144 REVIEWS AMERICAN REPRINTS. 



intellectual wealth thus appropriated, consider, good American reader, 

 what the judgment on you, and your copyright law will be, in the 

 great final court of appeal of posterity, when it shall appear that in so 

 doing you were withholding their just meed, and robbing of their hardly 

 earnedwages, the English Chattertons and Groldsmiths, the rieldings and 

 Johnsons, of this later century. Consider,most appreciative American 

 reader, what a Carlyle, a Kingsley, an Isaac Taylor, a Thackeray, or 

 others of those who, in pursuit of literary fame, 



" Scorn delights, and live laborious days ;" 



might have contributed to you in return for the small percentage you 

 would never miss. Consider that, guaranteed in such, Hugh Miller, 

 — relieved of the drudgery of editorial task- work, — might have lived 

 and wrought, might have taught and delighted us and you stUl. If 

 that old England of ours be in reality a sort of guano-island from 

 which .you maj^ thus calculate on importing such fertilizing cargoes 

 for your own intellectual culture, would it not become your practical 

 sagacity to get the most and the best out of it, even at the cost of a 

 very Uttle temporary self-denial. What Hugh Miller might and 

 could have done, would have rendered very insignificant all he has 

 done ; and would have well repayed you for any investment. Poor 

 old Dr. Dick, the author of " The Christian Philosopher," and other 

 works more highly appreciated in the States than at home, — at the 

 very time that his writings were selling to admiring xlmerican read- 

 ers for behoof of their dishonest appropriators, — had to go well nigh 

 a begging, at the age of eighty-three, before the meager pension of 

 £50 was doled out to him from the British Privy Purse. Happily 

 such cases are not the rule in the experience of our modern literary 

 men ; but authors enough might be named, whose works have been 

 selling by thousands for behoof of their American appropriators, 

 while .they have been compelled to uncongenial toil to win for them- 

 selves the income needful for their most moderate requirements. In 

 his column of '^ gossip " the enlightened citizen of -the American 

 " Modern Athens," might glance over the notices of contributions, 

 literary and dramatic, generously made by a Bulwer, or Dickens, or 

 Martin : now on behalf of a Greneral Literary Eund, and again for 

 the family of a Douglas Jerrold or other deceased author, whose 

 works the lettered citizen had meanwhile seen surreptitiously appro- 

 priated for his own behoof ; and the titles of which he could read'ofi" 

 in whole columns in the advertising sheets of Boston's most reputa- 

 ble publishers, to be had at the low charge of 75 cents per volume : 



