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he issued his annual commodities. A friend of his family told me, some forty years ago, that this incorrigible old bookseller always at this season kept a clean shirt in his pocket, that he might make a decent appearance before the magistrate and the keeper of Newgate. But Carnan persevered, till the judges of the Court of Common Pleas decided against the validity of the patent, and an injunction which had been obtained in the Exchequer was immediately dissolved. The Stationers' Company then induced Lord North to bring a Bill into Parliament to revest in them the monopoly that had been declared illegal. In 1779 Erskine, in a speech which remains as one of the great triumphs of his oratory, procured the rejection of this Bill by a large majority. What," some one of my readers may say, "has this digression to do with the works of Goldsmith?" Carnan, who had become the proprietor of The Traveller,' published by John Newbery, opposed the re-publication of Goldsmith's poems in the booksellers' edition of 1779. He was at issue with the leaders of the trade. "It is much to be regretted," says Mr. Cunningham, in his preface to Johnson's 'Lives of the Poets,' "that the petty interest of a bookseller named Carnan should have excluded Goldsmith from the number of his Lives." There was evidently something more than "petty interest," which set Carnan in direct opposition to the great body of his fellows. The great question was in hot dispute in 1777. The Stationers had the ear of the Prime Minister; but Carnan was in con

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fidential intercourse with Erskine. We shall not see his shadow amongst the forty booksellers who met at the Chapter Coffee-house to resist an invasion of their literary preserves by the publication at Edinburgh of an edition of The British Poets, from Chaucer to Churchill."

CHAPTER XII

THE CHAPTER COFFEE-HOUSE.

WO Undergraduates of Oxford, George Colman and Bonnel Thornton, commenced their literary career in 1754,

with the periodical paper, 'The Connoisseur.' The experience of these youths, who had been the Westminster schoolfellows of Cowper, Lloyd, and Churchill, scarcely justified them in assuming the dignity of "Mr. Town, Critic and Censor-General." Yet their liveliness contrasted agreeably with the solemnity of the 'Rambler,' which had come to a close in 1752; nor were they ignoble rivals of Hawkesworth, in his 'Adventurer,' commenced in that year. Colman and Thornton were the Beaumont and Fletcher of essayists, and in their concluding number, they declared that almost every single paper was the joint production of both. They had both looked upon London with the quick observation of youth, and were probably better qualified to describe some of its lighter aspects than those who desired "to point a moral" in the office of "Critic and Censor-General." They certainly have not described at hap-hazard the famous coffee-house in Paternoster Row, where booksellers "most do congregate." Alas! I am using a wrong tense; the

Chapter gradually fell into decay, and within a few years has ceased to exist. But in connection with the Old Booksellers, its memory will survive as long as that of the Mermaid or the Devil Tavern. Thus writes Mr. Town: "My publisher would not forgive me, was I to leave the neighbourhood without taking notice of the Chapter coffee-house, which is frequented by those encouragers of literature, and (as they are styled by an eminent critic) 'not the worst judges of merit, the booksellers.' The con

versation here naturally turns upon the newest publications; but their criticisms are somewhat singular. When they say a good book, they do not mean to praise the style or sentiment, but the quick and extensive sale of it. That book, in the phrase of the Conger, is best which sells most; and if the demand for Quarles should be greater than for Pope, he would have the highest place on the rubric-post. There are also many parts of every work liable to their remarks, which fall not within the notice of less accurate observers. A few nights ago, I saw one of these gentlemen take up a sermon, and after seeming to peruse it for some time with great attention, he declared it was very good English.' The reader will judge whether I was most surprised or diverted, when I discovered that he was not commending the purity and elegance of the diction, but the beauty of the type, which, it seems, is known among the printers by that appellation. We must not, however, think the members of the Conger strangers to the deeper parts of literature; for as carpenters, smiths, masons, and all mechanics smell of the trade they

labour at, booksellers take a peculiar turn from their connexions with books and authors. The character of the bookseller is commonly formed on the writers in his service. Thus one is a politician, or a deist; another affects humour, or aims at turns of wit and repartee; while a third perhaps is grave, moral, and sententious."

The members of "The Conger" were a select band, who, in the middle of the last century, had a common interest in the copyright of certain books, whether copyright by law or by usage. It appears that in 1719 five booksellers united themselves under the name of the Printing Conger. In 1736, this limited partnership still went on, with the addition of new names. In that year, a correspondent of Mr. Bowyer speaks of the Society for Encouraging Learning as

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a downright trading society, a mere Conger;" adding, "Forgive me if I misspell so mysterious a word." About the same period, a second partnership of the same kind was formed, calling themselves the New Conger. Mr. Nichols, who records these particulars, says, "the term Conger was supposed to have been at first applied to them invidiously, alluding to the Conger Eel, which is said to swallow the smaller fry; or it may possibly have been taken from Congeries." Whether the "smaller fry" were the minnows of bookselling or of authorship, Mr. Nichols does not explain. The Conger, new and old, died out. The practice of diminishing the individual risk of publication gradually extended in the division of a book into shares, varying in amount, each partner being liable for his portion of the cost. The arrangements

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