Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/57

39 period, and it is not a little comforting to find that the obloquy with which he has ever been associated was richly merited. He was born in the west of England, and after passing through several menial capacities, became a bookseller's assistant, and then kept a stall in the purlieus of Covent Garden. The year of his birth is unknown, and the writer of a contemporary memoir, The Life and Writings of E. Cl, who prophesied that " if he go on in the paths of glory he has hitherto trod," his name would appear in the Newgate Calendar, has unluckily been deceived. He appears to have first commenced publishing in the year 1708, and to have combined that honourable task with the vending of quack pills and powders for the afflicted. The first book he published was An Explication of a Famous Passage in the Dialogue of St. Justin Martyr with Typhon, concerning the Immortality of Human Souls, bearing the date of 1708; and, curiously enough, religious books formed in aftertime a very large portion of his stock, side by side, of course, with the most filthy and ribald works that have ever been issued.

In 1716 began his quarrel with Pope, originating as far as we know in the publication of the Court Poems, the advertisement of which said that the coffee-house critics assigned them either to a Lady of Quality, Mr. Gay, or the translator of Homer. It is not clear now whether Pope was really annoyed by the appearance of the volume, or whether he had first secretly promoted it, and then endeavoured to divert suspicion. At all events, he had a meeting with Curll at the "Swan Tavern," in Fleet Street, where, writes the bookseller, "My brother, Lintot, drank his half-pint of old hock, Mr. Pope his half-pint of sack, and I the