mons any participation either in the tain document, which, though published motives or the critical opinions of these anonymously in a provincial newspaper, pamphleteers. We give them credit for at once affiliated itself on a most illustriloving and honouring literature---one at ous pen, and was of course a subject of least of their number is himself among conversation in most literary circles the most distinguished men of letters throughout the country. In this dignified now living among us. But none of them and modest paper Mr. Macaulay, had he are so situated as to have been naturally condescended to have read it, would have led, of late years at least, to bestow much found every argument of his speech anticonsideration on the weight of the claims cipated---we think conclusively answerwhich they have enabled grovelling spirits ed. But it was not answered by anticito baffle for a season. Mr. Macaulay's pation only. In the Examiner, shortly speech on the 5th of February last was, after it was delivered, a writer---of course like all his speeches and writings, brilliant. of his own political party---but remote He can never disguise his splendid gifts, from the ignorant and interested clique by to however unworthy offices he may oc- which the opposition to the bill was casionally lead them. But we have never throughout stimulated and kept alive--read a declamation that left the questions a writer, whoever he be, of singular acutereally at issue more utterly untouched. ness and dexterity, published a critique from which we must indulge ourselves in some quotations :--

'It is impossible not to entertain a high respect for Mr. Macaulay's talents, but their display has, on many occasions, been attended with evidences of a want of what we will venture to call logical honesty. A certain trickiness pervades his reasonings. His favourite mode of ar

ism-surrounding it with a profusion of illustrations, and a copious variety of research, under which he insinuates fallacies unworthy of a mises and paradox for his conclusions; and the schoolboy. He takes commonplace for his prerichness of a fertile memory conceals the meagreness of a most defective logic.

It is sufficiently clear that this eloquent member, when he delivered his speech, had never read Mr. Talfourd's bill; for one of his chief topics is the possible danger that, were copyrights protected beyond the author's lifetime, a valuable work might be arrested in what Milton calls its life beyond life,' through some aversion towards the doctrine or sub-gument is to lay down some acknowledged truject matter of the work entertained by the family or other holders of the literary property in question: the fact being that in the Sergeant's bill there was included a clause distinctly providing for such a case, however unlikely to occur, and rendering it lawful for any man to reprint any work which should have been what is technically called out of print for a certain brief period...namely, five years. Mr. Macaulay ought surely to have understood the bill before he attacked it---but the omission was especially remarkable, in asmuch as the bill had been before the House during several years, and frequently discussed in Mr. Macaulay's hearing, though he never thought fit to take any part in the discussion, or signify his opinion one way or another, until on that final Friday night. This particular clause was not, we think, a sufficiently stringent one; Mr. Macaulay, with a very slender exertion of his ingenuity, might have pointed out how it could be rendered ef-never was whether they are property or not, but fective--but he had no right to treat the clause as a nonentity---as if Mr. Talfourd had never seen that some such provision ought to be included in any bill on this subject. Had he made the fit preparation for entering on such a debate, in the dou. bly authoritative character of a cabinet minister and a distinguished literator, he would have given attention also to a cer

'Mr. Macaulay began by certain propositions on the subject of property, which, taken in one sense, mean everything most dangerous, and taken in the other mean everything most comHe contended that, according to Paley, all property is created, not by an inherent monplace. right in itself, but by the common consent, for the public expediency. If we grant this as a dogma applicable to the origin of all property, it is a tyro's commonplace. If we accept it as applicable to the protection of property, and hold that, because expediency has been the origin of think it expedient, they may protect one kind of property, therefore, whenever the legislature property and make the public a present of another, no Jacobia ever uttered a sentiment more monstrous. The law has already declared that all literary works are, bonâ fide, property for twenty-eight years; the question, therefore,

whether the protection should be extended for a longer period. To argue, by the general laws relating to property, that the term of protection should not be so extended, any man who pretended to the character of a reasoner should have shownwhat distinctions existed between this class of property and the various other classes

+ We shall append the important paper in question to this article.

which the law does protect. Mr. Macaulay never attempted to do this. He was contented to reduce literary works to the origin of all property, and, having stated the origin, to get rid of the protection!

