Imperfect Civilisation—Reading during the Civil Wars—Reading after the Restoration—French Romances—First London Catalogue, 1680—Authors and Booksellers—Subscription Books—Books in Numbers—The Canvassing System.  
In a condition of society which may be characterised as that of a very imperfect civilisation—when communication is difficult, and in some cases impossible; when the influence of the capital upon the provinces is very partial and uncertain; when knowledge is for the most part confined to the learned professions—we must regard the rich upper classes precisely in the same relation to popular literature as we now regard the poor lower classes. We must view them as essentially uncritical and unrefined, swallowing the coarsest intellectual food with greediness, looking chiefly to excitement and amusement in books, and not very willingly elevating themselves to mental improvement as a great duty. When Ben Jonson speaks of the "prerogative the vulgar have to lose their judgments, and like that which is naught"—when he derides the taste of "the beast the multitude"—he also takes care to tell us that his description of those who "think rude things greater than polished," not only applied to "the sordid multitude, but to the neater sort of our gallants: for all are the multitude; only they differ in clothes, not in judgment {198} or understanding."[19] About the time when Jonson wrote thus—more calmly than when he denounced "the loathed stage, and the more loathsome age"—Burton was exhibiting the intellectual condition of the gentry in his 'Anatomy of Melancholy:'—"I am not ignorant how barbarously and basely for the most part our ruder gentry esteem of libraries and books; how they neglect and contemn so great a treasure, so inestimable a benefit, as ?sop's cock did the jewel he found in the dunghill; and all through error, ignorance, and want of education." Again, he says, "If they read a book at any time, 'tis an English chronicle, St. Huon of Bordeaux, Amadis de Gaul, &c., a play-book, or some pamphlet of news; and that at such seasons only when they cannot stir abroad." The "pamphlet of news" was a prodigious ingredient in the queer cauldron of popular literature for the next half-century. Every one has heard of the thirty thousand tracts in the British Museum, forming two thousand volumes, all published between 1640 and 1660. The impression of many of these was probably very small; for Rushworth, to whom they became authorities, tells us that King Charles I. gave ten pounds for the liberty to read one at the owner's house in St. Paul's Churchyard. This was the twenty years' work of Milton's "pens and heads, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas." Others were, "as fast reading, trying all things." Milton asks, {199} "What could a man require more from a nation so pliant and so prone to seek after knowledge?" He truly answers: "wise and faithful labourers, to make a knowing people, a nation of prophets, sages, and worthies."[20] The "wise and faithful labourers" were scarcely to be found in the civil and ecclesiastical violence of these partisan writers. But they were the pioneers of constitutional liberty; and till that fabric was built up, literature, properly so called, would offer few things great or enduring. The demand for books in that stormy period was, doubtless, very limited. The belief that the Ειχ?γ Βασιλιχ? was written by Charles I. would naturally account for the sale of fifty editions in one year. But from 1623 to 1664 only two editions of Shakspere were sold; and when the Restoration came, an act of Parliament was passed that only twenty printers should practise their art in the kingdom. The fact, as recorded by Evelyn, that at the fire of London, in 1666, the booksellers who carried on their business in the neighbourhood of St. Paul's lost as many books, in quires, as were worth 200,000l., is rather a proof of a slow demand than of the enormous extent of bookselling. In the vaults of Saint Faith's were rotting many a copy of what the world has agreed to call "heavy" books; books in advance of their time; books that no price would have made largely saleable—the books for the few.
The terrible quarter of a century that had preceded {200} the Restoration, and the new tastes which the return of the Stuarts brought to England, would seem to have swept away even the remembrances of the popular literature of Elizabeth and James. Edward Phillips, the nephew of Milton, has a remarkable passage with reference to the poets: "As for the antiquated and fallen into obscurity from their former credit and reputation, they are for the most part those who have written beyond the verge of the present age; for let us look back as far as about thirty or forty years, and we shall find a profound silence of the poets beyond that time, except of some few dramatics, of whose real worth the interest of the now flourishing stage cannot but be sensible."[21] This was written in 1674. What had the people to read who had forgotten Spenser, and Daniel, and Drayton; and Herbert—who knew little of Shakspere, except in the translations of Davenant and Dryden; and who, unquestionably, had small relish for the popular prose of another age, such as Bacon's 'Essays'? They had rhyming tragedies; they had obscene comedies; they had their Sedleys and Rochesters. It is not wonderful that the popular taste soon grew corrupted. Pepys says (1666), "To Deptford by water, reading Othello, Moor of Venice, which I ever heretofore esteemed a mighty good play; but having so lately read The Adventures of Five Hours, it seems a mean thing." Their "light reading" was a marvel—that romance literature {201} which at one time was as popular in its degree as the shilling novel of our own day. We have before us Mr. Samuel Speed's Catalogue of Books, printed for him in 1670. The first is 'Pharamond, the famed Romance, written by the author of those other two eminent volumes Cassandra and Cleopatra.' These famed and eminent volumes are large folios, translated from the French of M. de la Calprenede. If Calprenede was the Dumas, Madeleine Scudery was the Eugene Sue of those days. No popularity that these moderns have obtained by their feuilletons could have exceeded the excitement produced here, as well as in France, by the wonderful folios of their predecessors. 