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PETRARCH'S INKSTAND.

MISS EDGEWORTH's lines express her estimation of the gem she has the happiness to own. That lady allowed a few casts from it in bronze, and a gentleman who possesses one, and who favours the "Table Book" with his approbation, permits its use for a frontispiece to this volume. The engraving will not be questioned as a decoration, and it has some claim to be regarded as an elegant illustration of a miscellany which draws largely on art and literature, and on nature itself, towards its supply.

"I delight," says Petrarch, "in my pictures. I take great pleasure also in images; they come in show more near unto nature than pictures, for they do but appear; but these are felt to be substantial, and their bodies are more durable. Amongst the Grecians the art of painting was esteemed above all handycrafts, and the chief of all the liberal arts. How great the dignity hath been of statues; and how fervently the study and desire of men have reposed in such pleasures, emperors and kings, and other noble personages, nay, even persons of inferior degree, have shown, in their industrious keeping of them when obtained." Insisting on the golden mean, as a rule of happiness, he says, "I possess an amazing collection of books, for attaining this, and every virtue : great is my delight in beholding such a treasure.' He slights persons who collect books "for the pleasure of boasting they have them; who furnish their chambers with what was invented to furnish their minds; and use them no otherwise than they do their Corinthian tables, or their painted tables and images, to look at." He contemns others who esteem not the true value of books, but the price at which they may sell them-" a new practice" (observe it is Petrarch that speaks) "crept in among the rich, whereby they may attain one art more of unruly desire." He repeats, with rivetting force," I have great plenty of books: where such scarcity has been lamented, this is no small possession: I have an inestimable many of books!" He was a diligent collector, and a liberal imparter of these treasures. He corresponded with Richard de Bury, an illustrious prelate of our own country, eminent for his love of learning and learned men,

and sent many precious volumes to England to enrich the bishop's magnificent library. He vividly remarks, "I delight passionately in my books;" and yet he who had accumulated them largely, estimated them rightly; he has a saying of books worthy of himself "a wise man seeketh not quantity but sufficiency."

Petrarch loved the quiet scenes of nature; and these can scarcely be observed from a carriage or while riding, and are never enjoyed but on foot; and to me-on whom that discovery was imposed, and who am sometimes restrained from country walks, by necessity - it was no small pleasure, when I read a passage in his "View of Human Nature," which persuaded me of his fondness for the exercise: "A journey on foot hath most pleasant commodities; a man may go at his pleasure; none shall stay him, none shall carry him beyond his wish; none shall trouble him; he hath but one labour, the labour of nature-to go."

In "The Indicator" there is a paper of peculiar beauty, by Mr. Leigh Hunt, " on receiving a sprig of myrtle from Vaucluse," with a paragraph suitable to this occasion : "We are supposing that all our readers are acquainted with Petrarch. Many of them doubtless know him intimately. Should any of them want an introduction to him, how should we speak of him in the gross? We should say, that he was one of the finest gentlemen and greatest scholars that ever lived; that he was a writer who flourished in Italy in the fourteenth century, at the time when Chaucer was young, during the reigns of our Edwards; that he was the greatest light of his age that although so fine a writer himself, and the author of a multitude of works, or rather because he was both, he took the greatest pains to revive the knowledge of the ancient learning, recommending it every where, and copying out large manuscripts with his own hand; that two great cities, Paris and Rome, contended which should have the honour of crowning him; that he was crowned publicly, in the metropolis of the world, with laurel and with myrtle; that he was the friend of Boccaccio, the father of Italian prose; and lastly, that his

greatest renown nevertheless, as well as the predominant feelings of his existence, arose from the long love he bore for a lady of Avignon, the far-famed Laura, whom he fell in love with on the 6th of April, 1327, on a Good Friday; whom he rendered illustrious in a multitude of sonnets, which have left a sweet sound and sentiment in the ear of all after lovers; and who died, still passionately beloved, in the year 1348, on the same day and hour on which he first beheld her. Who she was, or why their connection was not closer, remains a mystery. But that she was a real person, and that in spite of all her modesty she did not show an insensible countenance to his pas sion, is clear from his long-haunted imagination, from his own repeated accounts, from all that he wrote, uttered, and thought. One love, and one poet, sufficed to give the whole civilized world a sense of delicacy in desire, of the abundant riches to be found in one single idea, and of the going out of a man's self to dwell in the soul and happiness of another, which has served to refine the passion for all modern times; and perhaps will do so, as long as love renews the world."

