Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/133

Rh To return again to educational works, we find that in Mangnall's Questions a property had been acquired that fully rivalled Murray's Mrs. Markham. A type now of a hideously painful and parrot-like system of teaching (what negations of talent our sisters and mothers owe to this encyclopædic volume we shudder to sum up!) it was imitated and printed in every direction. Poor Miss Mangnall! who recollects now-a-days that in 1806 she commenced her literary life with a volume of poems? A very similar book, but on scientific questions, was Mrs. Marcet's Conversations, which was not only profitable to Longman, but American booksellers, up to the year 1853, had reaped an abundant harvest from the sale of 160,000 copies.

The attempts already made by Constable and Murray to promote the sale of cheap and yet excellent books, led Longman to establish his Cabinet Encyclopædia. The management was given to Dr. Lardner, then a professor at the London University,