-adjacent and exterior cranial integument.

Now, this very declaration of Miss Susan's gives me a potent argument in defence of my practices, for, being bald, would not a neglect of those means whereby warmth is engendered where it is needed result in colds, quinsies, asthmas, and a thousand other banes? The same benignant Providence which, according to Laurence Sterne, tempereth the wind to the shorn lamb provideth defence and protection for the bald. Had I not loved books, the soul in my midriff had not done away with those capillary vestiges of my simian ancestry which originally flourished upon my scalp; had I not become bald, the delights and profits of reading in bed might never have fallen to my lot.

And indeed baldness has its compensations; when I look about me and see the time, the energy, and the money that are continually expended upon the nurture and tending of the hair, I am thankful that my lot is what it is. For now my money is applied to the buying of books, and my time and energy are devoted to the reading of them.

To thy vain employments, thou becurled and pomaded Absalom! Sweeter than thy unguents and cosmetics and Sabean perfumes is the smell of those old books of mine, which from the years and from the ship's hold and from constant companionship with sages and philosophers have acquired a fragrance that exalteth the soul and quickeneth the intellectuals! Let me paraphrase my dear Chaucer and tell thee, thou waster of substances, that

For me was lever han at my beddes hed A twenty bokes, clothed in black and red Of Aristotle and his philosophie, Than robes rich, or fidel, or sautrie; But all be that I ben a philosopher Yet have I but litel gold in cofre!

Books, books, books--give me ever more books, for they are the caskets wherein we find the immortal expressions of humanity--words, the only things that live forever! I bow reverently to the bust in yonder corner whenever I recall what Sir John Herschel (God rest his dear soul!) said and wrote: "Were I to pay for a taste that should stand me in stead under every variety of circumstances and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to me during life, and a shield against its ills, however things might go amiss and the world frown upon me, it would be a taste for reading. Give a man this taste and a means of gratifying it, and you can hardly fail of making him a happy man; unless, indeed, you put into his hands a most perverse selection of books. You place him in contact with the best society in every period of history--with the wisest, the wittiest, the tenderest, the bravest, and the purest characters who have adorned humanity. You make him a denizen of all nations, a contemporary of all ages. The world has been created for him."

For one phrase particularly do all good men, methinks, bless burly, bearish, phrase-making old Tom Carlyle. "Of all things," quoth he, "which men do or make here below by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books." And Judge Methuen's favorite quotation is from Babington Macaulay to this effect: "I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading."

Kings, indeed! What a sorry lot are they! Said George III. to Nicol, his bookseller: "I would give this right hand if the same attention had been paid to my education which I pay to that of the prince." Louis XIV. was as illiterate as the lowliest hedger and ditcher. He could hardly write his name; at first, as Samuel Pegge tells us, he formed it out of six straight strokes and a line of beauty, thus:

| | | | | | S

--which he afterward perfected as best he could, and the result was LOUIS.

Still I find it hard to inveigh against kings when I recall the goodness of Alexander to Aristotle, for without Alexander we should hardly have known of Aristotle. His royal patron provided the philosopher with every advantage for the acquisition of learning, dispatching couriers to all parts of the earth to gather books and manuscripts and every variety of curious thing likely to swell the store of Aristotle's knowledge.

Yet set them up in a line and survey them--these wearers of crowns and these wielders of scepters--and how pitiable are they in the paucity and vanity of their accomplishments! What knew they of the true happiness of human life? They and their courtiers are dust and forgotten.

Judge Methuen and I shall in due time pass away, but our courtiers--they who have ever contributed to our delight and solace--our Horace, our Cervantes, our Shakespeare, and the rest of the innumerable train--these shall never die. And inspired and sustained by this immortal companionship we blithely walk the pathway illumined by its glory, and we sing, in season and out, the song ever dear to us and ever dear to thee, I hope, O gentle reader:

Oh, for a booke and a shady nooke, Eyther in doore or out, With the greene leaves whispering overhead, Or the streete cryes all about; Where I maie reade all at my ease Both of the newe and old, For a jollie goode booke whereon to looke Is better to me than golde!

