146 REVIEWS AMERICAN REPRINTS. 



individual house, according to the amplest extent of any power to make such a 

 transfer that J may he found to possess hy law or custom in America^' 



These are creditable testimonials to the publishers who print them, 

 but what do they amount to ? So far as the American nation is con- 

 cerned in the matter they make things considerably worse. Such 

 letters indeed might be usefully copied in other matters besides book- 

 traffic, Messrs. A — . B — ., a Grreek house in the Levant, having 

 sold a cargo of Odessa wheat to a Liverpool skipper, could not do 

 better than supply him with a similar document, to produce on the 

 coast of Barbary, in case any colored gentlemen of an enterprising 

 turn, in that free and enlightened corner of the globe, should take a 

 fancy to visit him on the voyage home. The attention it would be 

 likely to receive would depend, we imagine, fully as much in the one 

 case as in the other, on the probable risks and profits likely to be the 

 result of either appropriation. 



One example in proof will suffice. A New Tork firm, by no 

 means the foremost among American publishers to recognise any 

 claims which British authors might fancy they had on those who 

 appropriated their works for the purposes of trade, have found, or 

 fancied, it for their interest to give Mr. Thackeray two thousand dol- 

 lars for early proof sheets of his " Virginians ;" a similar transaction 

 with Mr. Dickens for his " Little Dorrit " having proved a profitable 

 speculation. But another publisher, as they indignantly complain, 

 has begun to reprint these very sheets of " The Yirginians " in the 

 columns of a New Tork daily paper; an act which Messrs. Harper 

 protest must put an end to all monetary transactions between British 

 authors and the American appropriators of their works. In the light 

 of this, the most recent illustration of Anglo- American copy-rights, 

 we may estimate the monetary value of Elizabeth Browning's " earn- 

 est desire " that the chivalry of America will respect her rights of 

 authorship -, or De Quincey's grateful transfer to the liberal Boston 

 House, of all the rights in the creations of his own hand and brain 

 which he may he found to possess, hy law or custom^ in America! 



And what, meanwhile, does the American author say to all this ? 

 If no chivalrous sympathy with his order, awaken him to a generous 

 fellow-feeling for his English brother, does it not occur to him to ask 

 what is its efiect, for example, on his own solitary " North American 

 Review." Does that native periodical perform the important func- 

 tions to the literary men of the Union, or even of Boston, which 

 have been done to those of Edinburgh and London by their Maga- 

 zines and Reviews ? Is it no direct and palpable, though inestima- 



