Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/42

26 Then, as now, however, the works in most urgent demand were "novelties," and with these Dryden supplied his publisher as fast almost as pen could drive upon paper. From the correspondence between Dryden and Tonson, printed in Scott's edition of the poet's works, they seem to have been privately on very friendly terms, falling out only when agreements were to be signed or payments to be made. Tonson was at this time publishing what are sometimes known as Tonson's, sometimes as Dryden's, Miscellany Poems. written, so the title-pages averred, by the "most eminent hands." Apropos of this, Pope writes, "Jacob creates poets as kings create knights, not for their honour, but for their money. I can be satisfied with a bare saving gain without being thought an eminent hand." The first volume of the " Miscellany" was published in 1684, and the second in the following year, and of this second, Dryden writes, after thanking the bookseller for two melons—"since we are to have nothing but new, I am resolved we shall have nothing but good, whomever we disoblige." The third "Miscellany" was published in 1693, and Tonson sends an earnest letter of remonstrance anent the amount of "copy" received of the translation of Ovid:—"You may please, sir, to remember that upon my first proposal about the third 'Miscellany,' I offered fifty pounds, and talked of several authors without naming Ovid. You asked if it should not be guineas, and said I should not repent it; upon which I immediately complied, and left it wholly to you what, and for the quantity too; and I declare it was the furthest in the world from my thoughts that by leaving it to you I should have the less." He proceeds to show that Dryden had sold a previous, though recent