The Book-Hunter at Home. P. B. M. Allan
him. The Myriobiblon was compiled merely as a handbook for his brother Tarasius, that the latter might enjoy a brief synopsis of what the ambassador read on his travels. Several authors are now known only by the extracts in this book; and among them may be mentioned a writer named Conon, who is said to have written fifty novels, which Photius condensed to his liking. All this, of course, was merely pour passer le temps; the really important works of this bookworm being a lexicon and a number of books on theology. Needless to say in due course he became Patriarch of Constantinople.
Who nowadays keeps a commonplace book? Doubtless a good many readers of to-day have neither time nor inclination to indulge this pleasing fashion, at one time so popular; but to anyone whose delight is the reading of good books as opposed to modern novels, there can be no more interesting amusement.
It can be a risky thing, however, this commonplacing, and he would be a bold man who dared to assign unto any one writer a popular phrase for no other reason than that this one has first expressed it in writing. There is no new thing under the sun, and by continued expression a familiar maxim becomes at last a proverb. Ask at a dinner-table who first wrote 'God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.' The knowing ones will puzzle their brains in silence; some lady with religious tendencies will claim it for the Holy Writ, inclining towards Isaiah; but the quiet bookish man at the end of the table will smile in a superior way, and offer to wager that he can name the author. You may safely accept his bet, for it is a hundred pounds to a penny that he will proclaim Laurence Sterne to have written it—he may even quote the context. Granted that Sterne did write it, but Sterne was a widely-read man and a plagiarist of no mean ability. So you may ask the bookish man how he doth account for this saying occurring in that quaint collection of 'Outlandish Proverbs' entitled 'Jacula Prudentum,' by Master George Herbert, compiled from ancient sources full a hundred years before the birth of the 'Sentimental Journey.'[18]
Sometimes in ancient literature one comes across an expression which is in the vocabulary of everybody to-day, and one realises how very ancient some of these popular aphorisms must be. 'It is not alle golde that glareth,' wrote Chaucer, and the same theme was sung in Provençal by Amanieu des Escas near a hundred years before. But, like 'A bird in the hand,' it is so applicable to the failings to which mankind is prone, that its origin must surely have been far beyond even the classics of the old world, back in the dim ages of man's history. Common also to all nations must some at least of these primitive sayings be, for there is a primæval simplicity about them that knows nothing of race or civilisation. 'A soft answer turns away wrath,' 'Pride goes before a fall,' 'Spare the rod and spoil the child,' are not all these and many others, collected by King Solomon from the wisdom of the East, as applicable to our everyday life in this age as they have ever been in the whole history of mankind?[19] Enough of moralising, however; or else, convinced of the futility of attempting to assign originality to any man, you will come to agree with the young lady of fifteen who, priding herself on the possession of a literary flair, once remarked to the writer: 'In fact there is little doubt that Junius never wrote the letters attributed to him at all!'
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