Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/333

293 HENRY C OLE URN. 293 a heap of dramatic rubbish, coming at every fresh post, to the table of the benevolent encourager of youthful aspirations, that he was fain to acknowledge the justice of the managers' previous decisions. Although Colburn was throughout his career chiefly successful as a caterer for the libraries, supplying them with novels, which, by some mysterious law, were required to consist of three volumes of about three hundred pages each, the cost of the whole fixed im- mutably at one guinea and a half, his " Modern Novelists," containing his best copyright works, in a cheap octavo form, attained the number of nineteen, being published at intervals between 1835 and 1841, and formed a valuable addition to the popular litera- ture of the time. Finally, Colburn, having acquired an ample com- petence, retired from business, in favour of Messrs. Hurst and Blackett, still, however, retaining his name to some favourite copyrights. He had been twice married, the second time, in 1841, to the daughter of Captain Crosbie, R.N. After a period of well-earned leisure, rendered pleasingly genial by the constant society of his literary friends, Henry Colburn died, on the i6th of August, 1855, at his house in Bryanston Square. The whole of his property was sworn to be under 35,000, and went to his wife and her family. Two years later, the seven copyrights he had reserved were sold by auction, and realised the large sum of 14,000, to which Miss Strickland's " Lives of the Queens of England" alone contributed 6900. As publisher of three volume novels, Colburn was succeeded by two principal rival houses, with the foundation of each of which he was in some way con-