Some of the poets of England used book-plates which, in themselves of no especial interest, become of value to the collector from their association with men of bygone fame. There was Lord Charles Halifax, whose plate is not uncommon and whose fame would seem to rest more upon his career as a statesman than upon his few efforts in verse, yet as Dr. Johnson, in his Lives of the Poets, makes room for Halifax, shall any quarrel with this distinction being granted him ? His chief poetical work is his reply to Dryden's Hind and Panther, and as Johnson himself is forced to remark, "a short time withered his beauties." But his book-plate has an interest in itself, as it bears an early date, 1702, and I believe at the time this engraving was made Lord Charles was for the moment out of royal favor, as well as out of the Council. However, at his accession George I. made him an Earl and a Knight of the Garter, so that in some later plates we find these titles added.
Born in poverty and knowing it as a constant companion all his days and at the last dying in its arms, Robert Bloomfield, the uneducated shoemaker poet of London, had sufficient imagination to design For himself a coat-of-arms, and sufficient pride to have it engraved for a book-plate. His motto, A jig for the heralds, was a plain indication of the fictitious character of the arms he used, in which were represented the tools of his trade and what seems upon the other side of the shield to be a shoemaker about to beat his wife. This was designed in some moment of playfulness or hate, and while it makes a welcome addition to the collector's albums, poor Bloomfield could not have had much use for it, as circumstances never favored him with many books.
William Cowper made use of the libraries of his friends and. of those open to the public, and had but few volumes he could call his own. In fact, he had but nine books in all between the years 1768 and 1788, and when he died a dozen years later his library consisted of 177 volumes, many of which were thin, trifling 12mos hardly worthy the name of book. However, he had a book-plate, and for this reason his books are of interest here. The plate is a plain armorial, and from its style is judged to have been made somewhere about the year 1790, towards the completion of his happy labor of translating Homer into blank verse. The nervous fever which caused the last few years of his life to be passed in hopeless dejection came on him about this time, and as these book-plates have never been seen in more than four books, it may be that, having begun the pleasant task of pasting them into his books, he was not able to complete it.
Christopher Anstey had a book-plate in the Ribbon and Wreath style, which was made about the year 1780. He was a poet of no mean order and one who, according to Gary, " had the rare merit of discovering a mode of entertainment which belonged exclusively to himself." This is in reference to his famous New Bath Guide, which hit off the fashionable follies of the day in a manner which took at once with the reading public and which caused the presses of Dodsley to run to their fullest capacity and which really brought in a larger recompense than did Johnson's Rasselas. Edition after edition was sold, and it is not untrue to say that Smollett is indebted in no small degree to Anstey not only for the motive but the incidents of Humphrey Clinker. The suddenly and worthily famous writer of the clever satire upon the dissipation and frivolity of the Beau Nash regime died in 1805 and was buried in the city which gave him the materials for his famous work. A monument in the Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey commemorates the man and his work. The armorial bearings carved upon the stone which is set up against the central pillar of that splendid memorial will look to the collector of book-plates like a book-plate in stone. Robbie Burns had no book-plate as far as is known to-day, but as he invented for himself a coat-of-arms which he used as a seal and which might have served as well for a book-plate, it will be of some interest to give here a letter which he wrote to a friend in March, 1793, mentioning his new seal.
" One commission I must trouble you with, - I want to cut my armorial bearing (on a seal). Will you be so obliging as to inquire what the expense will be ? I do not know that my name is matriculated, as the heralds call it, but I have invented arms for myself, and by courtesy of Scotland, will likewise be entitled to supporters. These, however, I do not intend to have on my seal. I am a bit of a herald, and shall give you my arms. On a field azure, a holly bush, seeded, proper, in base; a shepherd's pipe and a crook, saltierwise; also proper in chief on a wreath of the colors, a woodlark perching on a sprig of a bay tree proper, for crest. Two mottoes, round the top of the crest, Wood notes wild; at the bottom of the shield, in the usual place, Better a wee bush than nae bield. By the shepherd's pipe and crook I mean a stock and a horn and a club."
