produced by printing books that met with no ready sale. Purchas was ruined by his 'Pilgrimes;' Castell by his 'Lexicon Heptaglotton;' Ockley by his 'History of the Saracens;' Rushworth by his 'Historical Collections.' Bishop Kennett gave away his 'Register and Chronicle,' saying, "The volume, too large, brings me no profit." The remedy was to be found in publishing by subscription. This plan, like most other human things, was subject to abuse; but it was founded upon a true estimate of the peculiar risks of publishing. It is manifest that, if a certain number of persons unite in agreement to purchase a book which is about to be printed, the author may be at ease with regard to the issue of the enterprise, and the subscribers ought to receive what they want at a lower cost than when risk enters into price. For more than half a century nearly all the great books were published by subscription; and the highest in literature felt no degradation in canvassing themselves with their "subscription receipts." It is easy to perceive, by the subscription prices, when the work was set on foot by an author, or his friends, simply as a more convenient mode of obtaining or bestowing money than begging or borrowing; and when there was a real market value given for the commodity offered. The scheme of levying contributions upon subscribers was as old as the days of Taylor, the Water Poet. He published his 'Pennilesse Pilgrimage' in this fashion; and it seems that he sometimes gave his books to those who were unwilling to return his honorarium. He consoles himself by a lampoon against his false subscribers:—
"They took a book worth twelvepence, and were bound
To give a crown, an angel, or a pound;
A noble, piece, or half-piece, what they list,—
They past their words, or freely set their fist."
Honest John had sixteen hundred and fifty such subscribers; but of these, seven hundred and fifty were "bad debtors."[23] In the next century, Myles Davies has the same story to tell of the degradation of the literary begging-letter writer. He leaves his books at the great man's door; he writes letter upon letter, "with fresh odes upon his graceship, and an account where I lived, and what noblemen had accepted of my present." He walks before the "parlour-window," and "advances to address his grace to remember the poor author." At last his parcel of books is returned to him unopened, "with half-a-guinea upon top of the cargo," and "with desire to receive no more." Heaven, in its mercy, has relieved the tribe from these heartbreaking disgraces. There may be "the fear that kills," but there is no longer the patron who starves. Goldsmith has described the devices and the abasement of the little man in the coffee-house, who "drew out a bundle of proposals, begging me to subscribe to a new edition he was going to give the world of Propertius, with notes." His plans were more ingenious and diversified than those of Myles Davies: "I first besiege their hearts with flattery, and then pour in my proposals at the breach. If they subscribe readily the first time, I renew my request to beg a dedication fee. If they let me have that, I smite them once more for engraving their coat-of-arms at the top." Forty years after Myles Davies, Samuel Johnson was enduring the anxieties attendant upon the subscription plan, although friends stood between the author and the customer. He writes to Burney in 1758, "I have likewise enclosed twelve receipts (for Shakspere); not that I mean to impose upon you the trouble of pushing them with more importunity than may seem proper," &c. Long was the subscribed Shakspeare delayed; and the proud struggling man had to bear Churchill's malignity, as well as the reproaches of his own sense of honour:—
"He for subscribers baits his hook,
And takes your cash; but where's the book?"
Well might Johnson write, in more prosperous times, "He that asks subscription soon finds that he has enemies. All who do not encourage him, defame him." Johnson and his publishers set no price upon their books, as a gratuity to the author, beyond their common market value. But great men had gone before them, who regulated their subscription prices by a higher estimate of the value of their works. Steele had received a guinea an octavo volume for the republication of 'The Tatler;' Pope had six guineas for his six quarto volumes of 'The Iliad;'—"a sum," says Johnson, "according to the value of money at that time, by no means inconsiderable." The subscription to Pope's 'Shakspeare' was also six guineas for six volumes. Johnson's projected translation of Paul Sarpi's 'History of the Council of Trent' was only to be charged twopence a sheet. That seems to have been the ordinary price of subscription books during the first half of the eighteenth century. Du Halde's 'China,' which appears to have required a great deal of what "the trade" call "pushing," was advertised by Cave at three halfpence a sheet; besides the attraction of a complicated lottery-scheme, with marvellous prizes. When the subscribers to a new book were served, the remaining copies were sold, generally at superior rates. Sometimes, in the case of high-priced works, the unsold copies lay quiet through the mildew of a quarter of a century in the bookseller's warehouse. At Tonson's sale, in 1767, Pope's six-guinea Shakspeare had fallen to sixteen shillings for the hundred and forty copies then sold as a "remainder."[24] Many of the subscription books were remarkably profitable. The gains of Pope upon his 'Iliad' are minutely recorded in his Life by Johnson. Lintot paid the expense of the subscription copies, and gave the poet two hundred pounds a volume in addition. Lintot looked for his remuneration to an edition in folio. The project was knocked on the head by a reprint in Holland, in duodecimo; which edition was clandestinely imported, as in the recent days of French editions of Byron and Scott. Lintot took a wise course. He went at once to the general public with editions in duodecimo, at half-a-crown a volume, of which he very soon sold seven thousand five hundred copies. But it may well be doubted if Pope would have made five thousand three hundred pounds, if he had originally gone, without the quarto subscription process, to the buyers of duodecimos. Perhaps even the duodecimos would not have sold extensively without the reputation of the quartos. There was no great reading public to make a fortune for the poet out of small profits upon large sales. Some may think that Pope would have been as illustrious without the ease which this fortune gave him. It may be so. But of one thing we are clear—that in every age the higher rewards of authorship, reaped by one eminent individual, are benefits to the great body of authors; and thus that the villa at Twickenham had a certain influence in making what the world called "Grub-street" less despicable and more thriving. It dissociated authorship from garrets. Yet it is marvellous, even now, how some of the race of attorneys and stockbrokers turn up their eyes when they hear of a successful writer keeping a brougham, and lament, over their claret, that such men will be improvident.
In those days of subscription books there were great contrasts of success and loss; of steady support and capricious neglect. Conyers Middleton made a little fortune by his 'Life of Cicero,' in two volumes quarto, published in 1741. His suspected heterodoxy was no bar to his success. Carte, in 1747, printed three thousand copies of the first volume of his 'General History of England,' for which he had adequate support. In that unlucky volume his Jacobitism peeped out, in a relation of an astonishing cure for the king's-evil, produced by the touch of the first Pretender, who, he says, "had not at that time been crowned or anointed." Away went the "remainder" of the three thousand volumes to the trunk-maker, and of the subsequent volumes only seven hundred and fifty were printed. Whether by subscription, or by the mode of fixing a published price for a general sale,—which, in the second half of the century, was superseding the attempt to ascertain the number of purchasers before publication,—there was always a great amount of caprice, or prejudice, in the unripe public judgment of a book, which rendered its fate very hazardous and uncertain. Hume, in 1754, published the first volume of his 'History of England.' He says, "Mr. Millar told me that in a twelvemonth he sold only forty-five copies of it." Gibbon published the first volume of his 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' in 1776: "I am at a loss," he modestly tells us, "how to describe the success of the work without betraying the vanity of the writer. The first impression was exhausted in a few days; a second and third edition were scarcely adequate to the demand; and the bookseller's property was twice invaded by the pirates of Dublin." Thomson's 'Seasons' was lying as waste paper in the publisher's shop, when one Mr. Whatley purchased a copy; and his authority in the coffee-houses brought it into notice. Collins was not so fortunate. His 'Odes' would not sell. He repaid the bookseller the price he had received for the copyright, settled for the printing, and burnt the greater part of the impression.