Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/486

444 444 PROVINCIAL BOOKSELLERS. sermons " for a crown piece and a pair of breeches " (profitable penny-a-lining that!) again printing treasonable papers, for which he was seized by the authorities ; and pirating and abridging " Robinson Crusoe," the first part of which appeared in 1/17, for which greater crime he went scot free. Occasionally he went home, but scarcely found it worth his while to stay in Dublin, and his parents' "melting tears caused mine to flow, and bedewed my pillow every night after that I lodged with them. ' What, Tommy,' my mother would sometimes say, ' this English dam- sel of yours, I suppose, is the chiefest reason why you slight us and your native country ! Well,' added she, ' the ways of Providence are unsearchable.' " Gent, however, "provident overmuch," made the heart of his English damsel sick with hope deferred and " yet" he writes, " I could not well help it. I had a little money, it is very true, but no certain home wherein to invite her. I knew she was well fixed ; and it pierced me to the very heart to think if through any miscarriage or misfortune I should alter her condition for the worse instead of the better. Upon this account my letters to her at this time were not so amorously obliging as they ought to have been from a sincere lover ; by which she had reason, how- ever she might have been mistaken, to think that I had failed in my part of those tender engagements which had passed between us." After serving some time with Watts, Tonson's printing partner, and also with Henry Woodfall, founder of a long line of famous printers, he pur- chased a quantity of old type from Mist, the proprie- tor of the well-known journal, and just as he was conning over his matrimonial prospects, " one Sunday