the patentees of great and useful inventions have generally realized large fortunes within a few years; whereas the best and greatest of our writers have commonly made such little ones, during their whole lives, that the Next-of-Kin never heard of anything to his advantage. And the reason was ably explained by the Bishop of London.

The merits of a mechanical invention can at once be tested: and are immediately recognized. The merest loggerhead can understand at a glance the advantage of a mac.ne which impels a ship without wind and a coach without horses-how beit the same dunderpate in twenty long years had never found out the use of "book larning." There is a gentleman of my acquaintance who derives a yearly sum for a patent clothes brush, the superiority of which, in brushing his master's coat, John Footman would detect ere he had whistled through "Nancy Dawson." But suppose instead of a machine of bristles, wire, and wood, my friend had composed a work, intended to brush off the dirt and dust of the human intellect, he might have been months in catching a publisher, and years upon years in getting hold of the public. But why talk of steam-engines, clothes brushes, and such utilities? There was one trifling instrument, for which, had the inventor secured a patent, the sale of the article, merely as a toy, would have certainly enriched the proprietor-for the dullest unit of humanity had but to put the tube to his or her eye to enjoy all the beautiful and varied patterns of the kaleidoscope. But suppose, instead of a tin machine with reflectors and bits of colored glass, the novelty had been a "Novum Organon," how many of those peeping thousands and millions might have looked through it and through it, by sunlight and lamplight, without discovering that it was rare food for the mind-prime intellectual Bacon. The truth is, we so far resemble the brutes, that we understand our physical wants and comforts, much more quickly than our mental or moral ones,—just as a turnspit would find out the value of a bottlejack long before that of a Bridgewater Treatise. Hence, the prompt recognition and remuneration of mechanical inventions and inNor must it be forgotten that government, as wide awake to the Physical, and as fast asleep to the Intellectual, as

ventors.

the loggerheaded dunce, John Footman, the kaleidoscopers, and the turnspit, it ought not to be forgotten that government has sometimes bought his invention of a patentee, but has never purchased a copyright since the invention of printing. It will be time enough, then, when Sir Robert Peel begins to bargain with us for our works, on behalf of the nation, to say that we are on the same footing as the patentees.

.

The International Question-and Pirates Foreign and Domestic-in my next.-Yours, &c.,

LETTER V.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE ATHENÆUM:

PROBLEMATICAL as some persons may consider the benefit of an extended copyright to authors, there can be no doubt of the immediate injury they must sustain, in common with publishers, from the piratical reprinting of the works in foreign countries to wit, France, Belgium, and the United States. am not aware whether Germany partakes in this disgraceful traffic but there is a word for it in the language, and nothing is more favorable to Nachdruckerie than the contiguity of several petty principalities.

seas.

Of the character of the system, the very name that is applied to it is significant-a term which associates this over-free-trade with the buccaneering practices of the old robbers on the high The literary pirate does not, indeed, dabble in blood, but in ink; but the object is the same, and pursued by the same means the indiscriminate pillage of friend or foe. And here be it said, that if anything can palliate the foreign marauder, and render his offence comparatively venial, it is the example of English publishers pirating English works. It has always been reckoned unnatural for dog to eat dog, or for hawks to pick out hawks' eyes; and the Highland veteran, who stole droves of cattle without scruple, would have held it a heinous offence to lift a sucking calf belonging to any one of his own clan. PART II.

9

Nevertheless, of this heinous and unnatural conduct there have been too many instances, including a couple within the last few months. In the first case, a piracy was committed by a Firm not the least active in the opposition to the Bill of Sergeant Talfourd, and who, of course, held the poacher-like principle that the proper time for a copyright to expire was whenever they chose to kill it. The other party alluded to, once went so far as to assert to me that an author would not receive more, but less, for a longer term in his works-a declaration attributed at the time to mere natural blockheadism; but his theory of literary rights has since been illustrated by an injunction obtained against him by a brother bookseller, for pirating some popular metrical legends. Now in what but the pseudo-respectability of a doublefronted shop in Cornhill does this publisher rank above a man whom he would no doubt have designated as a little, low, dirty, shabby library-keeper in the suburbs, to whom I one day happened to mention a placard in a neighboring shop-window announcing a spurious "Master Humphrey's Clock."

