Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/343

303 AND JAMES N1SBET. 303 professions he held out privately, Wesley and Whit- field had to go elsewhere for a publisher, although there must have been plenty of temptation to incline the trade to patronise Methodism, for Coote, in a comedy of his, published in 1757, makes a bookseller say : " I don't deal in the sermon way now ; I lost money by the last I printed, for all 'twas by a Metho- dist." But John Rivington would have none of them, and in 1752 we find him publishing "The Mischiefs of Enthusiasm and Bigotry : an Assize Sermon by the Rev. R. Hurd ;" and about 1760 he was appointed publisher to the venerable " Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge" an office that remained in the family for upwards of seventy years. Dissent in itself was injurious enough to his interests, but when Wilberforce and Hannah More succeeded in making a portion of the Church "Evangelical," upwards of half his customers deserted to a rival shop in Piccadilly. Some time before this he had admitted his sons, Francis and Charles, into partnership, and he was then appointed manager in general of the works pub- lished by his clique ; that is, of standard editions of Shakespeare, Milton, Locke, and other British classics, and of such religious works as were produced in an expensive and bulky form ; and of these works, two especially, Dr. Dodd's " Commentary," and Cruden's "Concordance" stand out so prominently that some slight account of their authors may not be unaccept- able. William Dodd was a man of great learning, and a very popular preacher in the metropolis, and in 1776, when he was appointed chaplain to the King, took his degree of LL.D. Ambitious and fond of display