'Artamenes' and 'Clelia,' to say nothing of 'Almahide' and 'The Illustrious Bassa,' were in every mansion of the ladies of quality. The matron and her daughters sate at their embroidery while the companion read aloud, night after night, a page or two of these interminable adventures, in which Greeks and Romans talked the language of the Grand Monarque; and the intrigues of the court, and the characters of its personages, were mysteriously shadowed forth in what were called "Portraits." What signified that they were stupid? They were as level to the comprehension of their high-born readers as the penny novels of the present day are to the intelligence of the factory-girl. They had a long popularity, and were reprinted again and again, in their eight or ten volumes, when the age of duodecimos had arrived. They had been fashionable, {202} and that was enough. Character they had none, and very little of human passions. They were constructed upon the admirable recipe of Molière in the 'Précieuses Ridicules'—a lover without feeling; a mistress without preference; mutual insensibility; sedulous attention to forms; a declaration in a garden; the banishment of the lover by the coquetting fair; perseverance; timid confessions; rivals; persecutions of fathers; jealousies conceived under false appearances; laments; despairs; abductions; and all that. Mammas thought they were wisely instructing their daughters, when they permitted Mademoiselle Scudery to teach them "des règles dont, en bonne galanterie, on ne saurait se dispenser." In vain Molière, and Boileau, and Scarron laughed at the great heroic romances. They held their own till Le Sage in France, and Defoe and Fielding in England, spoke the language of real life. They show us how long the great and little vulgar will feed upon husks, till some real fruit is offered to them. But it is remarkable how, in the same age, works of real genius and works of intense dulness will run side by side. It may be a question how far 'Don Quixote' drove out the romances of chivalry. 'Tartufe,' and 'Le Malade Imaginaire' were of the same era as that of the wonderful productions in which Cyrus was talking galanterie to Mandane through a thousand folio pages. When Pepys thought 'Othello' a mean thing compared with 'The Adventures of Five Hours' he also bought {203} "Hudibras, both parts, the book now in greatest fashion for drollery;" but he tells us his honest mind when he says, "I cannot, I confess, see enough where the wit lies." Voltaire had a different standard of taste when he wrote, "I never met with so much wit in one single book as in this." The politics of 'Hudibras' made it "in greatest fashion;" the wit shot over the heads of the idle, dissipated, slavish, and corrupt courtiers who gave it their patronage, but eventually left its author to starve. Butler became popular in another generation; and so did Milton. The first edition of 'Paradise Lost' sufficed for a circulation of seven years.
The earliest Catalogue of Books published in this country contains a list of "all the books printed in England since the dreadful fire, 1666, to the end of Trinity term, 1680." The statistical results of this catalogue of the productions of the press for fourteen years have been ascertained by us. The whole number of books printed was 3550; of which 947 were divinity, 420 law, and 153 physic; 397 were school-books, and 253 on subjects of geography and navigation, including maps. About one-half of these books were single sermons and tracts. Deducting the reprints, pamphlets, single sermons, and maps, we have estimated that, upon an average, 100 new books were produced in each year.
About the time when this catalogue was published, John Dunton, one of the most eccentric, {204} and perhaps therefore amusing, of the publishing race, went into business with half a shop. He can tell us something of the manufacture of some of these books of the London catalogue. He says, "Printing was now uppermost in my thoughts; and hackney authors began to ply me with specimens as earnestly, and with as much passion and concern, as the watermen do passengers with oars and scullers." He adds, "As for their honesty, 'tis very remarkable. They'll either persuade you to go upon another man's copy, to steal his thought, or to abridge his books which should, have got him bread for his lifetime."[22] There were varieties of this class:—"Mr. Bradshaw was the best accomplished hackney author I have met with; his genius was quite above the common size, and his style was incomparably fine." Dunton had a suspicion that Bradshaw wrote 'The Turkish Spy,' which might justify somewhat of his eulogium. Roger North says that "the demi-booksellers," who deal in "the fresh scum of the press," are such as "crack their brains to find out selling subjects, and keep hirelings in garrets, at hard meat, to write and correct by the great; and so puff up an octavo to a sufficient thickness, and there is six shillings current for an hour and a half's reading, and perhaps never to be read or looked upon after." The people get these wares cheaper now. The publishers of that day, and long afterwards, were not very nice as to the uniform excellence of the books {205} they issued. Dunton informs us that Mr. William Rogers, who was the publisher of Sherlock and Tillotson, was concerned in publishing "some Dying Speeches." They had books for all tastes, and carried their goods to many markets. They were equally at home in Cheapside or at Sturbridge fair; and the great Bernard Lintot exhibited his "rubric posts" in his shop, and kept a booth on the Thames when it was frozen over. Some, according to Dunton, were "pirates and cormorants;" others, who had "the intimate acquaintance of several excellent pens, could never want copies." Some were good at "projection"—the devisers of "selling subjects;" and the talent of some "lies at collection," which Dunton exemplifies by Mr. Crouch, who "melted down the best of our English histories into twelvepenny books, which are filled with wonders, rarities, and curiosities." One, who "printed The Flying Post, did often fill it with stolen copies;" whilst Jacob Tonson, who paid Dryden like a safe tradesman as he was, and made him presents of melons and sherry, is very indignant that the great poet charged him fifty guineas for fourteen hundred and forty-six lines, when he expected to have had fifteen hundred and eighteen lines for forty guineas. Peace to their manes! They were all doing something towards the supply of that great want which was beginning to assert itself somewhat extensively in their day. They were, for the most part, rugged dealers in wares intellectual. They had many modes of turning a {206} penny beyond the profits which they derived, as publishers, from "the great genius" or "the eminent hand," which each patronised. They had some difficulties in their way as manufacturers; although the more cautious and lucky did make fortunes. The more limited the public, the more uncertain the demand. They were pretty safe with their tracts, and their abridgments, and their new comedies; but when they had to deal with works of learning, which were necessarily costly, they and their authors—for the authors had often to sustain the charges of printing—encountered serious losses. We shall see how, as the commerce of books extended, new measures were adopted to lessen, if not to remove, the risk.
Amongst the 'Calamities of Authors' there are many touching records of
"Solitude, pain of heart, distress, and poverty,"
 
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 {207} 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 gi............