Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/74

54 54 THE BOOKSELLERS OF OLDEN TIMES. scribbling bookseller, who boasted that he had a thousand projects, fancied he had methodised six hundred, and was ruined by the fifty he executed." His greatest project, by the way, was intended "to extirpate lewdness from London." " Armed with a constable's staff, and accompanied by a clerical com- panion, he sallied forth in the evening, and followed the wretched prostitutes home to a tavern, where every effort was used to win the erring fair to the paths of virtue ; but these he observes were perilous adventures, as the cyprians exerted every art to lead him astray in the height of his spiritual exhorta- tions." There is something so Quixotic about his schemes, so complacent about his marvellous self-vanity, that we are really grieved when we find him ending his life, as most "projectors" do, with Dying Groans from the Fleet Prison ; or, a Last Shift for Life. Shortly after this, in 1733, his teeming brain and his eager pen were at rest for ever. Another bookseller, also a " man of letters," but of very different calibre from poor John Dunton, must have a niche here, not because he was eminent as a publisher, but because he was, taken altogether, the most famous man who has ever stood behind a book- seller's counter. One of our greatest novelists, his general life is so well known, that we will only treat here of his bookselling career. Samuel Richardson, born in 1689, was the son of a joiner in Derbyshire; a quiet shy boy, he became the confident and love-letter writer of the girls in his neighbourhood, gaining thereby his wonderful knowledge of womankind. Fond of books, and longing for opportunities of study, he was, at the age of sixteen, apprenticed to John