For the _Mysteries of Udolpho_ Mrs. Radcliffe received five hundred guineas, the largest sum that had at that time been given for a novel, and Peter Pindar (Dr. Wolcot) made a still better bargain for his poems. They had already acquired a prodigious popularity, and in selling the copyright a question arose, as to whether they should be purchased for a lump sum or an annuity. While the treaty was pending Wolcot was seized with a violent and rather ostentatious attack of asthma, which sadly interrupted him in discussing the arrangements, and he was eagerly offered an annuity of £250. The arrangement was made by Walker, a partner with Robinson in this transaction. Walker soon called to inquire after his friend’s illness, “Thank you, much better,” said Wolcot, “I have taken measure of my asthma, the fellow is troublesome, but I know his strength and am his master.” Walker’s face grew longer, and when he rejoined his wife in the next room, the doctor heard a shrill, feminine expostulation, “There, you’ve done it, I told you he wouldn’t die!” He outlived all the parties concerned, and was in his own case, perhaps, scarcely justified in originating the famous saying, “that publishers quaff champagne out of the skulls of authors.” This over-eager parsimony was not in any way due to Robinson; his generosity to his authors was well known, and his house became a general rendezvous for the literary men of the day, who were heartily welcome whenever they chose to turn up, provided always that they did not come late for dinner. After Robinson’s death in 1801, his son and brother carried on the business, but met with reverses, principally through loss of stock at a fire; but the wonderful prices that were realized at the auction, consequent on their declared bankruptcy, fairly set them afloat again. One bookseller, alone, is said to have invested £40,000 at the sale, and even the copyright of Vyse’s _Shilling Spelling Book_ was sold for £2,500, with an annuity of fifty guineas a year to the old schoolmaster Vyse. James Lackington, in his _Memoirs and Confessions_ has left plenty of material, had we space, for an amusing and instructive biography. He was born at Wellington in 1746, and his father, a drunken cobbler, would not even pay the requisite twopence a week for his son’s education. Loafing about the streets all day as a child, he thought he might turn his wanderings to account by crying pies, and as a pie-boy he acquired such a pre-eminence that he was soon engaged to vend almanacs. At fourteen he left this vagrant life to be apprenticed to a shoemaker, and his master’s family becoming strong adherents to the new sect of Methodists, he too was converted, and would trudge, he says, through frost and snow at midnight to hear “an inspired husbandman, shoemaker, blacksmith, or a woolcomber” preach to ten or a dozen people, when he might have quietly stopped at home to listen to “the sensible and learned ministers at Taunton.”