myself, I cannot be sufficiently grateful to Thomas Day who gave me 'Little Jack' and 'Sandford and Merton;' nor should I forget Henry Brooke with his wealth of stories in the Fool of Quality.' But a new source of attraction was to arise in a very few years after Mr. Newbery had done his work. There were two books, the companions of my childhood, which I presume it would be difficult to find in any juvenile collection now. And yet they were the precursors of a revolution in Art. The Progress of Man and Society,' of which Dr. Trusler was the compiler, was published in 1791; and 'The Lookingglass of the Mind' in 1796. The cuts for these two books were drawn and engraved by Thomas Bewick. There were two booksellers of the name of Newbery living at the same period, and each honourably connected with Goldsmith. John, of St. Paul's Churchyard, published the Traveller,' in 1765. Francis, his nephew, of Paternoster Row, published The Vicar of Wakefield,' in 1766. Boswell has given "authentically, from Johnson's own exact narration," the history of the sale of this novel to Francis Newbery-" I received one morning a message from poor Goldsmith that he was in great distress, and, as it was not in his power to come to me, begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent him a guinea, and promised to come to him directly. I accordingly went as soon as I was dressed, and found that his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent passion. I perceived that he had already changed my guinea,

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and had got a bottle of Madeira and a glass before him. I put the cork into the bottle, desired he would be calm, and began to talk to him of the means by which he might be extricated. He then told me that he had a novel ready for the press, which he produced to me. I looked into it, and saw its merits; told the landlady I should soon return ; and, having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used him so ill."

Although Francis Newbery eventually succeeded to the business of his uncle in St. Paul's Churchyard, there appears to have been an intermediate proprietor of the Original Juvenile Library, whom Mr. John Nichols simply mentions as bookseller in St. Paul's Churchyard, who died in 1788. Upon an edition of 6 Little Goody Two-Shoes,' I find this imprint ; "Printed for T. Carnan, successor to Mr. J. Newbery.' The reputation of Thomas Carnan is associated with more durable records than the obituary of the 'Gentleman's Magazine.' He lives in the eloquence of Erskine. John Newbery died in 1767; and soon after Carnan entered upon the business in St. Paul's Churchyard, he became possessed with a very sensible notion that the Stationers' Company had no legal title to their monopoly of Almanacs. He began, therefore, to publish almanacs of his own. The Company, after having anathematised him as the base publisher of "counterfeit almanacs," sent him to prison on a summary process, as regularly as

he issued his annual commodities. A friend of his family told me, some forty years ago, that this incorrigible old bookseller always at this season kept a clean shirt in his pocket, that he might make a decent appearance before the magistrate and the keeper of Newgate. But Carnan persevered, till the judges of the Court of Common Pleas decided against the validity of the patent, and an injunction which had been obtained in the Exchequer was immediately dissolved. The Stationers' Company then induced Lord North to bring a Bill into Parliament to revest in them the monopoly that had been declared illegal. In 1779 Erskine, in a speech which remains as one of the great triumphs of his oratory, procured the rejection of this Bill by a large majority. "What," some one of my readers may say, "has this digression to do with the works of Goldsmith?" Carnan, who had become the proprietor of The Traveller,' published by John Newbery, opposed the re-publication of Goldsmith's poems in the booksellers' edition of 1779. He was at issue with the leaders of the trade. "It is much to be regretted," says Mr. Cunningham, in his preface to Johnson's Lives of the Poets,' "that the petty interest of a bookseller named Carnan should have excluded Goldsmith from the number of his Lives." There was evidently something more than "petty interest," which set Carnan in direct opposition to the great body of his fellows. The great question was in hot dispute in 1777. The Stationers had the ear of the Prime Minister; but Carnan was in con

fidential intercourse with Erskine. We shall not see his shadow amongst the forty booksellers who met at the Chapter Coffee-house to resist "an invasion of their literary preserves by the publication at Edinburgh of an edition of The British Poets, from Chaucer to Churchill.”

CHAPTER XII.

THE CHAPTER COFFEE-HOUSE.

WO Undergraduates of Oxford, George Colman and Bonnel Thornton, commenced their literary career in 1754,

with the periodical paper, 'The Connoisseur.' The experience of these youths, who had been the Westminster schoolfellows of Cowper, Lloyd, and Churchill, scarcely justified them in assuming the dignity of "Mr. Town, Critic and Censor-General." Yet their liveliness contrasted agreeably with the solemnity of the 'Rambler,' which had come to a close in 1752; nor were they ignoble rivals of Hawkesworth, in his 'Adventurer,' commenced in that year. Colman and Thornton were the Beaumont and Fletcher of essayists, and in their concluding number, they declared that almost every single paper was the joint production of both. They had both looked upon London with the quick observation of youth, and were probably better qualified to describe some of its lighter aspects than those who desired "to point a moral" in the office of "Critic and Censor-General." They certainly have not described at hap-hazard the famous coffee-house in Paternoster Row, where booksellers "most do congregate." Alas! I am using a wrong tense; the