Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/56

38 contemporaries. Lintot was, however, disappointed with his share of the profits, and, pretending to have found something invalid in the agreement, threatened a suit in Chancery. Pope denied this, quarrelled, and finally left him, and turned his rancour to good account in the pages of the Dunciad.

By this time Lintot's fortunes were firmly assured. Pope was, says Mr. Singer, "at first apprehensive that the contract (for the Iliad) might ruin Lintot, and endeavoured to dissuade him from thinking any more of it. The event, however, proved quite the reverse. The success of the work was so unparalleled as to at once enrich the bookseller, and prove a productive estate to his family," and he must have certainly been progressing when Humphrey Walden, custodian of the Earl of Oxford's heraldic manuscripts, made, in 1726, the following entry in his diary: "Young Mr. Lintot, the bookseller, came inquiring after arms, as belonging to his father, mother and other relations, who now, it seems, want to turn gentlefolks. I could find none of their names." "Young Mr. Lintot" was Bernard's son and successor—Henry.

There was scarcely a writer of eminence in the "Augustan Era," whose name is not to be found in Lintot's little account book of moneys paid. In 1730, however, he appears to have relinquished his business and retired to Horsham in Sussex, for which county he was nominated High Sheriff, in November, 1735, an honour which he did not live to enjoy, and which was consequently transferred to his son. Henry Lintot died in 1758, leaving £45,000 to his only daughter, Catherine.

Edmund Curll is, perhaps, as a name, better known to casual readers than any other bookseller of this