[Footnote 242: Those who are interested in the history of authorship may care to know the end of the matter. Copyright is no modern practice, and the perpetual right of authors, or persons to whom they had ceded it, was recognised in France through the whole of the seventeenth century and three-quarters of the eighteenth. The perpetuity of the right had produced literary properties of considerable value; for example, Boudot's Dictionary was sold by his executors for 24,000 livres; Prevot's Manual Lexicon and two Dictionaries for 115,000 livres. But in 1777--ten years after Diderot's plea--the Council decreed that copyright was a privilege and an exercise of the royal grace. The motives for this reduction of an author's right from a transferable property to a terminable privilege seem to have been, first, the general mania of the time for drawing up the threads of national life into the hands of the administration, and second, the hope of making money by a tariff of permissions. The Constituent Assembly dealt with the subject with no intelligence nor care, but the Convention passed a law recognising in the author an exclusive right for his life, and giving a property for ten years after his death to heirs or _cessionaires_. The whole history is elaborately set forth in the collection of documents entitled _La Propriete litteraire au 18ieme siecle_. (Hachette, 1859.)] [Footnote 243: Oct. 11, 1759; xviii. 401.] [Footnote 244: xix. 319, 320.] [Footnote 245: _Miscellaneous Works_, p. 73.] [Footnote 246: Walpole to Selwyn. 1765. Jesse's _Selwyn_, ii. 9. See also Walpole to Mann, iv. 283.] [Footnote 247: D'Epinay, ii. 4, 138, 153, etc.] [Footnote 248: See Comte's _Positive Polity_, vol. iii.] [Footnote 249: "_That virtue of originality that men so strain after is not newness, as they vainly think (there is nothing new), it is only genuineness._"--Ruskin.] [Footnote 250: Lessing: 1729-81. Diderot: 1713-84. As De Quincey puts it, Lessing may be said to have begun his career precisely in the middle of the last century.] [Footnote 251: _Hamburg. Dramaturgie_, Sec. 85. Werke, vi. 381. (Ed. 1873.)] [Footnote 252: Diderot's _Leben_, i. 274, 277.] [Footnote 253: _Corr. Lit._, ii. 103.] [Footnote 254: See Grimm's account of the performance, _Corr. Lit._, vii. 313.] [Footnote 255: Act IV. sc. 3.] [Footnote 256: Act V. sc. 3.] [Footnote 257: _De la Poesie Dramatique_, ch. xxi.] [Footnote 258: vii. 107.] [Footnote 259: Nov. 28, 1760; xix. 457.] [Footnote 260: _Lettre sur les Sourds et les Muets_, i. 359.] [Footnote 261: _Correspond. du Roi Stanislas-Auguste et de Mdme. Geoffrin, _p. 466.] [Footnote 262: Aug. 1769; xix. 314-323.] [Footnote 263: Quoted in Mr. Sime's excellent _Life of Lessing_ (Truebner and Co., 1877), p. 230.] [Footnote 264: _De la Poesie Dramatique_, Sec. 2, vii. 313.] [Footnote 265: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, iv. 177 (ed. 1837).] [Footnote 266: xix. 474.] [Footnote 267: _Pere de Famille_, Act II. sc. 2, p. 211.]