The elder Tonson’s portrait represents him in his gown and cap, holding in his right hand a volume lettered “Paradise Lost”—such a favourite object was Milton and copyright! Jacob Tonson was the founder of a race who long honoured literature. His rise in life is curious. He was at first unable to pay twenty pounds for a play by Dryden, and joined with another bookseller to advance that sum; the play sold, and Tonson was afterwards enabled to purchase the succeeding ones. He and his nephew died worth two hundred thousand pounds.—Much old Tonson owed to his own industry; but he was a mere trader. He and Dryden had frequent bickerings; he insisted on receiving 10,000 verses for two hundred and sixty-eight pounds, and poor Dryden threw in the finest Ode in the language towards the number. He would pay in the base coin which was then current; which was a loss to the poet. Tonson once complained to Dryden, that he had only received 1446 lines of his translation of Ovid for his Miscellany for fifty guineas, when he had calculated at the rate of 1518 lines for forty guineas; he gives the poet a piece of critical reasoning, that he considered he had a better bargain with “Juvenal,” which is reckoned “not so easy to translate as Ovid.” In these times such a mere trader in literature has disappeared.
Sir James Burrows’ Reports on the question concerning Literary Property, 4to. London, 1773.
Mirror of Parliament, 3529.
See “Amenities of Literature” for an account of this author.
A coster-monger, or Costard-monger, is a dealer in apples, which are so called because they are shaped like a costard, i.e. a man’s head. Steevens.—Johnson explains the phrase eloquently: “In these times when the prevalence of trade has produced that meanness, that rates the merit of everything by money.”