he chief landed gentry of his
entertainer's neighbourhood. But the best Glenlivet would not induce him
to pledge "the cause of Bibliomania all over the world," being unable to
foresee what influence the utterance of words so unusual and so
suspiciously savouring of demonology might exercise over his future
destiny.]

The club thus abruptly formed, consisted of affluent collectors, some of
them noble, with a sprinkling of zealous practical men, who assisted
them in their great purchases, while doing minor strokes of business for
themselves. These, who in some measure fed on the crumbs that fell from
the master's table, were in a position rather too closely resembling the
professionals in a hunt or cricket club. The circle was a very exclusive
one, however; the number limited to thirty-one members, "one black ball
excluding;" and it used to be remarked, that it was easier to get into
the Peerage or the Privy Council than into "the Roxburghe."

Nothing has done so much to secure the potent influence of clubs as the
profound secrecy in which their internal or domestic transactions have
generally been buried. The great safeguard of this secrecy will be found
in that rigid rule of our social code which prohibits every gentleman
from making public the affairs of the private circle; and if from lack
of discretion, as it is sometimes gently termed, this law is supposed to
have a lax hold on any one, he is picked off by the "one," "two," "three
black balls." It is singular that a club so small and exclusive as the
Roxburghe should have proved an exception to the rule of secrecy, and
that the world has been favoured with revelations of its doings which
have made it the object of more amusement than reverence. In fact,
through failure of proper use of the black ball, it got possession of a
black sheep, in the person of a certain Joseph Hazlewood. He had
achieved a sort of reputation in the book-hunting community by
discovering the hidden author of Drunken Barnaby's Journal. In reality,
however, he was a sort of literary Jack Brag. As that amusing creation
of Theodore Hook's practical imagination mustered himself with sporting
gentlemen through his command over the technicalities or slang of the
kennel and the turf, so did Hazlewood sit at the board with scholars and
aristocratic book-collectors through a free use of their technical
phraseology. In either case, if the indulgence in these terms descended
into a motley grotesqueness,