[7] A most interesting and voluminous collection of “notes” in reference to Curll was contributed to “Notes and Queries” (2nd series, vols. ii., iii., and x.) by M.N.S. Many of our facts in relation to him have been taken from that source, and for a far fuller account, in the rough material, we refer the reader thither.
[8] West says he sat next Lackington at a sale when he spent upwards of £12,000 in an afternoon.
[9] Bookseller, June, 1865.
[10] As we shall have no other opportunity of referring to the third in rank of the leading quarterlies, we must, perforce, compress its history in a foot-note. The Westminster Review was started more than fifty years ago, by Jeremy Bentham, who was succeeded in editorship by Sir John Browning, in conjunction with General Perronet Thompson, whose labours in the cause of radical reform gave him considerable notoriety at the time. They made way for the accomplished statesman Sir William Molesworth, the editor of Hobbes. A profounder thinker still, Mr. John Stuart Mill, followed. Most of his philosophical essays appeared in its pages, at a time when Grote and Mr. Carlyle were both contributing. For more than twenty years now the Review has been in the hands of Dr. Chapman, who, beginning life as a bookseller in Newgate Street, was the first English publisher to recognise the value of Emerson’s writings. Under Dr. Chapman, what is now the great feature—the Quarterly Summary of Contemporary Literature—was introduced. The Review has lately attracted much attention by the bold manner in which the “Social Evil” and the “Contagious Diseases Acts” have been discussed in its columns, and these articles are generally attributed to the able pen of the editor himself.
| I. | “On Dryden.” (E. R., 1828.) |
| II. | “History.” (E. R., 1828.) |
| III. | “Mirabeau.” (E. R., 1832.) |
| IV. | “Cowley and Milton.” |
| V. | “Mitford’s Greece.” |
| VI. | “Athenian Orator.” |
| VII. | “Barère’s Memoirs.” |
| VIII. | “Mill’s Essay on Government.” (E. R., 1829.) |
| IX. | “Bentham’s Defence of Mill.” (E. R., 1829.) |
| X. | “Utilitarian Theory of Government.” (E. R., 1829.) |
| XI. | “Charles Churchill.” |
Many of these may be found in the volume of Miscellanies published by Longmans. It has been denied that No. XI. is by Macaulay at all.
[12] For a further account of these extraordinary sales, see Allibone’s Dictionary of English Literature, vol. ii., from which many of the above facts have been drawn.
[13] Among the sufferers by this failure was the family of Robert Watt, M.D., author of “Bibliotheca Britannica,” for which £2000 had been given in bills, all of which were dishonoured. He was a ploughboy until his seventeenth year, wrote many medical treatises, and occupied his concluding years with a work precious and indispensable to every student. The whole plan of the “Bibliotheca” is new, and few compilations of similar magnitude and variety ever presented, in a first edition, a more complete design and execution.
[14] Quarterly Review, vol. lxx.