Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/47

Rh obliged to take gold, neither will I; nor stay for it beyond four-and-twenty hours after it is due." Good silver, however, was very scarce, and was at a premium of forty per cent; so after a year's wrangling he had to put up with the fate of all who then sold labour for money. "The Notes and Queries," continues Dryden, perhaps as a gibe at Jacob's parsimony, "shall be short; because you shall get the more by saving paper." Again he attacks him, this time half playfully: "Upon trial I find all of your trade are sharpers, and you not more than others; therefore I have not wholly left you." Tonson all along wished to dedicate the work to King William, but Dryden, a staunch Tory, would not yield a tittle of his political principles, so the bookseller consoled himself by slyly ordering all the pictures of Æneas in the engravings to be drawn with William's characteristic hooked nose; a manoeuvre that gave rise to the following:—

In December, 1699, Dryden finished his last work, the "Fables," for which "ten thousand verses" he was paid the sum of two hundred and fifty guineas, with fifty more to be added at the beginning of the second impression. In this volume was included his Ode to St. Cecilia, which had first been performed at the Music Feast kept in Stationers' Hall, on the 22nd of November, 1697.