"Sir," said the little, low, dirty, shabby library-keeper, "if you had observed the name, it was by Bos, not Boz-S, Sir, not Z; and, besides, it would have been no piracy, Sir, even with the Z, because Master Humphrey's Clock, you see, Sir, was not published as by Boz, but by Charles Dickens."*

These lax principles of our domestic pirates are not at all braced by a passage across the Atlantic. In America the system has reached its climax, and the types, used on a new work here, are only the antetypes of a reprint in Boston, Philadelphia, or New York. Of this, a flagrant example has recently occurred in the republication of Sir E. Bulwer's last new novel, "Zanoni," in a newspaper form, at the rate of ten copies for a dollar! In fact, as to natural rights, in the States there appear to be two classes very much on a par-our read men and the Indians.

It may be as well for me, before commenting on such transactions, to disown any prejudice, personal or political, against America or the Americans. I am none of the "Mr. H's" who have drawn, sketched, or caricatured them. The stars and

• Fact.

stripes do not affect me like a blight in the eye; nor does "Yankee Doodle" give me the ear-ache. I have no wish to repeal the Union of the United States; or to alter the phrase in the Testament into "Republicans and Sinners." In reality, I have rather a Davidish feeling towards Jonathan, remembering whence he comes, and what language he speaks; and holding it better in such cases to have the wit that traces resemblances, than the judgment that detects differences, and perhaps foments them.

It is, therefore, to gratify no private spleen, spite, or jealousy, that my voice is raised against a system which has been condemned by some of the wisest and most distinguished of her own sons as prejudicial to the dignity and best interests of America -men, who do not care, perhaps, to see their Gog of a country indebted for all its prose and poetry to little Great Britain, just as the jolterheaded Giant at the gate of Kenilworth Castle was dependent for his literature on the dwarfish imp Flibbertigibbet.

And truly gigantic is Jonathan in his material works, and extra-fast in his physical progress; but will he really be satisfied with going ahead in everything but that in which the head is so distinguished an agent? He is first chop with the hatchet, and a crack with the rifle,-grand at a 'coon, mighty at a 'possum, and awful at a squirrel,—he can drive a nail with a bullet, or a bargain with a Jew pedlar,-whip his weight in wild cats,* grin Jesuit's bark into quinine, and, as some say, wring off the tail of a comet,-but where will be his exploits with the pen? Will he resemble or not the big Ben of the school, a dab at marbles, a first-rater at cricket, a top-sawyer at fives, and a good-'un at fisticuffs, but obliged to be obliged for his English themes and exercises to the least boy on the form? The picture is a mortifying one; but in some such character must Jonathan necessarily figure, if he consents to be a mere interloper-a Squatter, instead of a settler, in the Field of Letters.

That America, in the absence of an International Copyright, can never possess a native literature, has been foretold by the second-sighted on either side of the Atlantic. Indeed, accord

"Phoo! phoo!" said an old Anglo-Indian, in reference to this boast ; "I can whip my own weight in elephants

99

ing to Mr. Cornelius Mathews, in his speech at the public dinner given to Dickens at New York, the barren time is already come, and the field of letters, in the States, scarcely produces a prose thistle or a poetical dandelion. It would hardly feed a Learned Pig. Such must be the inevitable result of the republication of English works on a scale that totally precludes any native com. petition; and whatever may be the feeling of the trading partners, I can imagine nothing more mortifying to the spirit of a liberal, accomplished, and patriotic American, than to sit in his study, under a framed and glazed "Declaration of Independ ence," and to look at a Family Library, well stored indeed with books, but of which nothing save the paper and the covers are of home manufacture.

Of the character of the traffic there can be no doubt. No honorable man would wish to obtain mental food, any more than his bodily victual, without fairly paying for it. It makes no difference that the supply comes from another country; for who would object to pay his tradesman's bills on the plea that his American apples, his Ostend butter, and his French eggs, were of foreign production? Nor does it matter that the acquisition is not exactly so tangible as upholstery; it is as irregular to have your head furnished as your house at the expense of your neighbor.

But these are the consumers. As to the purveyors, they are precisely on a par with the remarkable cheap traders, who stole ready-made brooms. They are not liable, it is true, to any legal penalty; but a severe punishment is awarded to a very similar offence. According to the comity of civilized countries, the national flag virtually protects not only the aggregate people, but every native individual—the British subject at Baltimore or Boston as much as the cockney in Cheapside. Even so the copyright of an English work attaches to the solitary copy that finds its way to New York as much as to the 1499 which remain in the dominions of Queen Victoria. It is a single bank note, but of a large issue; and its multiplication by spurious copies, particularly for circulation in our empire or its colonies, is surely as nefarious as the forgery of our “flimsies.” The analogy is undeniable: and as the wholesale counterfeiting