Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/90

66 06 THE BOOKSELLERS OF OLDEN TIMES. wonderful " run." And the author, fond to distraction of his last child, " went every night to the stage side and cried at the distress of poor Cleone ;" yet when it was reported that Johnson had remarked that if Otway had written it, no other of his pieces would have been remembered, Dodsley had the good sense to say " it was too much." A long and prosperous career enabled Dodsley to retire some years before his death, which occurred at Durham, in 1/64. Thomas Cadell, who had served his apprenticeship to Andrew Millar, was now taken into partnership, and in a few years he and the Strahans quite filled the place that Dodsley and Millar had previously occupied. Together they became the proprietors of the copyright of works by the great historical and philosophical writers who shed a lustre round the close of the eighteenth century, and among their clients we find the names of Robertson, Gibbon, Adam Smith and Blackstone. For the History of CJiarlcs V. Robertson received ,4500, then supposed to be the largest sum ever paid for the copyright of a single work, and out of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire the booksellers are said to have cleared 60,000. Cadell retired with an enormous fortune, and was honoured by being elected Sheriff of London at a very critical and important time. Alex- ander Strahan, became King's printer, and left a fortune of upwards of a million. His business was eventually carried on by the Spottiswoodes. The practice, we have already referred to, of book- sellers fraternising pleasantly together for the purpose of bringing out expensive editions at a lessened risk, led to many famous associations, the earliest of