testern well bestowed,—but for so much worth as even poor I know to be stuffed in it.”
The poets had a profitable time when their poems, handsomely printed in quarto volumes, were priced so high as two guineas. Sir Walter Scott made great sums by these editions which sold in large numbers, but no other poet was so fortunate as he was. Moore did well with his poems, and in his Diary (Dec. 23, 1818) he records an amusing instance of the practical appreciation of an admirer. He writes—
“The young Bristol lady who enclosed me £3 after reading ‘Lalla Rookh’ had very laudable ideas on the subject; and if every reader of ‘Lalla Rookh’ had done the same, I need never have written again.”
Wordsworth’s “Excursion” was published in 1814, in a two guinea quarto volume, but it took six years to exhaust an edition of five hundred copies. Such are the inequalities in the rate of the remuneration of authors.