Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/430

390 THOMAS T&GG. Clarke, with a coloured portrait. 13,600 copies were sold at seven-and-sixpence each ; and, as he observes, the "bill was probably liquidated." Among his other cheap books were " Tegg's Chronology," " Philip Quail," and perhaps the most successful and useful of all a diamond edition of "Johnson's Dictionary," published when the original edition was selling at five guineas. In 1824 he purchased the copyright of Hone's "Every-Day Book" and "Table Book;" republished the whole in weekly parts, and cleared a very large profit. " I like you and your book, ingenious Hone ! In whose capacious, all-embracing leaves The very marrow of traditions shown, And all that History, much that Fiction weaves." So sang Charles Lamb ; and Southey says of these two delightful works : "The 'Every-Day Book ' and ' Table Book ' will be a fortune a hundred years hence, but they have failed to make Hone's fortunes." However, Tegg gave him five hundred pounds to compile the " Year Book," which proved much less successful than the others. Hone had been a bookseller in the Strand, where he probably acquired his miscellaneous stock of quaint knowledge about old English customs, and all that appertained to a race fast dying out. After the famous trial, in which his "Parodies" were charged as being " blasphemy," he immediately stopped the sale of them ; and, though at that time in urgent need of money, he resolutely refused tempting offers for copies. " The story of my three-days' trial at Guild- hall," he writes, "may be dug out from the journals of the period ; the history of my mind, my heart, my