LITTERATEUR AND BOOK-HUNTER
named C. Louis Scherer. I led him up to the hardware store, but the script was two centuries old; he was matter of fact and absolutely devoid of imagination and he could not read it. I determined not to be baffled in that way, bought a German Grammar and Dictionary and went to work, and at the end of about a year I went to the store and made a copy of the entry. With like material I began the study of Dutch and I have carried both languages with me through my later life. When in Holland in 1897, I spent a day with a citizen of Utrecht who accompanied me to Gorcum. He did not know a word of English and I had the satisfaction of hearing a Dutchman say of myself on the train: “If he were here for three months, he could talk Dutch.” When Ashenfelter returned from an abode of sixteen months in Guayaquil, where he became secretary to the United States Consul, had the yellow fever, smuggled cocoa and secured, together with a profit of $1,500, a knife cut across the chin and a bullet wound in the leg, I began to study Spanish and to use it in conversation with him. I proceeded so far as to read Don Quixote and other Spanish literature, and it caused me very little difificulty.
In 1863 I began the practice of keeping a sort of record of my reading, giving the name of the author, the title of the book, the number of pages and the excerpts of those thoughts which impressed me as most pleasing and forcible. This practice I have continued ever since and it has resulted in four manuscript volumes which have been of great service as well as satisfaction, furnishing me with ready quotations for papers and addresses from my own study. [1]0n one
- ↑ “I have examined three note books in his own handwriting which contain the record of his literary studies. They begin in October, 1863, and close, without omission of a single year, in 1916. They combine the features of common-place books, anthologies, quotations of striking passages both in prose and poetry, with careful lists of the authors read, the number of pages contained in each, arranged under appropriate headings. They embrace Greek, Latin, French, German, Dutch, Italian and Spanish as well as English books, carefully summarized. In 1863, he read a total of 21,130 pages of which 5,336 were in law and 15,794 in general literature. In the former, Coke-Littleton, Blackstone, Kent, Sir William Jones, Burlamaqui, and Williams alternated with Voltaire, Rousseau, Des Cartes, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Goethe, Spenser, Byron, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Chaucer and Swinburne. During the succeeding years he fell but little below this average. Even while he was Governor, oppressed with the affairs of state, he refreshed himself with literature, reading the Bible from cover to cover for the fourth time; in 1904 reading 27,934 pages, of which 1321 were in German, 48 in Dutch, and 216 in Italian. In 1906, while still in office, he ran the figures up to 31,578 pages, of which 779 were in German and 1002 in French. His list for that year includes all of Shakespeare's English historical plays, Henry IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, King John, Richard II and Richard III. In that year, as in former ones, he filled pages with quotations from what he had read. In 1910 while at Pennypacker's Mills, he filled 89 pages with extracts from Latin, French and old English authors. In 1916, while sick and suffering, he read Poe, Macaulay, Bayard Taylor's novels Joseph and The Story of Kennett, the Life of Menno Simons, Charles Francis Adams's Autobiography, Trollope and Koster's Secrets of German Success. Through all the years, at frequently recurring intervals he returned to Bunyan, Milton and Thomas à Kempis.” — Samuel W. Pennypacker: An address delivered before the Philobiblon Club, October 26, 1916, by Hampton L. Carson, Esq., Philadelphia: The Philobiblon Club, 1917.
