private letters, and though last, not least, the intimate lives of notable men. Tonson, the first great publisher, deserves to be named with Copernicus, Harvey, Kepler, James Watt, and other famous discoverers. But it was reserved for Edmund Curll, Pope’s victim and accomplice, to carry the discovery a step further, and so to play Newton to Tonson’s Kepler. Whether by happy chance or by laborious induction we cannot tell; but Curll hit on one of those epoch-making ideas which are so simple when once they are conceived, so difficult, save for the loftiest genius, in their first conception. It occurred to him that, in a world governed by the law of mortality, men might be handsomely entertained on one another’s remains. He lost no time in putting his theory into action. During the years of his activity he published some forty or fifty separate Lives, intimate, anecdotal, scurrilous sometimes, of famous and notorious persons who had the ill fortune to die during his lifetime. He had learned the wisdom of the grave-digger in Hamlet, and knew that there are many rotten corpses nowadays, that will scarce hold the laying in. So he seized on them before they were cold, and commemorated them in batches. One of his titles runs: The Lives of the most Eminent Persons who died in the Years 1711, 12, 13, 14, 15, in 4 Vols. 8o. His books commanded a large sale, and modern biography was established.
The new taste reacted on the older poets, whose works were steadily finding a larger and larger audience. In 1723 one Giles Jacob, who was the son of a maltster in Hampshire, and had been bred to the law, edited, for Curll, a collection in two volumes called The Poetical Register, or the Lives and Characters of all the English Poets, with an account of their Writings. His work,
