Rogers spared no cost in the production of what was intended to be the most beautifully illustrated volume that had ever been published. £10,000 was spent on the illustrations and the engraving of them. There were fifty-six engravings in all by Turner, Stothard, and other eminent artists. Turner was to have received fifty pounds apiece for his drawings, but at one time the whole speculation threatened to turn out a failure, and he then offered the bard the use of them for five pounds each instead. To match this luxurious volume the illustrated edition of Rogers’s “Poems” was brought out, at a further cost of £5000, with seventy-two engravings by Turner, Stothard, Landseer, Eastlake, &c., and, in spite of the enormous outlay on the two works, their increasing popularity must have recouped the poet, for upwards of 50,000 copies are said to have been sold before the year 1847. Moxon was always proud of the share he had taken in the production of these works. All the volumes he issued were indeed remarkable for the beautiful manner in which they were “got up,” and in 1835 he published such an exquisite edition of his own sonnets that the beauty of this dandy of a book enraged and alarmed a writer in the _Quarterly_:--“Its typographical splendours led us to fear that this style of writing was getting into fashion,” but fortunately for the reviewer’s peace of mind he discovered “that Mr. Moxon the bookseller is his own poet, and that Mr. Moxon the poet is his own bookseller.... The necessity of obtaining an imprimatur of a publisher is a very wholesome restraint, from which Mr. Moxon--unluckily for himself and for us--found himself relieved.” Surely after a notice like this--indeed we have only quoted the kindlier portion, for often as publishers din the unsaleable nature of the drug poetry into the ears of young writers, the charm of retorting upon a bookseller seldom falls so temptingly before an author.--Moxon must have regretted that he did not cleave to a promise, held out in his first essay in 1826:-- “You’ll hear no more from me, If critics prove unkind; My next in simple prose must be; Unless I favour find.” This will perhaps suffice as a specimen of the productions of Moxon’s muse, though the first lines in the volume, a “Sonnet to a Nightingale,” are inviting. They had been the cause of much pleasantry among the author’s friends, as having been penned by one who had never heard the song of the bird to which they were addressed, and the internal evidence upon this point is indubitably strong; the sonnet perhaps, to state it in proportion, is to Keats’s “Ode to the Nightingale,” as the owl’s screeching “too-whit” to “Sweet quired Philomela.”