When he entered his profession, the standard of conduct in every department of life connected with the publishing trade was determined by aristocratic ideas.  The unwritten laws which regulated the practice of bookselling in the eighteenth century were derived from the Stationers’ Company.  Founded as it had been on the joint principles of commercial monopoly and State control, this famous organization had long lost its old vitality.  But it had bequeathed to the bookselling community a large portion of its original spirit, both in the practice of cooperative publication which produced the “Trade Books,” so common in the last century, and in that deep-rooted belief in the perpetuity of copyright, which only received its death-blow from the celebrated judgment of the House of Lords in the case of Donaldson v.  Becket in 1774.  Narrow and exclusive as they may have been in their relation to the public interest, there can be no doubt that these traditions helped to constitute, in the dealings of the booksellers among themselves, a standard of honour which put a certain curb on the pursuit of private gain.  It was this feeling which provoked such intense indignation in the trade against the publishers who took advantage of their strict legal rights to invade what was generally regarded as the property of their brethren; while the sense of what was due to the credit, as well as to the interest, of a great organized body, made the associated booksellers zealous in the promotion of all enterprises likely to add to the fame of English literature.

Again, there was something, in the best sense of the word, aristocratic in the position of literature itself.  Patronage, indeed, had declined.  The patron of the early days of the century, who, like Halifax, sought in the Universities or in the London Coffee-houses for literary talent to strengthen the ranks of political party, had disappeared, together with the later and inferior order of patron, who, after the manner of Bubb Dodington, nattered his social pride by maintaining a retinue of poetical clients at his country seat.  The nobility themselves, absorbed in politics or pleasure, cared far less for letters than their fathers in the reigns of Anne and the first two Georges.  Hence, as Johnson said, the bookseller had become the Maecenas of the age; but not the bookseller of Grub Street.  To be a man of letters was no longer a reproach.  Johnson himself had been rewarded with a literary pension, and the names of almost all the distinguished scholars of the latter part of the eighteenth century—­Warburton, the two Wartons, Lowth, Burke, Hume, Gibbon, Robertson—­belong to men who either by birth or merit were in a position which rendered them independent of literature as a source of livelihood.  The author influenced the public rather than the public the author, while the part of the bookseller was restricted to introducing and distributing to society the works which the scholar had designed.