Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/88

64 64 THE BOOKSELLERS OF OLDEN TIMES, an author leaves the great and applies to the multi- tude." As to what the booksellers of the eighteenth century were, and as to bow they compare with the publishers of the nineteenth century, we will quote from an unedited letter of Mr. Thomas Carlyle, dated 3rd May, 1852, addressed to Mr. John Chapman, bookseller (Emerson's first English publisher, we belfeve), now Dr. Chapman : " The duties of society towards literature in this new condition of the world are becoming great, vital, inextricably intricate, little capable of being done or understood at present, yet all important to be under- stood and done if society will continue to exist along with it, or it along with society. For the highest provinces of spiritual culture and most sacred interests of men down to the lowest economic and ephemeral concerns, where ' free press ' rules supreme, society was itself with all its sovereignties and parliaments de- pending on the thing it calls literature ; and bound by incalculable penalties in many duties in regard to that. Of which duties I perceive finance alone, and free trade alone will by no means be found to be the sum. . . What alone concerns us here is to remark that the present system of book-publishing discharges none of these duties less and less makes even the appearance of discharging them and, indeed, as I believe, is, by the nature of the case, incapable of ever, in any perceptible degree, discharging any of them in the times that now are. A century ago, there was in the bookselling guild if never any royalty of spirit, as how could such a thing be looked for there ? yet a spirit of merchanthood, which had its value in regard to the prosaic parts of literature, and is even to be thankfully remembered. By this solid merchant