sellers and bookselling business of London at the beginning of the eighteenth century is that given by the famous John Dunton in the extraordinary autobiographical performance which he entitles his Life and Errors.' Dunton, born in 1659, was the only son of the Rev. John Dunton, rector of Graffham, in Huntingdonshire, and as such the descendant of a line of clergymen, both his grandfather and great-grandfather having been ministers of Little Missenden, in Bucks. He was himself intended for the church, and with that view he was put to school and taught Latin, which he says gave him satisfaction enough, so that he attained to such a knowledge of the language as to be able to "speak it pretty well extempore ;" "but," he continues, "the difficulties of the Greek quite broke all my resolutions; and, which was a greater disadvantage to me, I was wounded with a silent passion for a virgin in my father's house, that unhinged me all at once, though I never made a discovery of the flame, and for that reason it gave me the greater torment. This happened in my thirteenth year." The truth is, Dunton, with prodigious intellectual activity, or rather restlessness, never could persevere long enough with anything he undertook, study, task, business, or plan of life, to make much of it. So, finding him too mercurial for a scholar, his father determined to make a bookseller of him, and in his fifteenth year he was sent up to London, and apprenticed to Mr. Thomas Parkhurst, whom he describes as "the most eminent Presbyterian bookseller in the three kingdoms." Having passed through his apprenticeship, Dunton set up for himself as a bookseller and publisher about the year 1685. The picture he draws of literature and its followers in London at this date is not flattering, but it may be held to prove, at any rate, that the profession can hardly have degenerated. "Printing," he says (meaning what we should now call publishing), "was now the uppermost in my thoughts, and hackney authors began to ply me with specimens, as earnestly, and with as much passion and concern, as the watermen do passengers with oars and scullers. I had some acquaintance with this generation in my apprenticeship, and had never any warm affection for them; in regard I always thought their great concern lay more in how much a sheet than in any generous respect they bore to the commonwealth of learning; and, indeed, the learning itself of these gentlemen lies very often in as little room as their honesty, though they will pretend to have studied for six or seven years in the Bodleian Library, to have turned over the Fathers, and to have read and digested the whole compass both of human and ecclesiastic history ;when, alas! they have never been able to understand a single page of St. Cyprian, and cannot tell you whether the Fathers lived before or after Christ. And, as for their honesty, it is very remarkable: they will either persuade you to go upon another man's copy, or steal his thought, or to abridge his book, which should have got him bread for his lifetime. When you have engaged them upon some project or other, they will write you off three or four sheets perhaps; take up three or four pounds upon an urgent occasion; and you shall never hear of them more." Well, there may be some rapacity here, but there is considerable simplicity too; for surely the three or four pounds, even at the then value of money, could scarcely have been the full price of copy for as many sheets of letter-press. We doubt if a publisher ever now-a-days gets rid of an author upon such easy terms.

The most saleable of all publications at this date were sermons and other religious disquisitions. The first copy or manuscript Dunton ventured to print was a volume entitled, The Sufferings of Christ,' by the Rev. Mr. Doolittle. "This book," he says, "fully answered my end; for, exchanging it through the whole trade, it furnished my shop with all sorts of books saleable at that time.” This lets us into a peculiarity in the manner in which the publishing business was then carried on :--when a publisher, being also, as was generally or universally the case, a retail and miscellaneous bookseller, brought out a work, he disposed of the copies among the trade mostly in the way of barter or exchange for other books. This practice, it is hardly necessary to say, has long gone out.

Dunton speedily followed this first venture by two or three other publications in the same line, all of which did well; and this extraordinary success in his first attempts gave him, he observes," an ungovernable itch to be always intriguing that way." He now began to be plied with projects and proposals of marriage from various quarters. Mrs. Mary Sanders, the virgin who first unhinged him under the paternal roof, had by this time got entirely out of his head; the beautiful Rachel Seaton, the innocent Sarah Day of Ratcliffe, the religious Sarah Briscow of Uxbridge, had all had their turn; at last, being smitten at church by Elizabeth Annesley, daughter of the Rev. Dr. Annesley, a distinguished nonconformist preacher of those times, he married that lady. Another daughter of Dr. Annesley's, it may be noticed, married Mr. Samuel Wesley, the poet, and became by him the mother of John Wesley, the famous founder of Methodism. Annesley is said to have been a near relative of the Irish Annesleys, Earls of Anglesey-and the Wesleys, as is well known, were connected with another English family settled in Ireland, the Wellesleys, which has risen to much greater distinction. It is curious what strange diversities of station and character a genealogy will sometimes bring together.

