. The press itself will
have ceased to exist.

For several years past it has been frankly avowed by the trade that
books have ceased to sell; that the best works are a drug in the
market; that their shelves groan, until themselves are forced to
follow the example.

Descend to what shifts they may in order to lower their prices, by
piracy from other booksellers, or clipping and coining of authors--no
purchasers! Still, the hope prevailed for a time among the lovers of
letters, that a great glut having occurred, the world was chewing the
cud of its repletion; that the learned were shut up in the Bodleian,
and the ignorant battening upon the circulating libraries; that hungry
times would come again!

But this fond delusion has vanished. People have not only ceased to
purchase those old-fashioned things called books, but even to read
them! Instead of cutting new works, page by page, people cut them
altogether! To far-sighted philosophers, indeed, this was a state of
things long foreshown. It could not be otherwise. The reading world
was a sedentary world. The literary public was a public lying at
anchor. When France delighted in the twelve-volume novels of
Mademoiselle de Scuderi, it drove in coaches and six, at the rate of
four miles an hour; when England luxuriated in those of Richardson, in
eight, it drove in coaches and four, at the rate of five. A journey
was then esteemed a family calamity; and people abided all the year
round in their cedar parlours, thankful to be diverted by the arrival
of the _Spectator_, or a few pages of the _Pilgrim's Progress_, or a
new sermon. To their unincidental lives, a book was an event.

Those were the days worth writing for! The fate of Richardson's
heroines was made a national affair; and people interceded with him by
letter to "spare Clarissa," as they would not now intercede with her
Majesty to spare a new Effie Deans. The successive volumes of _Pope's
Iliad_ were looked for with what is called "breathless" interest,
while such political sheets as the _Drapier's Letters_, or _Junius_,
set the whole kingdom in an uproar! And now, if Pope, or Swift, or
Fielding, or Johnson, or Sterne, were to rise from the grave, MS. in
hand, the most adventurous publisher would pass a sleepless night
before he undertook the risk of paper and print; would advise a small
edition, and exact a sum down in ready money, to be laid out in puffs
and advertisements! "Even then, though we may get rid of a