[238] Sept. 17, 1769; xix. 320.
[239] Lettres sur le Commerce de la Librairie, xviii. 47.
[240] See Rousseau, vol. ii. ch. i. (Globe 8vo. ed.)
[241] Diderot's Lettre sur le Commerce de la Librairie (1767). Œuv., xviii.
[242] Those who are interested in the history of authorship may care to know the end of the matter. Copyright is no modern practice, and the perpetual right of authors, or persons to whom they had ceded it, was recognised in France through the whole of the seventeenth century and three-quarters of the eighteenth. The perpetuity of the right had produced literary properties of considerable value; for example, Boudot's Dictionary was sold by his executors for 24,000 livres; Prévot's Manual Lexicon and two Dictionaries for 115,000 livres. But in 1777—ten years after Diderot's plea—the Council decreed that copyright was a privilege and an exercise of the royal grace. The motives for this reduction of an author's right from a transferable property to a terminable privilege seem to have been, first, the general mania of the time for drawing up the threads of national life into the hands of the administration, and second, the hope of making money by a tariff of permissions. The Constituent Assembly dealt with the subject with no intelligence nor care, but the Convention passed a law recognising in the author an exclusive right for his life, and giving a property for ten years after his death to heirs or cessionaires. The whole history is elaborately set forth in the collection of documents entitled La Propriété littéraire au 18ième siècle. (Hachette, 1859.)
[243] Oct. 11, 1759; xviii. 401.
[244] xix. 319, 320.
[245] Miscellaneous Works, p. 73.
[246] Walpole to Selwyn. 1765. Jesse's Selwyn, ii. 9. See also Walpole to Mann, iv. 283.
[247] D'Epinay, ii. 4, 138, 153, etc.