Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/393

353 EDWARD MOXON. 353 must have recouped the poet, for upwards of 50,000 copies are said to have been sold before the year 1847. Moxon was always proud of the share he had taken in the production of these works. All the volumes he issued were indeed remarkable for the beautiful manner in which they were "got up," and in 1835 he published such an exquisite edition of his own sonnets that the beauty of this dandy of a book enraged and alarmed a writer in the Quarterly: " Its typographical splendours led us to fear that this style of writing was getting into fashion," but fortu- nately for the reviewer's peace of mind he discovered " that Mr. Moxon the bookseller is his own poet, and that Mr. Moxon the poet is his own bookseller The necessity of obtaining an imprimatur of a pub- lisher is a very wholesome restraint, from which Mr. Moxon unluckily for himself and for us found himself relieved." Surely after a notice like this indeed we have only quoted the kindlier portion, for often as publishers din the unsaleable nature of the drug poetry into the ears of young writers, the charm of retorting upon a bookseller seldom falls so tempt- ingly before an author. Moxon must have regretted that he did not cleave to a promise, held out in his first essay in 1826: " You'll hear no more from me, If critics prove unkind ; My next in simple prose must be> Unless I farour find." This will perhaps suffice as a specimen of the productions of Moxon's muse, though the first lines in the volume, a " Sonnet to a Nightingale," are in- viting. They had been the cause of much pleasantry among the author's friends, as having been penned