}

But we must resume the Examiner :—

The Sergeant had talked, two or three years ago, too sentimentally perhaps, of Milton's Mr. Macaulay then proceeded to place his the Paradise Lost was in every library. granddaughter in poverty and destitution, while "See argument upon two propositions-1st, that the the refutation," cries Mr. Macaulay," of your proposed boon of extending copyright for sixty own argument! Copyright was then perpetual. years after the author's death would be no The bookseller was prosecuting the pirate, and boon to the author; 2dly, that it would entail a Milton's granddaughter was starving." Your most onerous tax upon the public. Now, to sup- pardon, Mr. Macaulay. You correct the illusport the first, Mr. Macaulay had recourse, as is tration, but you do not touch the argument. usual with him and with all rhetoricians, to an Supposing Milton had not sold the copyright, illustration instead of an argument. And to the granddaughter would have been affluent; what an illustration! 26 Why," said he, "would and Sergeant Talfourd might well have repliednot Dr. Johnson have thanked the man who "Had Milton been living now, under the operagave him two-pence to buy a plate of beef much tion of the existing law, my boon, carrying his more than the man who told him, that after he property beyond the term for which he had sold was dead, some bookseller would be enjoying the glory of ages, would have placed his childhis copyrights for sixty years?" Again we re- ren out of want." We think it right here to peat, what an illustration! In the first place, point out one part of the question, in which Mr. Dr. Johnson had no children-not one for whose Macaulay and the other opponents of the measworldly interests he cared a rush-to better by ure have laboured under the grossest ignorance. the fruits of his labour; and, in the second place, Milton and Johnson sold their copyrights, and Dr. Johnson had sold all his copyrights. As therefore it is argued that booksellers, not auwell might we argue against giving a man the thors, would be enriched, if protection to copypower to bequeath his property in house and right were extended. We venture to say that fand, by instancing some bachelor spendthrift at this time there are very few authors of emiwho has no children to care for, and who has nence who do sell their copyrights, and whenevsold both house and land twenty years ago! The er they have done so, ere reputation had given question is, whether the extension will benefit permanent value to their works, their first obthe author who has children or relations to whom ject is to re-purchase them. To say, then, that he can leave nothing else but the costly crea- the power of leaving to those in whose strugtions of his genius, and who, in that hope, has gles with fortune they feel anxious, some inrefrained from selling the heritage he can become more or less derived from their own toils, queath.'

We think Mr. Macaulay's reference to Dr. Johnson was unjust as well as ungraceful. He had no right to take him as he was in the early period which he so sadly mentions as my distress;' at which period, be it observed, Johnson had produced no works of lasting value except his 'Imitations of Juvenal,' and the 'Life of Savage,' to the well-known history of which last piece Mr. Macaulay's unfeeling allusion obviously belongs. But if we were to cite Dr. Johnson at all as to this subject, surely he ought not to have suppressed what was Dr. Johnson's own recorded opinion about it when it was the great topic of thought and discussion among all literary men as well as all lawyers and all statesmen-in 1773. Dr. Johnson,' says Boswell, 'was zealous against a perpetuity; but he thought the term of the exclusive right of authors should be considerably enlarged. He was for granting a hundred years †

*The ultimate proposition of Mr. Talfourd was for a period of fifty years. See his Speech of Feb, 5, 1841-the one to which Mr. Macaulay was replying.

† Boswell, vol. ii., p. 233 [Edit. 1835.]

would not be a boon to men of that genius whose works survive their dust; to say that it would not inspire many an effort in laborious life, and whisper comfort to many a great soul in the agony of the last farewell, is an assumption which amidst the flowers and weeds of his rhetorical Mr. Macaulay may well endeavour to conceal

exuberance."

dwell on the case of Milton as the holder It was unworthy of Mr. Macaulay to or seller of literary copyrights. Milton, indeed, at the close of his Areopagitica, expresses in a strong parenthesis his sense of the flagrant injustice of not respecting a man's right in his copy;' but we all know that in his day the readers of high poetry in the English tongue were so few, that no copyright in such poetry could be considered by any author a matter of direct pecuniary consequence. The production of such poetry might lead to worldly advancement in many ways. Mil. ton's literary reputation obtained for him the notice of the Egertons and others in early life, and in middle life a high post under Cromwell. The idea of deriving any considerable emolument directly from the sale of his writings never entered his mind, any more than Virgil's, or Chaucer's, or Spenser's, or his immediate predecessor, Shakspeare's. He was not in

