enerality of the publishers of books, unlike all other tradesmen, are
often the worst judges of their own wares. Were it practicable, as I
believe it to be, that authors and men of letters could themselves be
booksellers, the public would derive this immediate benefit from the
scheme; a deluge of worthless or indifferent books would be turned away,
and the name of the literary publisher would be a pledge for the value of
every new book. Every literary man would choose his own favourite
department, and we should learn from him as well as from his books.

Against this project it may be urged, that literary men are ill adapted to
attend to the regular details of trade, and that the great capitalists in
the book business have not been men of literature. But this plan is not
suggested for accumulating a great fortune, or for the purpose of raising
up a new class of tradesmen. It is not designed to make authors wealthy,
for that would inevitably extinguish great literary exertion, but only to
make them independent, as the best means to preserve exertion. The details
of trade are not even to reach him. The poet GESNER, a bookseller, left
his _librairie_ to the care of his admirable wife. His own works,
the elegant editions which issued from his press, and the value of
manuscripts, were the objects of his attention.

On the Continent many of the dealers in books have been literary men. At
the memorable expulsion of the French Protestants on the edict of Nantes,
their expatriated literary men flew to the shores of England, and the
free provinces of Holland; and it was in Holland that this colony of
_litterateurs_ established magnificent printing-houses, and furnished
Europe with editions of the native writers of France, often preferable to
the originals, and even wrote the best works of that time. At that
memorable period in our own history, when two thousand nonconformists were
ejected on St. Bartholomew's day from the national establishment, the
greater part were men of learning, who, deprived of their livings, were
destitute of any means of existence. These scholars were compelled to look
to some profitable occupation, and for the greater part they fixed on
trades connected with literature; some became eminent booksellers, and
continued to be voluminous writers, without finding their studies
interrupted by; their commercial arrangements. The details of trade must
be left to others; the hand of a child can turn a vast machine,