nd tells with some operative power, however imperceptible
and infinitesimal, upon all subsequent events, great or small, so that
everything tells on everything, and there is no one specific cause,
primary or secondary, that can be assigned to any particular event. It
may be so objectively, as the transcendentalists say, but to common
apprehensions there are specific facts which are to them emphatic as
beginnings, such as the day when any man destined for leadership in
great political events was born, or that whereon the Cape of Good Hope
was doubled, or America was discovered.

The beginning of the book clubs is marked by a like distinctness, both
in date and circumstance. The institution did not spring in full
maturity and equipment, like Pallas from the brain of Jove; it was
started by a casual impulse, and remained long insignificant; but its
origin and early progress are as distinctly and specifically its own, as
the birth and infancy of any hero or statesman are his. It is to the
garrulity of Dibdin writing before there was any prospect that this
class of institutions would reach their subsequent importance and
usefulness, that we owe many minute items of detail about the cradle of
the new system. We first slip in upon a small dinner-party, on the 4th
of June in the year 1813, at the table of "Hortensius." The day was one
naturally devoted to hospitality, being the birthday of the reigning
monarch, George III.; but this the historian passes unnoticed, the
object of all-absorbing interest being the great conflict of the
Roxburghe book-sale, then raging through its forty-and-one days. Of
Hortensius it is needless to know more than that he was a distinguished
lawyer, and had a fine library, which having described, Dibdin passes on
thus to matters of more immediate importance: "Nor is the hospitality of
the owner of these treasures of a less quality and calibre than his
taste; for Hortensius regaleth liberally--and as the 'night and day
champagnes' (so he is pleased humorously to call them) sparkle upon his
Gottingen-manufactured table-cloth, 'the master of the revels,' or (to
borrow the phraseology of Pynson) of the 'feste royalle,' discourseth
lustily and loudly upon the charms--not of a full-curled or
full-bottomed 'King's Bench' periwig--but of a full-margined
Bartholomaeus or Barclay like his own."[67]

[Footnote 67: Bibliographical Decameron, vol. iii. p. 28.]

After some forty pages of this sort of matter, we