The “earliest men of letters”--if we accept the word in its modern meaning of those who earn their bread by their pens--were the dramatists; but the publication of their plays was a mere appendix to the acting thereof, and Shakespeare never drew a penny from the printing of his works. The Elizabethan dramatists--the Greenes and Marlowes--led a life of wretchedness only paralleled later on by the annals of Grub Street. As the use of the printing press expanded, however, a race of authors by profession sprang into existence. At the time of the Commonwealth James Howell, author of the “Epistolæ Ho-elianæ,” who was thrown into the Fleet prison, appears to have made his bread by scribbling for the booksellers; Thomas Fuller, also, was among the first, as well as the quaintest, hack-writers; he observes, in the preface to his “Worthies,” that no stationers have hitherto lost by him. His “Holy State” was reprinted four times before the Restoration, but the publisher continued to describe the last two impressions, on the title-page, as only the third edition, as if he were unwilling that the extent of the popularity should be known--a fact probably unprecedented. But still the great writers had either private means, or lived on the patronage of rank and wealth; for the reward of a successful book in those days did not lie in so much hard cash from one’s publisher, but in hopes of favour and places from the great. The famous agreement between Milton and Samuel Simmons, a printer, is one of the earliest authenticated agreements of copy money being given for an original work; it was executed on April 27th, 1667, and disposes of the copyright of “Paradise Lost” for the present sum of five pounds, and five pounds more when 1300 copies of the first impression should be sold in retail, and the like sum at the end of the second and third editions, _to be accounted as aforesaid; and that_ (each of) _the said first three impressions shall not exceed fifteen books or volumes of the said manuscript_. The price of the small quarto edition was three shillings in a plain binding. Probably, as Sir Walter Scott remarks, the trade had no very good bargain of it, for the first impression of the poem does not seem to have been sold off before the expiration of seven years, nor till the bookseller (in accordance with a practice nor confined solely to that age) had given it five new title-pages. The second five pounds was received by Milton, and in 1680, for the present sum of eight pounds, his widow resigned all further right in the copyright, and thus the poem was sold for eighteen pounds instead of the stipulated twenty. The whole transaction must be regarded rather as an entire novelty, than as an example of a bookseller’s meanness--a view too often unjustly taken.