MY ROMANCE WITH FIAMMETTA

My bookseller and I came nigh to blows some months ago over an edition of Boccaccio, which my bookseller tried to sell me. This was a copy in the original, published at Antwerp in 1603, prettily rubricated, and elaborately adorned with some forty or fifty copperplates illustrative of the text. I dare say the volume was cheap enough at thirty dollars, but I did not want it.

My reason for not wanting it gave rise to that discussion between my bookseller and myself, which became very heated before it ended. I said very frankly that I did not care for the book in the original, because I had several translations done by the most competent hands. Thereupon my bookseller ventured that aged and hackneyed argument which has for centuries done the book trade such effective service--namely, that in every translation, no matter how good that translation may be, there is certain to be lost a share of the flavor and spirit of the meaning.

"Fiddledeedee!" said I. "Do you suppose that these translators who have devoted their lives to the study and practice of the art are not competent to interpret the different shades and colors of meaning better than the mere dabbler in foreign tongues? And then, again, is not human life too short for the lover of books to spend his precious time digging out the recondite allusions of authors, lexicon in hand? My dear sir, it is a wickedly false economy to expend time and money for that which one can get done much better and at a much smaller expenditure by another hand."

From my encounter with my bookseller I went straight home and took down my favorite copy of the "Decameron" and thumbed it over very tenderly; for you must know that I am particularly attached to that little volume. I can hardly realize that nearly half a century has elapsed since Yseult Hardynge and I parted. She was such a creature as the great novelist himself would have chosen for a heroine; she had the beauty and the wit of those Florentine ladies who flourished in the fourteenth century, and whose graces of body and mind have been immortalized by Boccaccio. Her eyes, as I particularly recall, were specially fine, reflecting from their dark depths every expression of her varying moods.

Why I called her Fiammetta I cannot say, for I do not remember; perhaps from a boyish fancy, merely. At that time Boccaccio and I were famous friends; we were together constantly, and his companionship had such an influence upon me that for the nonce I lived and walked and had my being in that distant, romantic period when all men were gallants and all women were grandes dames and all birds were nightingales.

I bought myself an old Florentine sword at Noseda's in the Strand and hung it on the wall in my modest apartments; under it I placed Boccaccio's portrait and Fiammetta's, and I was wont to drink toasts to these beloved counterfeit presentments in flagons (mind you, genuine antique flagons) of Italian wine. Twice I took Fiammetta boating upon the Thames and once to view the Lord Mayor's pageant; her mother was with us on both occasions, but she might as well have been at the bottom of the sea, for she was a stupid old soul, wholly incapable of sharing or appreciating the poetic enthusiasms of romantic youth.

Had Fiammetta been a book--ah, unfortunate lady!--had she but been a book she might still be mine, for me to care for lovingly and to hide from profane eyes and to attire in crushed levant and gold and to cherish as a best-beloved companion in mine age! Had she been a book she could not have been guilty of the folly of wedding with a yeoman of Lincolnshire--ah me, what rude awakenings too often dispel the pleasing dreams of youth!

When I revisited England in the sixties, I was tempted to make an excursion into Lincolnshire for the purpose of renewing my acquaintance with Fiammetta. Before, however, I had achieved that object this thought occurred to me: "You are upon a fool's errand; turn back, or you will destroy forever one of the sweetest of your boyhood illusions! You seek Fiammetta in the delusive hope of finding her in the person of Mrs. Henry Boggs; there is but one Fiammetta, and she is the memory abiding in your heart. Spare yourself the misery of discovering in the hearty, fleshy Lincolnshire hussif the decay of the promises of years ago; be content to do reverence to the ideal Fiammetta who has built her little shrine in your sympathetic heart!"

Now this was strange counsel, yet it had so great weight with me that I was persuaded by it, and after lying a night at the Swan-and-Quiver Tavern I went back to London, and never again had a desire to visit Lincolnshire.