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 for the purpose of raising up a new class of tradesmen.  It is not designed to make authors wealthy, for that would inevitably extinguish great literary exertion, but only to make them independent, as the best means to preserve exertion.  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 even wrote the best works of that time.  At that memorable period in our own history, when two thousand nonconformists were ejected on St. Bartholomew’s day from the national establishment, the greater part were men of learning, who, deprived of their livings, were 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 became eminent booksellers, and 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, will himself be not the least eminent member.

CHAPTER XVIII.

The matrimonial state of literature.—­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.