Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/467

Rh the taste of the majority of the poorer readers, by enabling them to get at once cheap editions of good books?

A. The question is, which are the cheap editions that will be issued. I contend that they are the cheap editions of these books of a dissipating kind; and that the main effect will be to increase the dissipation.

Q. You do not think that the earlier publication of a cheap edition would raise the tone of readers?

A. I do not see that it would do so, unless it could be shown that that would tell upon the graver and more instructive books. My next answer, I think, will be an answer to that.

Q. If you improve the tone of the readers, of course it does tell upon the graver books for those who have time to read the graver books; but there is a large class of readers who have not that time?

A. Yes.

Q. (Chairman). Referring to the illustrations which you have just given of works which you would denominate as worthless, or comparatively valueless, did I hear among them historical memoirs and journals?

A. Crabb Robinson's "Diary," for instance; I call that a book of gossip, which anybody may read and be none the better for it.

Q. The question I should like to ask is, are you not of opinion that books of that sort are extremely valuable to the intending historian of the epoch to which they refer?

A. It may be that there are in them materials for him. I have not read the "Greville Memoirs" myself, and I have no intention of reading it; but my impression is that the great mass of it is an appeal to the love of gossip and scandal, and that it is a book which, if not read at all, would leave persons just as well off or better.

Q. Take Lord Hervey's "Memoirs," in the reign of George II.; if you had the privilege of reading that book you would probably say it was an extremely sensational book, but, knowing the position which Lord Hervey occupied in the court and family of George II., I presume we may take for granted that the extraordinary facts which he relates are facts; and if so they would form the basis of a great deal of truthful history, which would be written of that reign: would not that be so?

A. It might be so, no doubt.

Q. Then we understand you to mean that in your opinion the royalty system would not cheapen works that you would describe as valuable?

A. I think, on the average of cases, quite the contrary. I believe the system would raise the prices of the graver books. Ask what a publisher will say to himself when about to publish a book of that kind, of which he forms a good opinion: "I have had a high estimate given of this book. The man is a man to be trusted; the book possibly will be a success. Still my experiences of grave books generally are such that I know the chances are rather against its succeeding. If it should