Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/339

299 AND JAMES NISBE T. 299 myself at your expense, but you need not give your- self any uneasiness. I knew better than you could do the extent of the sale of single sermons, and accord- ingly printed one hundred copies, to the expense of which you are heartily welcome."* In 1736 Rivington became an active member of a society for promoting the encouragement of learning, but as he and his colleagues sustained much injury through it, this was in the following year abandoned. In 1737 we find him venturing in a very different path. "Two booksellers," writes Richardson, "my particular friends (Rivington and Osborne), entreated me to write for them a little volume of letters, in a common style, on such subjects as might be of use to those country readers who were unable to indite for themselves. 'Would it be any harm,' said I, 'in a piece you want to be written so low, if one should instruct them how they should think and act in common cases, as well as indite ?' They were the more urgent for me to begin the little volume for the hint. I set about it, and in the progress of writing two or three letters to instruct handsome girls who were obliged to go out to service, as we phrase it, how to avoid the snares that might be laid against their virtue, the above story occurred to me, and hence sprang ' Pamela.' " The first two volumes of the story were written in three months, and never was a book of this kind more generally or more quickly admired. Pope asserted that it would do more good than twenty sermons, mindful, perhaps, of its publisher ; Slocock and many other eminent divines recommended it from the pulpit ; a critic declared that if all books were 192
 * Aldine Magazine, p. 5-