advantage will be any advantage at all,
the present value sink to almost nothing. Such is the inconstancy of
the public taste that no sensible man will venture to pronounce, with
confidence, what the sale of any book published in our days will be
in the years between 1890 and 1900. The whole fashion of thinking and
writing has often undergone a change in a much shorter period than
that to which my honourable and learned friend would extend posthumous
copyright. What would have been considered the best literary property
in the earlier part of Charles the Second's reign? I imagine Cowley's
Poems. Overleap sixty years, and you are in the generation of which Pope
asked, "Who now reads Cowley?" What works were ever expected with more
impatience by the public than those of Lord Bolingbroke, which appeared,
I think, in 1754? In 1814, no bookseller would have thanked you for the
copyright of them all, if you had offered it to him for nothing. What
would Paternoster Row give now for the copyright of Hayley's Triumphs of
Temper, so much admired within the memory of many people still living? I
say, therefore, that, from the very nature of literary property, it will
almost always pass away from an author's family; and I say, that the
price given for it to the family will bear a very small proportion to
the tax which the purchaser, if his speculation turns out well, will in
the course of a long series of years levy on the public.

If, Sir, I wished to find a strong and perfect illustration of the
effects which I anticipate from long copyright, I should select,--my
honourable and learned friend will be surprised,--I should select the
case of Milton's granddaughter. As often as this bill has been under
discussion, the fate of Milton's granddaughter has been brought forward
by the advocates of monopoly. My honourable and learned friend has
repeatedly told the story with great eloquence and effect. He has
dilated on the sufferings, on the abject poverty, of this ill-fated
woman, the last of an illustrious race. He tells us that, in the
extremity of her distress, Garrick gave her a benefit, that Johnson
wrote a prologue, and that the public contributed some hundreds
of pounds. Was it fit, he asks, that she should receive, in this
eleemosynary form, a small portion of what was in truth a debt? Why, he
asks, instead of obtaining a pittance from charity, did she not live in
comfort and luxury on the proceeds of the sale of her ancestor's wor