ss of books of which the production has in this country
always been uphill work;--large solid books, more fitted for authors and
students than for those termed the reading public at large--books which
may hence, in some measure, be termed the raw materials of literature,
rather than literature itself. They are eminently valuable; but, since
it is to the intellectual manufacturer who is to produce an article of
saleable literature that they are valuable, rather than to the general
consumer, they do not secure an extensive sale. Of this kind of
literature the staple materials are old state papers and letters--old
chronicles--specimens of poetic, dramatic, and other literature, more
valuable as vestiges of the style and customs of their age than for
their absolute worth as works of genius--massive volumes of old
divinity--disquisitions on obsolete science, and the like.

It is curious, by the way, that costly books of this sort seem to
succeed better with the French than with us, though we do not generally
give that people credit for excelling us in the outlay of money. Perhaps
it is because they enjoy the British market as well as their own that
they are enabled to excel us; but they certainly do so in the
publication, through private enterprise, of great costly works, having a
sort of national character. The efforts to rival them in this country
have been considerable and meritorious, but in many instances signally
unfortunate. Take, for instance, the noble edition of Hollingshed and
the other chroniclers, published in quarto volumes by the London trade;
the Parliamentary History, in thirty-six volumes, each containing about
as much reading as Gibbon's Decline and Fall; the State Trials; Sadler's
and Thurlow's State Papers; the Harleian Miscellany, and several other
ponderous publications of the same kind. All of them are to be had
cheap, some at just a percentage above the price of waste paper. When an
attempt was made to publish in the English language a really thorough
Biographical Dictionary, an improvement on the French Biographie
Universelle, it stuck in letter A, after the completion of seven dense
octavo volumes--an abortive fragment bearing melancholy testimony to
what such a work ought to be. Publications of this kind have, in several
instances, caused great losses to some, while they have brought
satisfaction to no one concerned in them. A publisher has just the same
distaste as any other ordinary member of the