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After our early dinner, Dad pointed out to me the various objects of interest; the old Victory, flagship then as she is now again after an interval of thirty years or more, during which time she was supplanted by the Duke of Wellington, which she has in time supplanted once more; the Illustrious, the training-ship for naval cadets, near the mouth of the harbour, where the Saint Vincent is now moored; and the long line of battered old hulks stretching away in the distance up the stream to Fareham Creek, the last examples extant of those "wooden walls of old England" which Dibdin sang and British sailors manned and fought for and defended to the death, sacrificing their lives for "the honour of the flag!"
Good luck often attends us when we don't deserve it: "The sweet little cherub that sits up aloft," as Dibdin says, had an eye upon us. I knew we could not easily get out of the Gut of Gibraltar without knowing it; and accordingly, on the third day after leaving the frigate, we made the rock early in the morning, and, by two o'clock, rounded Europa Point.
"With the Poetess," suggested Nigel. "Just so wi' the equal o' Dibdin, not to mention the other fellow. Now it seems to me . How's 'er head?" The captain suddenly changed the subject here.
What is here meant will be easily felt by any one who chooses to consult the book which Dibdin issued under the title of "The Library Companion, or the Young Man's Guide and the Old Man's Comfort in the choice of a Library."
At last, however, he could not supply the cravings of his appetite without recourse to duplicates, and far more than duplicates. His friend Dibdin said of him, "He has now and then an ungovernable passion to possess more copies of a book than there were ever parties to a deed or stamina to a plant; and therefore I cannot call him a duplicate or a triplicate collector."
Every pipe may not, indeed, cost so much as that jewelled one seen by Dibdin in Vienna, which was valued at a thousand pounds; or even as the German meerschaum which was passed from mouth to mouth through a whole regiment of soldiers till it was colored to perfection, having never been allowed to cool, a bill of one hundred pounds being ultimately rendered for the tobacco consumed.
And what subjects shall they be? That depends on taste. Probably it is well to avoid the latest fashion. For example, the illustrated French books of the eighteenth century are, at this moment, en hausse. There is a "boom" in them. Fifty years ago Brunet, the author of the great "Manuel," sneered at them. But, in his, "Library Companion," Dr. Dibdin, admitted their merit.
"Greenwich Hospital" is a hearty, good-natured book, in the Tom Dibdin school, treating of the virtues of British tars, in approved nautical language.
Mead was a collector of the same kind. All that was beautiful came naturally to this great man, of whom it was said that he lived 'in the full sunshine of human existence. He was the owner of a very fine library, which he had 'picked up at Rome. He had a great number of early-printed classics, which fetched high prices at his sale in 1754; his French books, according to Dibdin, and all his works upon the fine arts 'were of the first rarity and value, and were sumptuously bound.
Great, we repeat, is bookishness and the charm of books. Even the writings, the ponderous writings, of that portentous parson, the Rev. T.F. Dibdin, with all their lumbering gaiety and dust-choked rapture over first editions, are not hastily to be sent packing to the auction-room.
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