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I take up the old and stained manuscript, with its marginalia, that are like the dim call from a far-away voice, and I know that, so I am driven to record the sequel to that gay introduction, it must be in a spirit of sombreness most deadly by contrast. I look at the faded opening words.
Coleridge's marginalia on borrowed works, according to Lamb, were an ornament of value to his friends, if they were lucky enough to get the books back again. Poe's marginalia were of exquisite neatness, though in their printed form they were not very interesting. Thackeray's seem mostly to have taken the shape of slight sketches in illustration of the matter.
Poe, whose theory of poetry comprehends only the lyric, and indeed chiefly that restricted type of lyric verse in which he himself was a master, insisted that there was a further lyric law, the law of vagueness or indefiniteness. "I know," he writes in his "Marginalia," "that indefiniteness is an element of the true music I mean of the true musical expression.
His two most cherished possessions were a fine copy of the Stultitiae Laus, printed by Froben, which had once been given by William Burton, the historian, to his brother Robert, when the latter was a youngster of twenty; and a first edition of one of Walton's lives, 'a presentation copy from the author. The former was rich with the autographs and marginalia of both brothers, and on the latter a friend of his has already hung a tale, which may or may not be known to the Reader.
They are freely annotated by the father's hand, with marginalia which throw light on his life and times, his dislike of the Venetians for their anti-papal policy, his experiences as physician to the Abbey of St. Ulrich in Augsburg, and the part that he played in the introduction of printing there.
Some of these marginalia were copied by subsequent scribes into the text, where, in our version, they still remain. Some of them, however, were removed in the late revision.
I found it the other day among some letters from Margaret and a copy of the 1909 Report of the Poor Law Commission, also rich with pencilled marginalia. My opening was a criticism of the democratic idea and method, upon lines such as I have already sufficiently indicated in the preceding sections.
One day in the bungalow, when I was reading the copious marginalia with which my father had furnished his own copy of The Veiled Queen, I came upon a passage which so completely carried my mind back to the night of our betrothal that I heard as plainly as I had then heard Winnie's words at the door of her father's cottage: 'I should have to come in the winds and play around you in the woods.
She affects his narrative only inasmuch as he happened to meet at her house a gentleman who for a time exerted a considerable influence over his fortunes. Here Polyhistor's narrative must give place to certain editorial marginalia by Miss Lucy , who "runs" the Family Magazine: "Polyhistor, indeed!" she writes. "The conceit of some people!
Doubtless this is why among the Welsh hills the old saying used to be "The spirits follow the crwth." 'Which folly is the more besotted, I said, as I read and re-read the marginalia 'that of the scholar with his scientific nonsense about vibrations, or that of the ignorant Gypsy with her living mullos drawn through the air by music and love?
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