We are now living in an age of handsome reprints. It is possible to publish a good-sized book on good paper and sell it at a profit for fourpence halfpenny. But of course to do this, as the profit is too small to bear division, you must get the Authors out of the way. Our admirable copyright laws and their own sedentary habits do this on the whole satisfactorily and in due course. Consequently dead authors are amazingly cheap. Not merely Shakespeare and Milton, Bunyan and Burns, but Scott and Macaulay, Thackeray and Dickens. Living authors are deadly dear. You may buy twenty books by dead men at the price of one work by a living man. The odds are fearful. For my part, I hope a _modus vivendi_ may be established between the publishers of the dead and those of the living; but when you examine the contents of the ‘Camelot Classics,’ the ‘Carisbrooke Library,’ the ‘Chandos Classics,’ the ‘Canterbury Poets,’ the ‘Mermaid Series of the Old Dramatists,’ and remember, or try to remember, the publishing lists of Messrs. Routledge, Mr. Black, Messrs Warne, and Messrs. Cassell, it is easy for the reader to snap his fingers at Fate. It cannot touch him--he can dine for many a day. Even were our ‘lyrical cry’ to be stifled for half a century, what with Mr. Bullen’s ‘Elizabethan Lyrics,’ and ‘More Elizabethan Lyrics,’ and ‘Lyrics from the Dramatists,’ and ‘Lyrics from the Romances,’ and Mr. Palgrave’s ‘Golden Treasury,’ ‘a man,’ as Mr. Markham observes in ‘David Copperfield,’ ‘might get on very well here,’ even though that man were, as Markham asserted himself to be, ‘hungry all day long.’ A British poet does not cease to be a poet because he is dead, nor is he, for that matter, any the better a poet for being alive. As for a scarcity of living poets proving national decadence, it would be hard to make out that case. Who sang Chatham’s victories by sea and land? BOOK-BINDING. There is a familiar anecdote of the ingenious author of ‘The Seasons,’ ‘Rule, Britannia,’ and other excellent pieces, that when he sent a well-bound copy of his poems to his father, who had always regarded him, not altogether unjustly, as a ‘feckless loon,’ that canny Scot handled the volume with unfeigned delight, and believing that his son had bound it, cried out admiringly, ‘Who would have thought our Jamie could have done the like of this?’ This particular copy has not been preserved, and it is therefore impossible for us to determine how far its bibliopegic merits justified the rapture of the elder Thomson, whose standard is not likely to have been a high one. Indeed, despite his rusticity, he was probably a better judge of poetry than of binding.