Light Of Other Days

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 293, 2 March 1928, Page 14

Light Of Other Days

(Written for The SunJ

IT is really very pleasant to find a corner of the world —and In this supposedly gauche “young New Zealand" —where old authors are treated with cordiality as familiar spirits and where Shakespeare happened only yesterday. Shakespeare! Shakespeare is a modern, a daring youngster, an Innovation. Lo»k in one corner of the Turnbull Library, in Wellington, and you will find a very precious and yellow copy of Plutarch’s “Lives," one of the very early printed books called “Incunabula,” that is, "in the cradle," being printed before 1500 A.D., ard from this Shakespeare got his stories of Pericles, Antony and his gipsy, Julius Cscsar, and half a dozen others. And so beautiful is the type in this old volnme, with its great sweeping R’s and lordly M’s, that hundreds of years later William Morris took it as the model of the type to be used in the Kelmscott Press. Outside, there is bright sunshine, and veronica bushes, and an ordinary little Wellington by street. But within dwell the first illustrated edition of Shakespeare—the Nicholas Rowe edition—and the second folio edition, very beautiful In its casing, and almost unromantlcally free from dogears and disfigurements. Yet, that from all the thousands of early Shakespeare editions, tattered and torn and sacrilegiously used for curl-papers, these should have been treated with tender care and at the end of a few centuries brought to an honoured vesting place in the Turpbull Library —in this there is no little romance. Would you believe, without visible proof, that it would be possible to translate "Paradise Lost” into Armenian? The combination of Milton’s periods and Armenian lettering seems, at first thought, a little too overwhelming. But there stands the translation, side by side with French, Italian, and Welsh versions, in the finest "Milton Corner” outside the British Museum. Mere is a "Lycidas”—printed in 1638 by “Th. Buck and R. Daniel, printers »o the Universitie of Cambridge”— the only duplicate of which was recently sold to an American for £IBOO. And yet another American, with £ISOO, won for himself the distinction of owning a 1638 copy of “Comus,” the fellow of which lies in this unostentatious little Wellington Library. But almost more interesting is Milton's newspaper, "Mercurlus Politicus” which ran from 1650 to 1656, and which is here preserved complete. 1 opened one volume at random, and happened upon a little leader about someone who seemed to need execution very badly indeed. “We made.” said the writer “no bones of a kingly traitor! Why should we hesitate with a priestly one?’’ But the book-people which appealed to me most were not the grandees, the splendid unapproachables, but the Tost or half-forgotten writers. There was one James Stewart, who wrote in 1600 a manual on "The Whole Art of Hair-Dressing.” Strangely, he wand ered ofT from the realms of essences and curls into that of baby-c.-aft and gives, together with some of the most advanced Plunket ideas about fresh «.tr and cold baths, advice o:- the treatment of infant digestions. All very simple in those days. One dosed fractious babies with “confection o hyacinth, and the scrapings of a unicorn’s horn.” Then there is the “piteously burnt” manuscript of “School-mistress” William Shen- * tone’s poems, rescued from a fire in Northumberland House by F. Percy, about 1780, and the long, pointed handwriting of F. Percy, faded very pale by time, has written on the flyleaf a little epitaph to his friend the author, no less an acquisition to Heaven than an ornament to earth. The verses are mostly about kings and queens, dignified subjects woi-thy of an old-time poet’s notice, in 1796, one Lady Charleville translated and brought out a private edition of Voltaire’s "La Pucelle.” Her chaplain, the Reverend Henry Boyd, read it and fainted. Being revived with burnt feathers, he declared that If this work of iniquity wasn’t burned, Lady Charleville, sooner or later, would be, and he would leave the

house. The edition went, all except a few stray copies, one of which is now proudly possessed by the Turnbull Library. And what of the others? The beautiful William Morris Kelmscott editions, with their illuminated pages and Burne-Jones ladles; the autographed Charles Lamb, a “John Woodville,” printed in 1802, and inscribed, In very tiny letters, their ink browned by a century’s passage, "With my best regards, C. Lamb”; the unpublished manuscript poem by Swinburne, titled "White Violets,” and talking dreamily about a child’s tender hands, and “The light of days that are because they were”—what of these? There are too many of them for each to have the full mention it deserves. But one can't forget the "Johnny Newcombe in the Navy” with coloured illustrations of exquisite striped trousers and tiny white-sailec* snips. And there is a Cruickshank-illustrated “Punch and Judy.” The illustrations are watercolours. First of all is the picture

of Mr. Punch massacring poor Judy and the baby. Solemnly underneath is written “Punch does for Judy.” Then he does for the justice. Then for the hangman; and then, very naturally, the devil calls to collect. He is not at all a conventional Mephistopheles, but a black, shaggy, and alarming monster. In the last picture he is seen limp and helpless, and below is written, in a kind of sorrowful triumph, at the badness of Mr Punch, "Punch does for the Devil.” The Turnbull Library, besides Its lesser-known collection of rare editions, has a wonderful list of “old New Zealand” literary curios. A few works of art have also found their way to the rooms, and to the wall above the stairs. A beautiful Maori girl looks down on the tired climber of the fourth flight, and there is one Sir Donald McClean, whose portrait looks more like the name, Donald McClean, than I could ever have believed possible: whiskered and Scotch and kind and incorruptible, with eyes like those of a nice, but intelligent sheepdog. There are Rembrandts upstairs, and a few beautiful old prints, full of deep gelds and scarlets. The log book of Captain Cook, before he became Captain Cook, was excavated in a Melbourne curio shop and here reposes. Captain Cook could not spell “cruiser”: he tried four different ways, none of them right, but for all that, his handwriting had the “lines of grace and beauty,” demanded of our great grandmammas, poor ladies. His log Is conscientious, but not very exciting. He mentions every little breezi be meets, but doesn’t seem to strike any tornadoes. It is Lieutenant Hicks of the Endeavour, who has the makings of a novelist. His log, clearly written iD a beautiful letter hand, tells all about the “Indians” who came off from our coast in their double canoes, and the threatening dark skies, and th. great number of gannets flying. But older still is a copy of Abel Tasman’s log, translated in 1776 by one Mr Waide, who asks £3O (in a letter enclosed) for his troublesome task. He deserved it. His untidy translation give Tasman’s own words about the massacre at Murderer’s Bay, and the building of little cairns along the seashore of a beautiful hostile country. It brings the days of the frigate—ships and of adventuring very close. Of course, one can guess what book would first be printed in New Zealand. It was the Church Catechism, printed at Kerikeri, in 1830, by the Rev. W. Yate. There, in right fair Maori script, all the little brown boys and girls are asked who gave them their names, answer N. or M. and are told of the things theitr godparents have been good enough to renounce for them. And while all the New Zealand books, from solemn tomes concerning our geology to little works illustrated in faint and dainty watercolours by little ladies who loved our flower life—while all these are waiting to be taken down, and touched gently, and loved, one’s feet begin to pray for rest and an easy chair; and a sacrilegious thought creeps in that perhaps the greatest treasure in the Turnbull Library is this. Downstairs, there is a teak and leather chair, made from the wood of the barque Inconstant, wrecked off Pencarrow Heads In 1857. The old ship was made by an enterprising family into a general store-house, and known as Plimmer’s Noah’s Ark. When at last the Ark was dismantled, this chair was made and stored away, that the old days might not altogether be forgotten. It has a battered and still slightly nautical air about It. One can see it quite easily, in a cabin with a swinging iariip, “where the cabin portholes are dark and green because of the waves outside.” ROBIN HYDE Wellington,