The Examiner proceeds to the member

his old days, when 'Paradise Lost' was under nine or ten guineas, and we may buy an completed, so rich as to be above taking excellent edition of Byron for 17.' whatever a bookseller would give him for authority to publish it; but neither was he so abjectly poor that Simmons' (his pub- for Edinburgh's third argument--that lisher's) 157. in hand could have offered any about the danger of a man's heirs dislikinducement whatever for him to deprive ing his book, and endeavouring to suphis children of an ultimately profitable pos- press it. Mr. Macaulay alleged that Richsession, could he have foreseen the ex- ardson's son would have deprived us of tension of literary taste and curiosity de- Clarissa Harlowe,' and that Boswell's veloped within 1674, when he died, and--. heir would have suppressed the Life of (to waive once more a perpetuity of inter. Johnson.' The Examiner replies:est)- 1734 (fifteen years after the death of Addison), when, under Sergeant Talfourd's bill, the copyright of the English epic would have expired.

6

'An author is sufficiently sensitive on the subject of his works, and sufficiently keen in his desire for fame, to take very good care to whom he bequeaths the property of his reputation. The vain, prim, penetrating Richardson would very easily have seen whether or not his son valued or disapproved his novels, and would have bequeathed them accordingly. James Boswell Was far too alive to his own consequence to have heritor of his delightful book, as to its future permitted a single doubt on the mind of the inpublication. Where the son, therefore, wounds the author in his most sensitive point (and in could scarcely be concealed), we think that the the intimacy of near relationship the disposition practical result would be, not that the world would lose the book, but that the son would lose the legacy. On the other hand, it must be

'But the Examiner proceeds this additional term of copyright will be a prodigious tax upon the public! To doubt this-to doubt that monopoly increases the price of the article, is to doubt that arsenic poisons! Softly, Mr. Macaulay. There is a law in political economy that precedes the one that you advanceviz.: There is no enterprise in competition where there is no protection to property. At this moment the works of many of the greatest writers in the language are both scarce and dear, nay, even uncollected, because, without the protection of a copyright, no bookseller will venture to print them. If, without copyright, works became cheap and plentiful, it would be easy, Mr. observed, that where one man would be indifMacaulay, to prove your case. Have the good-zealous for it. If the law imposed on the deness to name the great masters of our language scendant the moral obligation of attending to whose works find good and cheap editions because there is no copyright. There are no cheap editions of Bacon, Locke, Cudworth, and Hobbes, our greatest philosophers; none of Raleigh and Browne; none of Swift, Steele, and Bolingbroke; none of Dryden; only very recently a cheap edition of Spenser. For centuries the works of the great Elizabethan dramatists (Shakspeare alone excepted) found no cheap editions. Talk of the want of copyright making books cheap! Why the first thing a bookseller does when he reprints a standard author is to create a copyright, which did not exist before.*

Works are cheap or dear, not in proportion as there is a copyright or not, but in proportion as they are more or less popular in their nature. Newton's Principia is published, we believe, at about 41. 4s.; Goldsmith's poems may be had for a shilling. Why? because the sale of the Principia depends on a few, and the sale of a few copies must therefore suffice to remunerate; but Goldsmith is read by the many, and to the many therefore the bookseller adapts the price. So little has copyright to do with the question of high or low price, that if we take two writers equally voluminous and of the same class in literature, viz., Dryden and Byron-we find that we cannot buy the only good edition of Dryden

ferent to his father's fame, a thousand would be

his natural and chief anxiety would be to give to the memory of the progenitor we believe that the public a much better, and certainly a much clined to do in the mere avarice of speculation, cheaper edition, than a bookseller would be inand with the uncertainty of adequate protection for the capital he is to risk.'—Examiner, Feb.

28, 1841.

