Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies II.djvu/453

 Letters of Dr. Johnson.

��the authour, or of those who claim from him, about fifty years, a term sufficient to reward the writer without any loss to the publick. In fifty years far the greater number of books are forgotten and annihilated, and it is for the advantage of learning that those which fifty years have not destroyed should become bona communia, to be used by every Scholar as he shall think best 1.

In fifty years every book begins to require notes either to explain forgotten allusions and obsolete words ; or to subjoin those discoveries which have been made by the gradual ad vancement of knowledge; or to correct those mistakes which time may have discovered 1.

Such Notes cannot be written to any useful purpose without

��1 Johnson, arguing this question in 1763, was for granting authors a hundred years of exclusive right. Life, i. 439. In 1773 he said: ' The consent of nations is against it [a perpetual copyright], and indeed reason and the interests of learning are against it ; for were it to be per petual, no book, however useful, could be universally diffused amongst man kind, should the proprietor take it into his head to restrain its circula tion. No book could have the ad vantage of being edited with notes, however necessary to its elucidation, should the proprietor perversely op pose it. For the general good of the world, therefore, whatever valuable work has once been created by an authour, and issued out by him, should be understood as no longer in his power, but as belonging to the publick ; at the same time the authour is entitled to an adequate reward. This he should have by an exclusive right to his work for a considerable number of years.' Life, ii. 259.

By the present law copyright lasts for the life of the author and seven years afterwards, or for forty-two years, whichever is the longer period.

��Carlyle in his petition to the House of Commons asked for sixty years. 'After sixty years, unless your Honourable House provide other wise, they [extraneous persons] may begin to steal.' Miss Martineau's Thirty Years' Peace, ed. 1850, ii.

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Macaulay, opposing this period, said : ' Dr. Johnson died fifty-six years ago. If the law were what my honourable and learned friend wishes to make it, somebody would now have the monopoly of Dr. Johnson's works. Who that somebody would be it is impossible to say ; but we may venture to guess. I guess then that it would have been some book seller, who was the assign of another bookseller, who was the grandson of a third bookseller, who had bought the copyright from Black Frank, the doctor's servant and residuary legatee, in 1785 or 1786.' Macaulay's Misc. Writings, ed. 1871, p. 612.

1 'Johnson talked with approbation of an intended edition of The Spec tator, with notes. . . . He observed that all works which describe manners require notes in sixty or seventy years, or less.' Life, ii. 211.

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