Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/394

354 354 EDWARD MOXON. by one who had never heard the song of the bird to which they were addressed, and the internal evidence upon this point is indubitably strong ; the sonnet per- haps, to state it in proportion, is to Keats's " Ode to the Nightingale," as the owl's screeching "too-whit" to " Sweet quired Philomela." By this time, however, Moxon, in spite of his bad poetry, had made a wide reputation as a poetical publisher, and from his establishment was issued, not only all that was most valuable of contemporary poetical literature, but with true catholic taste, the works of our older dramatic poets, edited for the most part by the Rev. Alexander Dyce. By degrees, too, Moxon was enabled to add to his catalogue the works of many of the poets who had shed a lustre upon the two first decades of this century, especially the works of Keats, Shelley, and Leigh Hunt. In 1839 he brought out Mrs. Shelley's edition of her husband's poems the first "complete edition" that had been published. In the following year a bookseller in the Strand named Hetherington was indicted for selling a work entitled " Haslam's Let- ters to the Clergy of all Denominations," and was sentenced to four months' imprisonment, as having published in this volume sundry " libels " against the Old Testament. While the trial was pending, Hetherington commissioned a servant of his, named Holt, to purchase copies of " Shelley's Poems" from the publisher, and from the retail dealers, and then obtained a similar indictment against Moxon. The celebrated trial the " Queen v. Moxon" was of course the result. The prosecution relied chiefly upon cer- tain passages in " Queen Mab," more especially in the notes, and these were read in order to prove the