which,
American moneys having been substituted for German ones, is here given, as
follows:

"We have so long enjoyed the advantage of unrestricted competition in the
production of the works of the best English writers of the past, that we
can hardly realize what our position would have been had the right to
produce Shakespeare, or Milton, or Goldsmith, or any of our great classic
writers, been monopolized by any one publishing-house,--certainly we
should never have seen a shilling Shakespeare, or a half-crown Milton;
and Shakespeare, instead of being, as he is,' familiar in our mouths as
household words,' would have been known but to the scholar and the
student. We are far from condemning an enlightened system of copyright,
and have not a word to say in favor of unreasoning competition; but we do
think that publishers and authors often lose sight of their own interest
in adhering to a system of high prices and restricted sale. Tennyson's
works supply us with a case in point--here, to possess a set of
Tennyson's poems, a reader must pay something like 38_s_. or 40_s_.--in
Boston you may buy a magnificent edition of all his works in two volumes
for something like 15_s_., and a small edition for some four or five
shillings. The result is the purchasers in England are numbered by
hundreds, in America by thousands. In Germany we have almost a parallel
case. There the works of the great German poets, of Schiller, of Goethe,
of Jean Paul, of Wieland, and of Herder, are at the present time 'under
the protecting privileges of the most illustrious German Confederation,'
and, by special privilege, the exclusive property of the Stuttgart
publishing firm of J. G. Cotta. On the forthcoming 9th of November this
monopoly will cease, and all the works of the above-mentioned poets will
be open to the speculation of German publishers generally. It may be
interesting to our readers to learn the history of these peculiar legal
restrictions, which have so long prevailed in the German booktrade, and
the results likely to follow from their removal.

"Until the beginning of this century literary piracy was not prohibited
in the German States. As, however, protection of literary productions
was, at last, emphatically urged, the Acts of the Confederation (on the
reconstruction of Germany in the year 1815) contained a passage to the
effect, that the Diet should, at its first meeting