Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/326

286 286 HENRY COL BURN. of my august detainer, the king." However, political influence was brought to bear upon the Government, and he was set at liberty with the burden of the debt hanging very lightly round his neck. In 1820 he founded the John Bull newspaper, strongly in favour of the king's interests, scurrilous as it was witty ; everybody read it, and for some years it yielded him 2000 per annum. His. life we see had been sufficiently various, and not an incident of it was ever forgotten, for his memory was probably unrivalled. He made a bet that he would repeat in order the names of all the shops on one side of Oxford Street, and he only misplaced one ; and he gained another wager by saying from memory a whole column of Times advertisement, which he had only once conned over ; and on another occasion he utterly discomfited a universal critic, by engaging him in a conversation anent lunar eclipses, and then discharg- ing three columns of the " Encyclopaedia Britannica" at him, without pause or hesitation. He had, too, the gift of improvising verse in our stubborn English tongue, and was known on one occasion to introduce the names of fifty guests at a supper-table, in a song of fifty verses each verse a rhymed epigram. With attainments and experiences like these, Col- burn may be considered as a wise rather than a venturous man when he offered Hook 600 to write a novel. The idea of the " Sayings and Doings" was struck out at a John Bull gathering, and the book when published in 1824, was so successful that 6000 copies of the three volumes were soon disposed of,* shows a clear profit of ^2000 on the/r-tf series. This must be incorrect.
 * Lockhart, in his article in the Quarterly, says that Hook's diary