It would seem, however,
that when Dryden neglected his stipulated labour, Tonson possessed
powers of animadversion, which, though exercised in plain prose, were
not a little dreaded by the poet. Lord Bolingbroke, already a votary of
the Muses, and admitted to visit their high priest, was wont to relate,
that one day he heard another person enter the house. "This," said
Dryden, "is Tonson: you will take care not to depart before he goes
away: for I have not completed the sheet which I promised him; and if
you leave me unprotected, I shall suffer all the rudeness to which his
resentment can prompt his tongue."[14] But whatever occasional subjects
of dissension arose between Dryden and his bookseller appears always to
have brought them together, after the first ebullition of displeasure
had subsided. There might, on such occasions, be room for acknowledging
faults on both sides; for, if we admit that the bookseller was penurious
and churlish, we cannot deny that Dryden seems often to have been
abundantly captious, and irascible. Indeed, as the poet placed, and
justly, more than a mercantile value upon what he sold, the trader, on
his part, was necessarily cautious not to afford a price which his
returns could not pay; so that while, in one point of view, the author
sold at an inadequate price, the purchaser, in another, really got no
more than value for his money. That literature is ill recompensed, is
usually rather the fault of the public than the bookseller, whose trade
can only exist by buying that which can be sold to advantage.
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