The Shape of Things That Came

REVIEWS 449 proclaimed that ('easy" as it appears to be to fabricate reprints of rare books it is in actual practise absolutely impossible to do so in such a manner that detection cannot follow the result." He was right. But though he was in his turn exposed, his alternative was none the less brilliant. It was, simply, not imitation but creation: -the choice of a title from an already existing volume; printing this, in pamphlet form, in a small edition; planting it in well-known libraries,·and buildi.ng up its reputation and value. The masterly way in which Wise looked after his illegitimate children is very amusingly illustrated in these letters. We can, as Miss Ratchford suggests, imagine the gleam in his eye as he boasted to v\Trenn of having got a copy well below the market price, of having bought one advantageously at an auction (to which he had anonymously submitted it), or when he wrote "We shall have more bargains before we are done." And what could be better comedy than his indignation when he found that someone had forged his forgery? What more natural than to offer to give (or sell!) a copy of the "genuine article" to the cheated book-lover? The amounts he made were relatively small, the prices at which he sold or procured good books for Wrenn (a very congenial friend) were well below market price. In all his dealings with Wrenn he received no commission. Had his books and those of vVrenn been sold at thei r deaths, the pri"ces fet~hed would have been, Miss Ratchford says, five hundred per cent above the cost-and this -for collections valued at hundreds of thousands of pounds. Yet while he was building up these monuments to his judgmen t, knowledge, energy, and shrewdness, he was also selling Wrenn all his forgeries and inven·ting fictitious sources for very desirable books passed on at reasonable prices. . The moti ves for all this are even more interesting than the facts. Why did he do it? At first, apparently, there was the need for money-to buy , rare books-he being relatively poor at the time with £500 a year and a wife.. There must also have been the desire to achieve rapidly a reputation . as a rising bibliographer and book-collector in a world"of education, and sometimes of wealth, to which he d~d not belong. There was an element"of excitement allied to .that when, on his regular expeditions, he discovered treasures " in unexpected places. There was vanity and ·pride. In Who's Who, year a" fter year, "Book collecting and the study of bibliography" was Wise's only entry after ('Recreation." Recreation? But doubtless most, men are better for a hobby. THE SHAPE OF THINGS THAT CAME* KENNETH ~AcLEAN "Too hot for neutral topics," the successful editor of the Tatler turned his attention to Whig politics so successfully as to secure a seat in Parliament , a knighthood, 'and a lucrative patent for the Drury Lane Theatre. *Tracts and Pamphlet.s by Richard Steele. Edited with notes and commentary by RAE BLANCHARD. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. 1944. pp. xv.ii, 663. ($5.50) 450 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO, QUARTERLY That Steele in entering politics should have remained the man of letters, is not 'surpris,ing in an age when one pending piece of legislation might call up three new periodicals and a whole flight of pamphlets. Steele's political , writings consti'tute the bulk of the tracts' and pamphlets Miss Blanchard has here collected and edited. The briefest glance at these writings tells ot)e that Steele is not among the great English political writers. These pamphlets are fragmentary in their composition, pat~hworks of q~otation from legislation, speeches, pet.itions, letters; newspapers, and rival pamphlets . Too often they have the formlessness of the rebuttal. And their , prose style, which was at one time regarded as simplicity itself compared with the elaborate prose of the seventeenth century, no longer sounds simple to us. This prose is definitely Ciceronian and rhetorical, depending for 'effect upon rhythm of balanced structures. It is the prose associated with Greek and Roman democracy...