To return to Dodsley, we find that in 1753 he commenced the _World_, a weekly essay ridiculing “with novelty and good humour, the fashions, follies, vices, and absurdities of that part of the human species which calls itself the World”. Three guineas was allowed as literary remuneration for each number, but Moore, the editor, a receiver of this allowance, obtained much gratuitous assistance from Lord Chesterfield, Horace Walpole, and other men of wit and fashion. Another periodical, but a bi-weekly, the _Rambler_, all the work of Samuel Johnson, appeared without intermission for the space of two years, and in its gravity, its high morality, and its sententious language presents a curious contrast to its livelier companion. Dodsley, after having published Burke’s earliest productions, entrusted to his care the management of a very important venture, the _Annual Register_, which was to carry Dodsley’s name up to our own times. In the same year, 1758, his last play _Cleone_, in which he ventured to rise to tragedy, after having been declined by Garrick was acted at Covent Garden amidst the greatest applause, and for a number of nights, that, in those times, constituted a wonderful “run.” And the author, fond to distraction of his last child, “went every night to the stage side and cried at the distress of poor Cleone;” yet when it was reported that Johnson had remarked that if Otway had written it, no other of his pieces would have been remembered, Dodsley had the good sense to say “it was too much.” A long and prosperous career enabled Dodsley to retire some years before his death, which occurred at Durham, in 1764. Thomas Cadell, who had served his apprenticeship to Andrew Millar, was now taken into partnership, and in a few years he and the Strahans quite filled the place that Dodsley and Millar had previously occupied. Together they became the proprietors of the copyright of works by the great historical and philosophical writers who shed a lustre round the close of the eighteenth century, and among their clients we find the names of Robertson, Gibbon, Adam Smith and Blackstone. For the _History of Charles V._ Robertson received £4500, then supposed to be the largest sum ever paid for the copyright of a single work, and out of Gibbon’s _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ the booksellers are said to have cleared £60,000. Cadell retired with an enormous fortune, and was honoured by being elected Sheriff of London at a very critical and important time. Alexander Strahan, became King’s printer, and left a fortune of upwards of a million. His business was eventually carried on by the Spottiswoodes. [Illustration: Thomas Cadell. 1742-1802.]