he
present state of English literature, the most profuse perhaps in Europe,
we cannot refrain from thinking that the "patronage of booksellers" is
frequently injurious to the great interests of literature.

[Footnote A: The agreement made with Simmons, the publisher, was 5_l_.
down, and 5_l_. more when 1500 copies were sold, the same sum to be paid
for the second and third editions, each of the same number of copies.
Milton only lived during the publication of two editions, and his widow
parted with all her right in the work to the same bookseller for eight
pounds. Her autograph receipt was in the possession of the late Dawson
Turner.--ED.]

The dealers in enormous speculative purchases are only subservient to the
spirit of the times. If they are the purveyors, they are also the
panders of public taste; and their vaunted patronage only extends to
popular subjects; while their urgent demands are sure to produce hasty
manufactures. A precious work on a recondite subject, which may have
consumed the life of its author, no bookseller can patronise; and whenever
such a work is published, the author has rarely survived the long season
of the public's neglect. While popular works, after some few years of
celebrity, have at length been discovered not worth the repairs nor the
renewal of their lease of fame, the neglected work of a nobler design
rises in value and rarity. The literary work which requires the greatest
skill and difficulty, and the longest labour, is not commercially valued
with that hasty, spurious novelty; for which the taste of the public is
craving, from the strength of its disease rather than of its appetite.
ROUSSEAU observed, that his musical opera, the work of five or six weeks,
brought him as much money as he had received for his "Emile," which had
cost him twenty years of meditation, and three years of composition. This
single fact represents a hundred. So fallacious are public opinion and the
patronage of booksellers!

Such, then, is the inadequate remuneration of a life devoted to
literature; and notwithstanding the more general interest excited by its
productions within the last century, it has not essentially altered their
situation in society; for who is deceived by the trivial exultation of the
gay sparkling scribbler who lately assured us that authors now dip their
pens in silver ink-standishes, and have a valet for an amanuensis?
Fashionable writers must necessarily get out of fashion; it is th