At Vaucluse, or Valchiusa, " a remarkable spot in the old poetical region of Provence, consisting of a little deep glen of green meadows surrounded with rocks, and containing the fountain of the river Sorgue," Petrarch resided for several years, and composed in it the greater part of his poems.

The following is a translation by sir William Jones, of

AN ODE, BY PETRARCH,
TO THE FOUNTAIN OF VALCHIUSA,

Ye clear and sparkling streams!
(Warm'd by the sunny beams)

Through whose transparent crystal Laura play'd
Ye boughs that deck the grove,
Where Spring her chaplets wove,

While Laura lay beneath the quivering shade ;
Sweet herbs and blushing flowers!
That crown yon vernal bowers,

For ever fatal, yet for ever dear;

And ye, that heard my sighs
When first she charm'd my eyes,
Soft-breathing gales! my dying accents hear.
If Heav'n has fix'd my doom,
That Love must quite consume

My bursting heart, and close my eyes in death; Ah! grant this slight request,

That here my urn may rest,

When to its mansion flies my vital breath.
This pleasing hope will smooth

My anxious mind, and soothe
The pangs of that inevitable hour;
My spirit will not grieve

Her mortal veil to leave

In these calm shades, and this enchanting bower. Haply, the guilty maid

Through yon accustom'd glade

To my sad tomb will take her lonely way;
Where first her beauty's light

O'erpower'd my dazzled sight,
When love on this fair border bade me stray:
There, sorrowing, shall she see,
Beneath an aged tree,

Her true, but hapless lover's lowly bier;
Too late her tender sighs

Shall melt the pitying skies,

And her soft veil shall hide the gushing tear.
O! well-remember'd day,

When on yon bank she lay,
Meek in her pride, and in her rigour mild;
The young and blooming flowers,
Falling in fragrant showers,
Shone on her neck, and on her bosom smil'd:
Some on her mantle hung,

Some in her locks were strung,
Like orient gems in rings of flaming gold;
Some, in a spicy cloud
Descending, call'd aloud,

"Here Love and Youth the reins of empire hold."
I view'd the heavenly maid;
And, rapt in wonder, said-
"The groves of Eden gave this angel birth;"
Her look, her voice, her smile,
That might all Heaven beguile,
Wafted my soul above the realms of earth:
The star-bespangled skies

Were open'd to my eyes;

Sighing I said, "Whence rose this glittering scene?" Since that auspicious hour,

This bank, and odorous bower,

My morning couch, and evening haunt have been. Well mayst thou blush, my song,

To leave the rural throng

And fly thus artless to my Laura's ear;
But, were thy poet's fire

Ardent as his desire,

Thou wert a song that Heaven might stoop to hear.

It is within probability to imagine, that the original of this "ode" may have been impressed on the paper, by Petrarch's pen, from the inkstand of the frontispiece.

THE

TABLE BOOK;

BY

WILLIAM HONE.

With Engravings.

Cuttings with Cuts, facts, fancies, recollections,
Heads, autographs, views, prose and verse selections

Notes of my musings in a lonely walk,

My friends' communications, table-talk,
Notions of books, and things I read or see,

Events that are, or were, or are to be,
Fall in my TABLE BOOK-and thence arise
To please the young, and help divert the wise.

EVERY SATURDAY.

LONDON:

PUBLISHED FOR WILLIAM HONE,

BY HUNT AND CLARKE, YORK-STREET,

COVENT GARDEN.

"The Table Book," with Indexes, will form a volume every six months.

This Title-page is to be cancelled: another will be delivered, gratis, at the proper time.