The history of Dunton's various amours, connubial and Platonic, makes up a great part of his book; but of course, although many of his details are abundantly curious, we cannot enter upon that matter here. His first wife and he called one another Iris and Philaret, both before and after their marriage-and he would have us believe that they lived together in unequalled affection and harmony. But for all that Dunton never could remain long at home: he had been but a few years married when he set off for New England, and remained away for nearly a year; when he came back he found his affairs in such a state that he thought it prudent to make a tour in Holland and Germany, in order to be safe from his creditors ;-one of his books is an account of a visit he made to Ireland; he talks there of a projected expedition to Scotland; and we do not know how much farther he extended his rambles. He defends his practice in this respect, indeed, upon high grounds. "Who would have thought," he says, in his account of the Irish tour, "I could ever have left Eliza? for there was an even thread of endearment run through all we said or did.' I may truly say, for the fifteen years we lived together, there never passed an angry look; but, as kind as she was, I could not think of growing old in the confines of one city, and, therefore, in 1686, I embarked for America, Holland, and other parts. To ramble is the best way to endear a wife, and to try her love, if she has any. . . It is truc, for a wife to say, as Eliza did, My dear, I rejoice I am able to serve

once.

thee, and, as long as I have it, it is all thine, and we had been still happy had we lost all but one another; this, indeed, is very obliging, and shows she loves me in earnest. But still there is something in rambling beyond this; for this is no more, if her husband be sober, than richer for poorer' obliges her to; but for a spouse to say, Travel as far as you please, and stay as long you will, for absence shall never divide us,' is a higher flight abundantly, as it shows she can part with her very husband, ten times dearer to a good wife than her money, when it tends to his satisfaction." Acting upon these principles of philosophy, Dunton took his swing; and not only gratified himself with the sight of foreign parts, but, being a perfectly virtuous person, struck up Platonic friendships with all the agreeable women,-maids, wives, and widows,-he met with wherever he went. Meanwhile, he took care never to forget his wife at home; when he was in New England, he says, he sent Eliza sixty letters by one ship! He kept all he wrote during his stay, we suppose, and making them up into a parcel, sent them off at However, Eliza, or Iris, died in 1697; and the same year he married a Miss Sarah Nicholas, whom he calls Valeria, and with whom and whose relatives he by no means got on so harmoniously as he had done with his first matrimonial connexion. The truth appears to be that he was by this time a ruined man→→ and that his new marriage was rather a speculation in trade than anything else, his wife having some expectations which he wished to turn to account and was thwarted in his object by her friends. He had wasted a world of energy and ingenuity in a vast multiplicity of enterprises and projects, very few of which probably turned out remunerative. Dunton's first shop was at the corner of Prince's Street, near the Royal Exchange; from this, in 1688, on the day the Prince of Orange entered London, he transferred himself, and his sign of the Black Raven, to the Poultry Compter, where he remained for ten years. Whither he went after this does not appear. He published his Life and Errors,' in a little thick duodecimo, in 1705, when he had been twenty years in business-in the course of which time, he tells us, he had printed no fewer than 600 works. Of many of these he was the author, as well as the publisher-and he continued to write and print for nearly twenty years longer. The last ten years of his existence, however, seem to have passed in quiet and obscurity-not improbably in poverty and broken health-and all that is further known of him is that, having lost his second wife, from whom he had long been separated, in 1721, he gave up the battle of life in 1733, at the good old age of seventy-four.

The principal literary performance by which Dunton's memory is preserved, besides his Life and Errors,' is his Athenian Mercury,' originally published from 17th March, 1690, to 8th February, 1696, in weekly numbers, the best of which were afterwards collected and reprinted in three octavo volumes. It was projected by himself, and his principal or only associates in carrying it on were a Mr. Richard Sault, a Cambridge theologian, one of his hack authors, for whom he soon after published a singular production entitled The Second Spira,' which made a great deal of noise-his brother-in-law, Mr. Samuel Wesley-and the famous metaphysical divine, Dr. John Norris. The papers consist of casuistical and other disquisitions, in answer to queries upon all sorts of subjects, which are supposed to have been submitted to the conductors, and many of which probably were actually sent to them, although in other cases the puzzle as well as the

solution of it may have been the oracle's own. The scheme at least ensured unlimited variety of subject, and the writers had sufficient talent and superficial learning to give a temporary interest to their lucubrations, if not to put into them much of an enduring value.

