He now, by the kindness of Dr. Farmer, was admitted to Emanuel College, Cambridge, and, removing to Bene't, became the Fifth Senior Optime. He was five years dangling after a fellowship, but without success. He then returned to London, and attained eminence in copying oil portraits in water colours. Another change of occupation-and then the end. He "perished in his pride."

Melancholy, indeed, is the record of this unhappy man's career as a London bookseller. But the story of misfortune, and the story of success, are equally instructive. "All prospects in the church vanishing, and my eyes beginning to fail very fast, I turned bookseller, and for the last thirteen years have struggled in vain to establish myself. The same ill fortune which has followed me through life, has not here forsaken me. I have seen men on every side of me, greatly my inferiors in every respect, towering above me; while the most contemptible amongst them, without education, without a knowledge of their profession, and without an idea, have been received into palaces, and into the bosom of the great, while I have been forsaken and neglected, and my business reduced to nothing. It is, therefore, high time for me to be gone." Mr. Bowyer Nichols (who prints, in his 'Illustrations of Literary History,' the newspaper memoir which I have quoted) does justice to the memory of this unfortunate bookseller. He had married an interesting and well-educated woman with some fortune, but his wife and child dying, he became regardless of appearances, and sank into the slovenly Mustapha that Dibdin has described. His shop was

ill-kept; the curious volumes upon his shelves were always dirty and ill-arranged; the ordinary civilities to his customers were put aside. Though men of learning and literary celebrity came there to profit by his various knowledge, and to enjoy his brilliant conversation, he had not the art of making money by buying and selling, as the unlearned man had, who, in copying titles, mistook the dative for the accusative case. Following an intellectual occupation, he did not perceive that qualities for the working day were necessary to make a prosperous tradesman.

APPENDIX.

THE following is a reprint, without alteration, of an article written by the author of this volume in 1834, and published in a monthly periodical called The Printing Machine.' It contains some general views of the progress of Printing and Bookselling in England which may illustrate some of the details of the preceding pages. The date of this paper must be borne in mind by the reader of thirty years later :—

THE MARKET OF LITERATURE.

THERE was an ingenious gentleman in the seventeenth century who was greatly alarmed lest the breed of horses should be annihilated in England, by the introduction of public conveyances. The people that were accustomed to ride "their good pad-nags" wickedly preferred, he says, the smaller cost of making their journeys in the stage-coaches "that go to almost every town within twenty or twenty-five miles of London, at very low rates; so that," he adds, "by computation, there are not so many horses, by 10,000, kept now in these parts, as there were before stage-coaches set up."

It would be very easy now, by computation, to show that the establishment of public carriages has multiplied the breed of horses fifty-fold more than it would have multiplied, had the rich only continued to use horses. But that is not our present business. What the worthy encourager of travelling maintained would happen, and, indeed, had happened, by the extension of the advantages of travelling from the few to the many, a considerable number of the worthy encouragers of knowledge maintain will happen, and, indeed, has happened, by a similar extension of the benefits of knowledge. They show, by compu

tation, that the breed of books has deteriorated—that the market for books is narrowed-and that "there are not so many books, by 10,000, used now in these parts, as there were before books for all, at very low rates, were set up." The complaint may be just; but we shall take the liberty of investigating its correctness with a care proportioned to the alleged magnitude of the evil.

To conduct this investigation upon data that may be satisfactory to ourselves and our readers, we must open a very wide field of inquiry. It embraces the literary history, not only of England, but of every other country where books are printed. The subject is a most interesting one; but its facts are to be sought for in barren and thorny places. In the present paper we can only bring together some of the more striking results which lie upon the surface. It is possible that we may occasionally devote some other papers to particular branches of the inquiry. In the mean time this preliminary view will, if we mistake not, establish one great truth-that at every step of the diffusion of knowledge, from the first slow efforts of the rude Printing Press of 1460, to the last rapid workings of the Printing Machine of 1833, the foundations of the prosperity, the independence, and the consequent excellence of literature, have been deepened and widened; and the condition of every labourer and chapman in the market of literature successively ameliorated. If we do not show this by computation, we shall be content to believe, for the rest of our lives, that good horses and good books will never appear again in England; and that, as the Bristol mail is the destruction of travelling, so the Penny Cyclopædia' is the destruction of literature. We are not obstinate.

6

We may probably simplify this large subject, by determining to confine this introductory paper to the progress of printing in England, and by dividing this progress into five periods, viz:— I. From 1471 (the introduction of printing by Caxton) to the accession of James I., 1603.

II. From 1603 to the Revolution, 1688.

III. From 1688 to the accession of George III., 1760.

IV. From 1760 to 1800.

V. From 1800 to 1833.*

I omit this latter period, which does not belong to the subject of the "Old Booksellers."