This seal was made (indeed, he had three or four) and was used by Burns until his death. When the Chevalier James Burnes was invested with the Guelphic Order of Hanover by William IV., he incorporated the poet's seal with other devices in his arms as registered in the office of Lyon King of Arms. " Then to the well-trod stage anon, If Johnson's learned sock be on, Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child, Warble his native wood-notes wild." (Il Penseroso, 131-4.)
It may have been from this verse of Milton's that Burns took one of his mottoes. The words frequently occur in Burns' writings.
Henry James Pye, Poet-Laureate of England from 1790 to 1813, used a book-plate of the middle Chippendale style, which is of some interest on account of the distinguished office held by its owner, which, however, by all accounts was not graced by his holding; for he was the maker of but dull verse and, while a respectable member of Parliament and loyal to the interests of the government, was not thereby fitted to be its chosen songster.
Robert Southey immediately succeeded Pye, and he too had a book-plate which is of as much more interest than Pye's as his verse is of better quality. The family of Southey traces its line back a considerable distance, and among those ancestors was a follower of Monmouth, who, had he not in some way escaped the vigilance of Judge Jeffreys, would have lost his life and with it the possibility of continuing the line in which the poet was born. Southey tried to read law, but found it like " thrashing straw," and turned his attention with redoubled energy to the literary passions already enkindled within him. His book-plate is one of the dreamy landscapes of Bewick, and was engraved by that master in the year 1810. It shows the shield of arms nestling against a rock, while above and about the guarding shrubbery is thick and abundant.
The plate of Thomas Campbell, which is not dated but which is probably not later then 1810, shows the arms of the Argyllshire Campbells with the well-remembered "gyronny of eight" with the boar's head crest, anent which the following verses may be read: -
" So speed my song, marked with the crest That erst th' adventurous Norman wore, Who won the Lady of the West, The daughter of MacCullom Moore.
" Crest of my sires ! whose blood it sealed
With glory in the strife of swords, Ne'er may the scroll that bears it yield Degenerate thought or faithless words."
It is to be remembered that the Campbell family sprung from the union of a Norman warrior of the twelfth century and the heiress of Lochow, to whom there is reason to fear the marriage was not welcome. Campbell expressed in these lines a hope to which he was loyal, for no written line of his could he wish to change or lose. And Rogers, Samuel Rogers, he who impressed every one with the elegance of his taste, he used a book-plate of elegant simplicity, as one would expect him to do. Designed in the chaste Ribbon and Wreath style, his plate dates not far from 1790, probably. Surely then this plate must have been in the books which were in the beautiful bookcase " painted by Stothard in his very best manner, with groups from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Boccaccio," as Lord Macaulay relates. In speaking further of the delights of this famous house of Rogers', at 22 St. James Place, to which the banker-poet came in the year 1800, the same writer says :
" What a delightful house it is! It looks out on the Green Park at just the most pleasant point. The furniture has been selected with a delicacy of taste quite unique. Its value does not depend on fashion, but must be the same while the fine arts are held in any esteem." In a similar strain is the following from Proctor's Recollections of Men of Letters:
"Upon the whole, I never saw any house so tastefully fitted up and decorated. Everything was good of its kind and in good order. There was no plethora, no appearance of display, no sign of superfluous wealth. There was not too much of anything, not even too much welcome, yet no lack of it." Again, to quote from the diary of Byron:
" If you enter his house, his drawing-room, his library, you of yourself say this is not the dwelling of a common mind. There is not a gem, not a coin, a book thrown aside on the chimney-piece, his sofa, his table, that does not bespeak an almost fastidious elegance in the possessor." And to have a copy of Rogers' book-plate in his collection, to handle the very paper which he may have pasted with exquisite care into some selected volume, how real the pleasure, how rich the sense of companionship ! Lord Byron, admirer of Campbell, Moore, and Rogers, reckless in his choice of friends, he too had a book-plate, but it is with not a little disappointment that it is found to show the Noel arms. One cannot but wonder how this plate came to be made. Byron himself seems hardly likely to have ordered so slight a matter attended to while busy in Italy with his schemes with Hunt and Shelley; perhaps it was done upon the order of Burdett, the arbiter, or again, as conjecture is our only aid in solving the