Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/73

THE BOOKSELLERS OF OLDEN TIMES. 53 started as auctioneer, naturally falling foul of the Irish booksellers, whom he dressed off in a tract entitled "The Dublin Scuffle." He returned to England complacently believing that he had done more service to learning by his auctions " than any single man that had come into Ireland these hundred years." In London, however, he was by this time so involved in commercial difficulties, that he was fain to give up bookselling altogether, and take to bookmaking instead ; and his pen was so indefatigable that he soon bid fair to be the author of as many volumes as he had published. The book that concerns us most here is the " Life and Errors of John Dunton, written by himself in Solitude," in which is included the " Lives and Characters of a Thousand Persons now living in London." In this latter part he was obliged, "out of mere gratitude," "to draw the characters of the most eminent of the profession in the three kingdoms ;" consequently we find some half-dozen lines of " character " given to every bookseller of his time in London, " gratitude " compelling him, how- ever, to be almost invariably laudatory ; the other parts of the " three kingdoms " are thus summarily and easily dealt with, " Of three hundred booksellers now trading in country towns, I know not of one knave or a blockhead amongst them all." The book, however rambling and incoherent, contains much worth preservation, and is not unpleasant desultory reading. Dunton's own " character " has been preserved else- where than in his Life and Confessions. Warburton describes him as " an auction bookseller and an abusive scribbler ;" Disraeli, " as a crack-brain,