Dunton himself was not without a touch of something that may be almost called genius. No doubt he was all along a little, or not a little, mad; both his writings and his history betray this throughout; and he was also a very imperfectly educated man. But, if we make due allowance for these defects, we shall find a merit far above mediocrity in much of what he has done. He may be shortly characterised as a sort of wild Defoe-a coarser mind cast in somewhat a like mould-a Defoe without the training, and also with but a scanty endowment of the natural capability of being so trained, but yet with a .considerable portion of the same fertility and vital force, as well as of the same originality of intellectual character. If Defoe had died before producing any of his works of fiction-which he might very well have done and still left behind him a considerable literary name, seeing that the first of them, Robinson Crusoe,' did not appear till 1719, when he was in his fifty-eighth year, and had long been distinguished as a political and miscellaneous writer-the comparison between him and Dunton would not have at all a fanciful or extravagant air.

In a tract, which he entitles Dunton's Creed, or Religio Bibliopolæ, in imitation of Dr. Brown's Religio Medici,' first published in 1694, under the name of Benjamin Bridgwater, an M.A. of Trinity College, Cambridge, by whom it was in fact partly written, Dunton gives no very favourable account of the estimation in which the members of "the Trade" were held in that day. "Booksellers, in the gross," he says, "are taken for no better than a pack of knaves and atheists." He asserts, however, in opposition to this vulgar prejudice, that "among them there is a retail of men who are no strangers to religion and honesty." In his Life and Errors he undertakes "to draw the characters of the most eminent of that profession in the three kingdoms,"-and this is one of the most curious and interesting portions of his book. His review of his literary contemporaries comprehends also the authors for whom he published, the successive licencers of the press with whom he had to do, his printers, the stationers from whom he bought his paper, and even the binders he employed; but we must confine ourselves to a few gleanings from his notices of the booksellers.

A circumstance that is apt at first to excite some surprise is the apparent extent and activity of the publishing business in London at this date. The booksellers were very numerous-those of eminence perhaps more numerous than in the present day—and nearly all of them seem to have at least occasionally engaged in publishing, or printing, as it was called. The impressions, too, we apprehend, were in general at least as large as in more recent times; of some descriptions of publications certainly many more copies were thrown off than would now find a sale. The fact is, that from the middle of the seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth century was the age of pamphlets; the century that has since elapsed has been the age of periodical publications and of newspapers. All controversy and discussion upon the events of the day, and upon the reigning questions both of politics and religion, was then carried on by occasional writers; even news was to a considerable extent communicated to the

public in pamphlets. The gradual transformation of this unregulated condition of things into the organized system that has taken its place was according to the common course of nature and the development of society; and it may be remarked that the same process is still going on. Publication seems to be falling more and more into the form of series and periodical issue; and who knows but the time may come when nearly all new works shall be brought out in that method?

The bookseller with whose name Dunton heads his list is Mr. Richard Chiswell," who," says he, "well deserves the title of metropolitan bookseller of England, if not of all the world. His name at the bottom of a title-page does sufficiently recommend the book. He has not been known to print either a bad book, or on bad paper." Chiswell was the printer of the octavo edition of 'Tillotson's Sermons,' which proved a remarkably successful publication. A short account of him may be seen in Strype's Stow,' where we are told that he was born in 1639, and died in 1711. Strype, who states that he was one of the proprietors of his book, characterises him as "a man worthy of great praise." His shop was in St. Paul's Churchyard.

A name now better remembered is that of the wealthy Thomas Guy, the founder of the hospital. He lived in Lombard Street. "He is," says Dunton,

"a man of strong reason, and can talk very much to the purpose upon any subject you will propose." Many of these notices of Dunton's, by the bye, bear out what is said by Roger North of the superior acquirements of the booksellers of that generation. Thus, Mr. John Lawrence, who, we are informed, "when Mr. Parkhurst dies will be the first Presbyterian bookseller in England," is declared to be " very much conversant in the sacred writings." Of Mr. Samuel Smith, bookseller to the Royal Society, it is stated that he "speaks French and Latin with a great deal of fluency and ease." Mr. Halsey was already distinguished, we are assured, for "his great ingenuity and knowledge of the learned lan