of their own wares. Were it practicable, as I believe it to be, that authors and men of letters should 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 to raise up a new class of tradesmen; it is not designed to make authors wealthy, for that would inevitably extinguish great literary exertion, but only independent, as the best means to preserve it. 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 wrote the best works of that time. At that memorable period in our own history, when two thousand non-conformists were ejected on St. Bartholomew's day from the national establishment, the greater part were men of learning, deprived of their livings, and 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 of the great booksellers at that period were either those scholars themselves or their descendants, and many of them 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, and the object here proposed would be lost, if authors sought to become merely booksellers.

Whenever the public of Europe shall witness such a new order of men among their booksellers, they will have less to read, but more to remember; their opinions will be less fluctuating, and their knowledge will come to them with more maturity: men of letters will fly to the house of the bookseller who in that class of literature in which he deals, is himself not the least eminent.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE MATRIMONIAL STATE-MATRIMONY SAID NOT TO BE WELL SUITED TO THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS-CELIBACY A CONCEALED CAUSE OF THE EARLY QUERULOUSNESS OF MEN OF GENIUS-OF UNHAPPY UNIONS-NOT ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY THAT THE WIFE SHOULD BE A LITERARY WOMAN —OF THE DOCILITY AND SUSCEPTIBILITY OF THE HIGHER FEMALE CHARACTER A PICTURE OF A LITERARY WIFE.

MATRIMONY has often been considered as a condition not well suited to the domestic life of genius, accompanied as it must be by many embarrassments for the head and the heart. It was an axiom with Fuessli, the Swiss artist, that the marriage state is incompatible with a high cultivation of the fine arts; and such appears to have been the feeling of most artists. When MICHAEL ANGELO was asked why he did not marry, he replied, "I have espoused my art; and it occasions me sufficient domestic cares, for my works

shall be my children. What would Bartholomeo Ghiberti have been, had he not made the gates of Saint John? His children consumed his fortune, but his gates, worthy to be the gates of Paradise, remain." The three Caraccis refused the conjugal bond on the same principle, dreading the interruptions of domestic life: their crayons and paper were always on their dining-table. Careless of fortune, they determined never to hurry over their works, that these might supply the ceaseless demands of a family. We discover the same principle operating in our own times; when a young painter, who had just married, told Sir Joshua that he was preparing to pursue his studies in Italy, that great painter exclaimed, "Married! then you are ruined as an artist!”

The same principle has influenced literary men. Sir Thomas Bodley had a smart altercation with his first librarian, insisting that he should not marry, maintaining its absurdity in the man who had the perpetual care of a public library; and Woodward left as one of the express conditions of his lecturer, that he was not to be a married