The next volume you lay hand on is manifestly edited by an Ecclesiologist, or a votary of that recent addition to the constituted "ologies," which has come into existence as the joint offspring of the revival of Gothic architecture and the study of primitive-church theology. Through this dim religious light he views all the things in heaven and earth that are dealt with in his philosophy. His notes are profusely decorated with a rich array of rood screens, finial crockets, lavatories, aumbries, lecterns, lych sheds, albs, stoups, sedilia, credence tables, pixes, hagioscopes, baudekyns, and squenches. It is evident that he keeps a Bestiary, or record of his experiences in bestiology, otherwise called bestial eikonography; and if he be requested to give a more explicit definition of the article, he will perhaps inform you that it is a record of the types of the ecclesiological symbolisation of beasts. If you prevail on him to exhibit to you this solemn record, which he will open with befitting reverence, the faintest suspicion of a smile curling on your lip will suffuse him with a lively sorrow for your lost condition, mixed with righteous indignation towards the irreverent folly whereof you have been guilty. He finds a great deal beyond sermons in stones, and can point out to you a certain piece of rather confused-looking architecture, which he terms a symbolical epitome of all knowledge, human and divine--an eikonographic encyclopædia.
If you desire an antidote to all this, you may find it in the editor in true blue who so largely refers to the Book of the Universal Kirk, The Hynd Let Loose, The Cloud of Witnesses, Naphtali, and Faithful Witness-Bearing Exemplified, and is great in his observations on the Auchinshauch Testimony, the Sanquhar Declaration, and that fine amalgamation of humility and dogmatism, the Informatory Vindication.[78]
[Footnote 78: "An Informatory Vindication of a poor, wasted, misrepresented remnant of the suffering anti-popish, anti-prelatic, anti-erastian, anti-sectarian, _only true_ church of Christ in Scotland."]
There is no occasion for quarrelling with these specialties. They are typical of a zeal often prolific both in amusement and instruction; and when a man has gone through the labour of rendering many hundreds of pages from a crabbed old manuscript, or of translating as much from a nearly unknown tongue, it would be hard to deny him the recreation of a few capers on his own hobby. Keep in mind that everything of this kind is outside the substance of the book. The editor has his swing in the introduction and appendix, and the notes; perhaps also in the title and index, if he can make anything of them. But it is a principle of honour throughout the clubs that the purity of the text shall not be tampered with; and so, whether dark or light, faint or strong, it is a true impression of the times, as the reader will perhaps find in the few specimens I propose to show him. As touching the literary value of what is thus restored, there are some who will say, and get applause for doing so, that there are too many bad or second-rate books in existence already; that every work of great genius finds its way to the world at once; and that the very fact of its long obscurity proves a piece of literature to be of little value. For all this, and all that can be added to it, there are those who love these recovered relics of ancestral literature, and are prepared to give reasons for their attachment. In the first place, and apart from their purely literary merits, they are records of the intellect and manners of their age. Whoever desires to be really acquainted with the condition of a nation at any particular time--say with that of England during Elizabeth's reign, or the Commonwealth--will not attain his object by merely reading the most approved histories of the period. He must endeavour as far as he can to live back into the times, and to do this most effectually he had better saturate himself to the utmost with its fugitive literature, reading every scrap he may lay hand on until he can find no more.