If it were worth while to dwell further upon the particular cases adduced by Mr. Macaulay, we could easily show that he spoke on gross misinformation concerning them. The grandson (not son) of Richardson to whom he alludes, was the Rev. Samuel Crowther, vicar of Christ Church, in London, a most worthy man, and of some note as what is called an evangelical preacher.' In a note to his funeral sermon, his friend Daniel Wilson (now the exemplary Bishop of Calcutta) made the statement on which alone Mr. Macaulay had to rely-it is in these words:Mr. C. once said, in humorous a am an unworthy grandson never to have read those celebrated works.' Does it follow that Mr. Crowther would have suppressed them without first reading them, have been willing to suppress them at all? or that, if he had read them, he would

way,

I

But he was only one of several sons of Garland' had not one jot of the old fashone of Richardson's daughters; other ioned hidalgo prejudices of his granddaughters also left sons; and even Mr. father; but he was an eminently decorous Crowther's own brother, the surgeon of gentleman in his own domestic habits and Bethlehem Hospital, was a man of habits relations-besides being very clever, a and tastes totally different from his. In very accomplished man, a man whose own no case, therefore, could the Rev. Vicar personal ambition was literary. His fahave had the power to keep back a new ther's faults and their issues were known edition of the Clarissa even for a single to him, and he could not but lament them ;-year.

The orator was equally in the dark about Boswell's family. He depends, we presume, on a very striking and beautiful passage in Mr. Croker's Preface to the Life of Johnson,' viz. :

'Mr. Boswell's father was, we are told, by no means satisfied with the life he led, nor his eldest son with the kind of reputation he attained: neither liked to hear of his connection even with Paoli or Johnson; and both would have been better pleased if he had contented himself with a domestic life of sober respectability.

but what reason is there to suppose that he would, if he could, have suppressed the most delightful book in the world, which had given his father a high place in the roll of English authors, merely because that work contained plentiful illustrations of what he might consider as a foible, when he could never have had the slightest power to suppress the collateral records of Johnson's life by Hawkins and Piozzi, in which that weakness, if such it were, is blazoned abroad, without any com"The public, however, the dispenser of fame, pensating proof or acknowledgment of has judged differently, and considers the biogra- the man's remarkable talents and the many pher of Johnson as the most eminent part of the sterling virtues of his original character? family pedigree. With less activity, less indis- But Sir Alexander had a brother-James, cretion, less curiosity, less enthusiasm, he might, the editor of Shakspeare-a London dinerperhaps, have been what the old lord would, no out, a wit, a man of clubs and jokes and doubt, have thought more respectable; and have been pictured on the walls of Auchinleck (the literary gossip by profession. James the very name of which we never should have heard) younger owed his start and much of his by some stiff, provincial painter, in a lawyer's standing in London society to nothing wig, or a squire's hunting cap; but his portrait, else but his being the son of Johnson's by Reynolds, would not have been ten times Boswell. He was an easy-going bachelor engraved; his name could never have become as it is likely to be-as far spread and as lasting as the English language; and "the world had wanted" a work to which it refers as a manual of amusement, a repository of wit, wisdom, and morals, and a lively and faithful history of the manners and literature of England, during a period hardly second in brilliancy, and superior in importance, even to the Augustan age of Anne.' -Pref., vol. i., pp. xiv. xv.

of the Temple--he worshipped his father's memory---would he have concurred in extinguishing the source and monument of his father's fame? But how extinguish it? What hope of doing so ?--Mr. Boswell's melancholy and deplorable death was in 1795--his sons were children at the time of his death-he left Malone his literary executor, and the book had been reprinted over and Now every reader of Scott knows that over again long before Malone died. Unless the ancient judge of the Court of Session both sons had been idiots, they must have had the feeling here commented upon: seen that any hinderance of the circulation but we beg leave to remain extremely of the book after it came into their hands doubtful as to Sir Alexander Boswell's could serve no purpose but to excite new share in the tradition. Those who are curiosity about its contents, and cover aware of certain facts in the history of themselves with ridicule and contempt. Mr. Boswell and his family, of date long We think it much more probable that, if subsequent to his connection with John- these gentlemen had had the control of son, cannot need to be informed that his their father's book, we should have reson might very well have wished that, in- ceived an embellished edition of it from stead of embracing a gay and chequered that private press which in the days when London career, he had contented him- we enjoyed the late baronet's acquaintance self with a domestic life of sober respect- formed the chief amusement of Auchinability. It was, we are persuaded, only leck. because the connection with Johnson was