THE

TABLE BOOK.

FORMERLY, a "Table Book" was a memorandum book, on which any thing was graved or written without ink. It is mentioned by Shakspeare. Polonius, on disclosing Ophelia's affection for Hamlet to the king, inquires

"When I had seen this hot love on the wing, what might you, Or my dear majesty, your queen here, think, If I had play'd the desk, or table-book ?" Dr. Henry More, a divine, and moralist, of the succeeding century, observes, that "Nature makes clean the table-book first, and then portrays upon it what she pleaseth." In this sense, it might have been used instead of a tabula rasa, or sheet of blank writing paper, adopted by Locke as an illustration of the human mind in its incipiency. It is figuratively introduced to nearly the same purpose by Swift: he

tells us that

"Nature's fair table-book, our tender souls, We scrawl all o'er with old and empty rules, Stale memorandums of the schools."

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Dryden says, "Put into your Table-Book whatsoever you judge worthy." I hope I shall not unworthily err, if, in the commencement of a work under this litle, I show what a Table Book was.

Table books, or tablets, of wood, existed before the time of Homer, and among the

Jews before the Christian æra.

The table books of the Romans were nearly like ours, which will be described presently; except that the leaves, which were two, three, or nore in number, were of wood surfaced with wax. They wrote on them with a style, one end of which was pointed for that pur pose, and the other end rounded or flattened, or effacing or scraping out. Styles were nade of nearly all the metals, as well as of one and ivory; they were differently formed, and resembled ornamented skewers; the common style was iron. More anciently, he leaves of the table book were without wax, and marks were made by the iron style on the bare wood. The Anglo-Saxon style was very handsome. Dr. Pegge was of opinion that the well-known jewel of Alfred, preserved in the Ashmolean museum at Oxford, was the head of the style sent by that king with Gregory's Pastoral to Athelney.†

A gentleman, whose profound knowledge of domestic antiquities surpasses that of

• Johnson.

+ Fosbroke's Encyclopædia of Antiquities.

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preceding antiquaries, and remains unrivalled by his contemporaries, in his “Illustrations of Shakspeare," notices Hamlet's expression, "My tables, meet, it is I set it down." On that passage he observes, that the Roman practice of writing on wax tablets with a style was continued through the middle ages; and that specimens of wooden tables, filled with wax, and constructed in the fourteenth century, were preserved in several of the monastic libraries in France. Some of these consisted of as many as twenty pages, formed into a book by means of parchment bands glued to the backs of the leaves. He says that in the middle ages there were table books of ivory, and sometimes, of late, in the form of a small portable book with leaves and clasps; and he transfers a figure of one of the latter from an old work to his own: it resembles the common "slate-books" still sold in the stationers' shops. He presumes that to such a table book the archbishop of York alludes in the second part of King Henry IV.,

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"And therefore will he wipe his tables clean
And keep no tell-tale to his memory."

Às in the middle ages there were tablebooks with ivory leaves, this gentleman remarks that, in Chaucer's "Sompnour's Tale," one of the friars is provided with

"A pair of tables all of ivory, And a pointel ypolished fetishly, And wrote alway the names, as he stood, Of alle folk that yave hem any good." He instances it as remarkable, that neither public nor private museums furnished specimens of the table books, common Shakspeare's time. Fortunately, this observation is no longer applicable.

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A correspondent, understood to be Mr. Douce, in Dr. Aikin's " Athenæum," subsequently says, "I happen to possess a table-book of Shakspeare's time. It is a little book, nearly square, being three inches wide and something less than four in length, bound stoutly in calf, and fastening with four strings of broad, strong, brown tape. The title as follows: Writing Tables, with a Kalender for xxiiii yeeres, with sundrie necessarie rules. The Tables made by Robert Triple. London, Imprinted for the Company of Stationers.' The tables are inserted immediately after the almanack. At first sight they appear like what we call asses-skin, the colour being precisely

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*Gesner De rerum fossilium figuris, &c. Tigur. 1565; 12mo.

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