that for booksellers to take the entire risk of publication upon themselves, and in the event of success to pay one half the net profits of their books to authors, does not always prove to be as beneficial as it may at first sight appear. You insinuate that booksellers confine their liberality to very great authors; I could however mention numerous instances, within my own knowledge, in which booksellers have presented authors with gratuities over and above the sums agreed upon as the prices of their copyrights, when their books have proved more successful than they were expected to be; and these liberal compliments have not always been limited to one or two first rate litterateurs. Mr. Murray has repeatedly presented very liberal sums, in addition to the prices contracted for to gentlemen whose books have met with more success than was anticipated from them. Mr. Colburn has done the same thing. On two late occasions, indeed, he is said to have presented handsome pecuniary acknowledgments to Mr. Horace Smith, and Mr. Theodore Hook, in addition to the liberal prices he paid them for Brambletye House, and Sayings and Doings; and Messrs. Longman and Co. very soon after the publication of Mr. Moore's Life of Sheridan, sent that gentleman a cheque for three hundred pounds, in addition to the large sum they had previously paid him for the copyright of his work. These cannot surely be considered as proofs of the desire of booksellers to take undue advantages of the authors with whom they may stand connected. With regard to the charges usually made to authors who publish works on the principle of a mutual division of profits, I cannot undertake to question the accuracy of your statements, inasmuch as there must of necessity be men of overreaching dispositions in the bookselling as well as in all other trades; but I do most positively deny the inference you have left to be deduced from your illustrative account, that booksellers are in the habit of absorbing the profits of authors by either vexatious or unwarrantable charges. As, however, the discount for ready money could not possibly amount to the sum you have stated as the difference between the two accounts you have brought into juxta-position, I must suppose that you intend to insinuate a charge of unfairness against booksellers, which my own information enables me to pronounce, (as far as it regards the trade generally), as unjust as it is ungenerous. You need not be informed that the profits of a single volume can never be very important, unless its sale is unusually large; since the expenses attendant upon the publication of one volume, are heavier in proportion than those which are incurred for a work consisting of three or four. It is just as expensive to advertise and publish a few pages, as it would be to publish several volumes. I never, however, heard of any author receiving so small a profit as you have described. To the rest of the remarks contained in your article, entitled Booksellers and Authors, I have, as far as I can recollect, nothing to object; and the spirit of impartiality and independence, which characterises some of your observations, leads me to conclude that you will readily give insertion to the opinions, founded on the dearly bought experience, of PATERNOSTER Row, A VETERAN BOOKSELLER. SKETCHES FROM ABROAD. No. 2. DEAR Cousin, I scarcely know how to begin For the whirl and the vortex my thoughts are all in ; But I'll rally my thoughts since the straits I have crossed, Oh! why have I dared the disastrous main, And been sea-tossed, and sea-washed, and sea-sick, in vain. That such things o'er my spirit have any control; What took me from home, but a passion for fame? And the beacon of Calais auspiciously shone, While I, in the cabin, lay cold as a stone! But I'm not one of those who would basely pretend Thus you see my dear cousin, how Fate in pure malice, 'Tis a notion, a dream, a ridiculous rant! This people enlightened, this people polite, (I protest I can scarce hold my goose-quill for spite), I believed all the bedlams in Europe were there. In vain I resisted the maniac throng, Half-dead, malgrè moi, I was carried along. But you'll scarcely believe the next thing that occurred, 'Twas so monstrous provoking, so yery absurd; The vile ragamuffins who dragged me away The moment I first set my foot on the quay, Thrust me into a hole, where a strange looking creature, But what hurts me most, after all, is to find Before I set out, I determined to hold Or at least with bon mots to enrich my narration; That some centuries hence, when my deeds are rehearsing, Cried "Good people for heaven's sake, give me some tea." Human nature usurped, and was tyrant that night. And I found ne'er a fire, but some wretched wood-embers; "Here's a pretty concern! if this travelling you call, To a mile-stone as well one might whistle a jig ! For they've poked a great hole in your new poplin gown ; As for me, I am half mad.-Its a shame! its a sin!" Still some comfort arose in my heart, from observing, When she ceased for awhile, and my thoughts were left free, A proof that the hours I have puzzled my brains With Locke and with Stewart were well employed pains. Now, cousin, adieu,-and be sure in my breast, Wheresoever I roam, you are ever a guest. MAXIMS TO LIVE BY. PEREGRINA. XIII. Their suc THE French are so fully alive to the value of that kind of writing which has for its object the delineation of manners and of men, that there is scarcely a statesman, a warrior, or scholar of their nation, who has not bequeathed some remains of this sort to posterity. cess, however, has seldom kept pace with their pretensions; for as they have looked at the affairs of the world chiefly through the medium of their particular professions, their representations have taken a peculiar tint from their pursuits. In our own country, Bacon was a giant who attempted much, and who succeeded in all that he attempted; and if we regret that the number of the aphorisms he has left us is so few, it is because they are so good. Swift was too misanthropical, Shaftesbury was too sceptical, Bolingbroke too superficial, and Addison too tame and common-place, to have attained much celebrity in this branch of literature. Johnson possessed many of the most important of the requisites we look for in a successful writer of apothegms; and, accordingly, we find scattered up and down his various works, passages which would not have discredited the most successful writers of this class. He had studied men as well as books, and things as well words; he was also unshackled by the trammels of any profession, and had much of that stern stuff about him of which a philosopher ought to be composed. But he was deeply tainted by party, and still more so by prejudice; he laboured under a depression, morbid but constitutional; and he seldom moved a step which was the impulse of nature or of ease. He could, at times, indeed, unbuckle his armour, but it was only to get upon his stilts; and he was often unwieldly in the one, and sometimes ridiculous on the other. If I were inclined to animadvert in his own strain upon some of the Doctor's efforts, I should say, that we are led through a grandiloquence that is ostentatious, and a sesquepediality that is triptological, to some trite truism, so obvious that all can apply it, but so common that none will appropriate it; shrouding its meanness in the magnificence of its investiture, and the pomp of its paraphernalia. Rouchefoucault has, I am of opinion, been |