Mr. Macaulay, however, takes good what first knit Boswell to London habits, care to destroy his own argument, for, that Sir Alexander could ever have after expatiating on the danger of wilful thought or spoken of that connection with suppression, he goes on to declare his conregret. The author of the Justiciary viction that the extension of copyright

must tempt on a vast extension of piracy. | cer's only son died childless. ShaksWell---in what cases would the tempta- peare's line expired in his only daughter's tion to piracy be the strongest? Piracy only daughter. None of the other draof books is checked by nothing but the matists of that age left any progeny-nor consent of honourable traders not to sell Raleigh nor Bacon-nor Cowley nor Butpiratical copies. But for this, every au- ler. The granddaughter of Milton, so often thor or other proprietor of a book must alluded to in this controversy, was the last keep a regiment of spies--an indefatigable of his blood. Dryden's three sons all died ambulating army of policemen in his own childless. Newton-Locke-Popepay. But who dreams that the body of Swift-Arbuthnot--Hume---Gibbon-Cow. retail booksellers would act in combina- per--Gray-Walpole--Cavendish-and tion all over the country to protect a right we might greatly extend the list-never which they all knew to be kept wilfully in married. Neither Bolingbroke, nor Ad waste? The old firm of Curl and Co. dison, nor Warburton, nor Johnson, nor would have been very alert in baffling the Burke, transmitted their blood. Monsieur suppression of Bozzy, and 'Our Fathers Renouard's last argument against a perpe of the Row' would have cast a broad shield tuity in literary property is (vol. i., p. 449,) over the for once well-employed outlyers that it would be founding another noblesse. of the Trade. Neither jealous Aristocracy nor envious When Sir Edward Sugden alarmed the Jacobinism need be under much alarm. house by his predictions of the numberless When a human race has produced its intricate lawsuits that must needs follow,'bright consummate flower' in this kind, it were the protection of property in a book seems commonly to be near its end. extended to the author's family--it appears But to return to Mr. Macaulay. A man to us, with profound submission, that he was arguing against perpetuity of copy right. We do not believe that the argu. ment ought to have had much weight even with reference to that imaginary proposi tion; but we are at a loss to understand how Sir Edward could suppose it to be at all applicable to a proposal for protection during such a period of years as is sanctioned by the French or by the Prussian statute, or even as had been recommended by Mr. Talfourd and M. Guizot.

may declaim about the evils and dangers of monopoly, until, as the Rev. Sidney Smith expressed it, he stands plashing in the slop of his own rhetoric.' There was no justice in branding the author's ori ginal claim as a claim of monopoly ; but that claim has been set aside, and the au thor acquiesces.

He says:--you have settled that I shall not have a perpetual interest in the fruit of my labour, but that I shall have as much profit from it as will not interfere with the interest of the public. Now the interest of the public is to have good books first, and then to have the good books cheap. And it is for you to show, not that by restricting authors' rights to the narrowest possible limit the public will have cheap books, but that they will get books that shall be both good and cheap.

We are not going to speculate about the causes of the fact--but a fact it is---that men distinguished for extraordinary intel. lectual power of any sort very rarely leave more than a very brief line of progeny behind them. Men of genius have scarcely ever done so. Men of imaginative genius we might almost say never. With the one Now we must beg leave to observe, that exception of the noble SURREY, we cannot our supply of good and cheap books has at this moment point out a representative hitherto, down to a very recent day inin the male line, even so far down as in deed, been mainly the result of a real mothe third generation, of any English poet; nopoly--or something in practice very like and we believe the case is the same in one; though a monopoly which did not in France. The blood of beings of that or- any case exist for the direct benefit of any der can seldom be traced far down, even individual author or author's descendants in the female line. With the exceptions of whatsoever. We have had good and Surrey and SPENSER, we are not aware of cheap Bibles-that was a complete moany great English author of at all remote nopoly. We have had good and cheap edi. date from whose body any living person tions of the ancient classics, chiefly beclaims to be descended. There is no other cause the universities have supplied them, real English poet prior to the middle of the and they enjoy by law a perpetual monoeighteenth century, and, we believe, no poly in editions prepared and printed ungreat author of any sort except Claren- der their auspices, and, indeed, in all don and Shaftesbury-of whose blood we have any inheritance among us. • We do not wish to enlarge upon a fact which, if Chau- the decision of 1774 was just, must be pronounc