Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/322

282 In 1816, the year before the foundation of the Literary Gazette, Colburn had, as we have seen, migrated to New Burlington Street, and soon rendered his shop famous as the chief emporium for the purchase and sale of novels and other light literature. The first book issued from the new establishment was Lady Morgan's "Zana"—a work certainly not worth much, but scarcely meriting an attack in the Quarterly, which Talfourd stigmatises as "one of the coarsest insults ever offered in print by man to woman;" however, through the power of her ladyship's name, and with the aid of skilful advertising in which Colburn was perhaps the greatest expert in a time when the art had not reached its present high state of development "Zana" proved eminently successful. Talented in a manner Lady Morgan certainly was, and, as a proof, is said to have made more than twenty-five thousand pounds by her pen. She had published a volume of verses at the unfortunately early age of fourteen, and this idea of precocity seems to us to accompany all her works.

At the suggestion of his friend Mr. Upcott, Colburn undertook, in 1818, the publication of "Evelyn's Diary," and its success would have been almost unparalleled had it not been followed in 1825 by the "Diary of Pepys." For more than 150 years this work reposed unread and unknown, until Mr. John Smith succeeded in deciphering the stenographic characters which had concealed so much amusement from the world. The Work, edited by Lord Braybrooke, was published in two volumes at six guineas, and though this and the two succeeding editions, at five guineas, were almost worthless from the editorial excisions they had undergone from the too-modest fingers of the noble editor,