Most of the 135 booksellers were good men, according to Dunton, but not all.  ’Mr. Lee in Lombard Street.  Such a pirate, such a cormorant was never before.  Copies, books, men, shops, all was one.  He held no propriety right or wrong, good or bad, till at last he began to be known; and the booksellers, not enduring so ill a man among them, spewed him out, and off he marched to Ireland, where he acted as felonious Lee as he did in London.  And as Lee lived a thief, so he died a hypocrite; for being asked on his death-bed if he would forgive Mr. C. (that had formerly wronged him), “Yes,” said Lee, “if I die, I forgive him; but if I happen to live, I am resolved to be revenged on him."’

The Act of Union destroyed the trade of these pirates, but their felonious editions of eighteenth-century authors still abound.  Mr. Gladstone, I need scarcely say, was careful in his Home Rule Bill (which was denounced by thousands who never read a line of it) to withdraw copyright from the scope of action of his proposed Dublin Parliament.

There are nearly eleven hundred brief character-sketches in Dunton’s book, of all sorts and kinds, but with a preference for bookish people, divines, both of the Establishment and out of it, printers and authors.  Sometimes, indeed, the description is short enough, and tells one very little.  To many readers, references so curt to people of whom they never heard, and whose names are recorded nowhere else, save on their mouldering grave-stones, may seem tedious and trivial, but for others they will have a strange fascination.  Here are a few examples: 

   ’Affable Wiggins.  His conversation is general but never
   impertinent.

   ’The kind and golden Venables.  He is so good a man, and so truly
   charitable, he that will write of him, must still write more.

’Mr. Bury—­my old neighbour in Redcross Street.  He is a plain honest man, sells the best coffee in all the neighbourhood, and lives in this world like a spiritual stranger and pilgrim in a foreign country.

   ’Anabaptist (alias Elephant) Smith.  He was a man of great
   sincerity and happy contentment in all circumstances of life.’

If an affection for passages of this kind be condemned as trivial, and akin to the sentimentalism of the man in Calverley’s poem who wept over a box labelled ‘This side up,’ I will shelter myself behind Carlyle, who was evidently deeply moved, as his review of Boswell’s Johnson proves, by the life-history of Mr. F. Lewis, ’of whose birth, death, and whole terrestrial res gestae this only, and, strange enough, this actually, survives—­“Sir, he lived in London, and hung loose upon society. Stat PARVI hominis umbra."’ On that peg Carlyle’s imagination hung a whole biography.

Dunton, who was the son of the Rector of Aston Clinton, was apprenticed, about 1675, to a London bookseller.  He had from the beginning a great turn both for religion and love.  He, to use his own phrase, ‘sat under the powerful ministry of Mr. Doolittle.’  ’One Lord’s day, and I remember it with sorrow, I was to hear the Rev. Mr. Doolittle, and it was then and there the beautiful Rachel Seaton gave me that fatal wound.’