interesting question, may we not believe it was the gift of his affectionate half-sister, Augusta Leigh ? And again, had Byron any or many of these plates with him in Italy ? Amid all the excitement of the strange things there done, at Pisa, at Leghorn, at Genoa, at Ravenna, one wonders if a book-plate could have claimed the least attention. Deeply affected for a time by the dreadful death of Shelley and the burning of his body on the sands of Spezzia, within a few months he quarrelled with the fascinating Countess Guiccioli, and the journey to Greece was shortly afterwards undertaken. What with the monkeys and the other impedimenta, was there chance for a book-plate to have been thought of ? Little do we know, little can we guess, of the origin or the use of this bit of paper engraved with the arms of the Wentworth-Noels. In itself the plate is uninteresting, being one easily passed over in any collection of ordinary armorials, but when viewed from the standpoint of the informed collector with what interest it is invested! Charles Kingsley may with some considerable reason be classed among the poets, and his plate find mention here. It is another example of the common and undesirable kind, which but for its owner would never be retained by him who elects to have a choice collection of plates. However, this simple armorial plate ranks high among his treasures when once the collector is so fortunate as to secure it; for it is not widely distributed or indeed very widely known.
In the writings of the late Lord Tennyson one is somewhat surprised to find upon examination very scanty reference to the science of heraldry. Upon first thought the tales of the chivalrous knights of the Table Round will occur to the reader, and he may think the lines descriptive of their prowess to be full of heraldic emblazonry and the pomp and state the lists suggest. Not so; Arthur himself is clad in the silken garment, ornamented with a dragon, and the shield of Sir Lancelot is mentioned as bearing "azure lions crowned with gold, rampant," while Gareth has one " blue, and thereon the morning star," and these are about all the passages that can be thought of that refer with anything like certainty to heraldry. And the book-plate which the poet-laureate made use of shows the arms of the commoner, and not the special grant, with its somewhat different blazoning, given when he was raised to the peerage. Truth to tell, it is but a common-looking plate, which, save for the autograph beneath it, would never attract notice. But that bit of scrawled penmanship makes the plate one the collector is proud to have within his cases.
Although Alfieri was not an Englishman, he is classed here among the poets. Vittorio Alfieri was born of a noble family in 1749, at Asti, in Piedmont. He lived many years in England and in France, and wrote some fine tragedies and a quantity of minor poems. His career was romantic, though not worthy of imitation, and his attachment for the Countess of Albany is of course familiar to every reader of history. He used a book-plate of exceeding beauty, and it is unfortunate that the name of its engraver is not preserved. The design represents Father Time casting down his scythe and with the gesture of despair regarding the works of the poet, which lie in a pile upon a stone pedestal. The Italian motto helps one to understand the motive of the designer, which was to record the fact that even Time himself was unable to obliterate the fame of their author. Rather a vain motto this, one would think, for a man to select for use upon his own book-plate, even if its verdict should subsequently be that of a nation upon the works of the most celebrated poet of his age, and the one who raised the Italian tragic drama from its degraded condition. The name of Thomas Frognall Dibdin must ever remain to the book-lover as that of a prince among bibliographers and book-collectors. Founder of the famous Roxburghe Club and writer of several important and much-prized works relating to the love and collecting of books, he used a book-plate upon which he recorded his tastes with a manner at once pleasing and characteristic. Without attempting the difficult feat of blazoning the arms in heraldic terminology, let it suffice to say that the shield is quartered and that in the first quarter there is upon the azure field a lion rampant debruised by a bendlet of silver, over which is a label of three points having the same color. In the second quarter, with which begins the bookish flavor of the design, a chapman clad in gold walks before a red field. Within the third, upon a silver field, the colophon mark of Fust and Schoeffer is given, and in the last the printer's mark of William Caxton. For crest a hand upholds an open book, which is seen to be an early illuminated volume with metal clasps. Perhaps no plate has yet been devised by a bibliomaniac which equals this for the quality of its appropriateness and apparent conformity to the style of the period. It is a plate not easily picked up to-day and one to value when found.


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