Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/436

396 396 THOMAS TEGG. him his small winnings, for a space of sixty years, at shortest. After sixty years, unless your Honourable House provide otherwise, they may begin to steal. " And your petitioner will ever pray. "THOMAS CARLYLE." Tegg did not confine his business to these cheap reprints, but issued many books which were altogether beyond the popular taste and purse, such as " Black- stone," edited by Price ; Smith's " Wealth of Nations," Burton's " Anatomy of Melancholy," Locke's Works, (in ten volumes), Bishop Butler's Works, and Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity," &c. Out of Dr. Adam Clarke's " Family Bible" he is said to have made a small fortune ; the work was stereotyped, and re-issue after re-issue was published. In 1835 he was nominated Alderman of his Ward, but was not elected ; in the following year he was chosen Sheriff, and paid the fine to escape serving, having resolved to forego any further civic distinc- tions. To the usual fine of 400 he added another hundred, and the whole went to found a " Tegg Scholarship" at the City of London School, and he still further increased the value of the gift by adding thereto a very valuable collection of books. On 2 ist April, 1845, Thomas Tegg died, affer a long and painful illness, brought on by over-exertion, mental and physical. His third son, Alfred Byron Tegg, a youth of twenty, then studying at Pembroke College, Oxford, was so affected by the shock of his father's death that he died almost on receipt of the news, and was buried the same day as his father at Wimbledon Thomas Tegg's native village. At the commencement of his autobiography, Tegg says, and the narrative bears the veracity of the