Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/71

51 THE BOOKSELLERS OF OLDEN TIMES. 51 in the said company," and then the terrible panic came. He was between seventy and eighty years of age when he determined to devote his fortune to building and endowing a hospital which should bear his name, and, dying in 1724, he lived just long enough to see the walls roofed in. The cost of building "Guy's Hospital" amounted to 18,793, and he left .219,499 as endowment. At Tamworth, his mother's birthplace, which he represented in Parliament for many years, he erected alms-houses and a library. Christ's Hos- pital received 400 a year for ever, and, after many gifts to public charities, he directed that the balance of his fortune, amounting to about 80,000, should be divided among all who could prove themselves in any degree related to him. Guy's noble philanthropy would be unequalled in bookselling annals, but that Edinburgh, happily boasting of a Donaldson, can rival London in the generosity of a bookseller. We have had occasion to quote several times from " Dunton's Characters ;' and, as the author was himself a bookseller, and was, moreover, the only con- temporary writer who thought it worth his while to preserve any continuous record of the bookselling fraternity, we must give him a passing notice here. John Dunton, the son of a clergyman, was born in 1689, and, after passing through a disorderly ap- prenticeship, commenced bookselling " in half a shop, a warehouse, and a fashionable chamber." " Printing," he says, " was the uppermost in my thoughts, and hackney authors began to ply me with specimens as earnestly and with as much passion and concern as the waterman do passengers with oars and sculls." Having some private capital he went ahead merrily,