Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/398

358 358 EDWARD MOXON. British Museum Catalogue. The system upon which he had obtained money for them appears to have been very extensive and well organised, and as some few were probably genuine, and others based upon a substratum of truth, the difficulty of judging those which in various ways have got into print, was extreme. Altogether, this is one of the most notable literary forgeries of modern times. To return, however, to Moxon, we find that in 1835, conjointly with Longman, he published Wordsworth's "Yarrow Revisited," and shortly after this the poet transferred all his works from the Messrs. Longman, and we believe that Moxon purchased the copyrights of the past poems for the sum of one thousand pounds. Mr. Browning's earlier volumes, like Mr. Tennyson's " Lyrical Poems," had been published by Effingham Wilson, but in 1840 Moxon issued " Sordello." This was followed by " Bells and Pomegranates," published in numbers between 1842 and 1845, and by a " Blot in the Scutcheon," (acted at Drury Lane in 1843), and which, though unsuccessful on the stage, was in the opinion of Charles Dickens "the finest poem of the century." In 1848, however, Mr. Browning re- moved his works to the care of Messrs. Chapman and Hall. Among the other authors whose productions were issued by Moxon somewhere at this period, and whom we cannot do more than mention, were Talfourd, Monk- ton Milnes (Lord Houghton), Tom Hood, Barry Corn- wall (Proctor), Sheridan Knowles (who was by turn an usher, a journalist, a dramatic poet, and a dissent- ing minister), Quillinan (whose works Landor wittily, though unjustly, described as Quillinanities), Mr. Browning (for a brief period only), Haydn, and Dana.