LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 255 



may still comfort themselves with a non omnis moriar, laying a 

 mournful emphasis on the adjective, and feeling that they have 

 not lived wholly in vain while they share with the dodo a frag 

 mentary continuance on earth. To be sure, the immortality, 

 such as it is, belongs less to themselves than to the famous men 

 they help to illustrate. If they escape oblivion, it is by a back 

 door, as it were, and they survive only in fine print at the -page s 

 foot. At the banquet of fame they sit below the salt. After all, 

 perhaps, the next best thing to being famous or infamous is to 

 be utterly forgotten, for this also is to achieve a kind of definite 

 result by living. To hang on the perilous edge of immortality 

 by the nails, liable at any moment to drop into the fathomless 

 ooze of oblivion is at best a questionable beatitude. And yet 

 sometimes the merest barnacles that have attached themselves 

 to the stately keels of Dante, or Shakespeare, or Milton have 

 an interest of their own by letting us know in what remote 

 waters those hardy navigators went a pearl-fishing. Has not 

 Mr. Dyce traced Shakespeare s dusty death ; to Anthony 

 Copley, and Milton s back resounded Death ! to Abraham 

 Fraunce ? Nay, is it not Bernard de Ventadour s lark that sings 

 for ever in the diviner air of Dante s Paradise ? 



Quan vey laudeta mover 

 De joi sas alas contra 1 rai, 

 Que s oblida e s laissa cazcr 

 Per la doussor qu al cor li n vai. 



Qual lodoletta che in acre si spazia, 

 Prima cantando, e poi tace contenta 

 Dell ultima dolcezza che la sazia. 



We are not sure that Bernard s Que s oblida e s laissa cazer* 

 is not sweeter than Dante s tace contenta/ but it was plainly 

 the doussor that gave its cue to the greater poet s memory, and 

 he has improved on it with that exquisite ultima, as his master 

 Virgil sometimes did on Homer. 



But authors whose interest for us is mainly bibliographic 

 belong rather in such collections as Mr. Allibone s. As litera 

 ture they are oppressive ; as items of literary history they find 

 their place in that vast list which records not only those named 

 for promotion, but also the killed, wounded, and missing in the 

 Battle of the Books. There our hearts are touched with some 

 thing of the same vague pathos that dims the eye in some de 

 serted graveyard. The brief span of our earthly immortalities 

 is brought home to us as nowhere else. What a necrology of 

 notability ! How many a controversialist, terrible in his day, 

 how many a rising genius that somehow stuck on the horizon, 



