Who is King of the Booksellers? There is no King among them at this time, but there is a Directory of five Members, Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green in the East; the Emperor Murraylemagne, whom Byron used to call the Grand Murray, reigned alone in the West, till Henry Colburn divided his empire, and supported the station which he had assumed by an army of trumpeters which he keeps in constant pay. If the Books had a King that monarchy must needs be an elective one, and the reader of these volumes knows where the election would fall. But literature being a Republic, this cannot be the King of Books. Suffice it that it is a BOOK FOR A KING, or, for our SOVEREIGN LADY THE QUEEN. INTERCHAPTER XXI. MEASURE FOR MEASURE. _Le Plebe è bestia Di cento teste, e non rinchiude in loro Pur oncia di saper._ CHIABRERA. The Public, will, I very well know, make free with me _more suo_, as it thinks it has a right to do with any one who comes before it with anything designed for its service, whether it be for its amusement, its use, or its instruction. Now my Public, I will _more meo_ make free with you—that we may be so far upon equal terms. _οὐδὲν δεῖ παραμπέχειν λόγους._[1] You have seldom or never had the truth spoken to you when you have been directly addressed. You have been called the enlightened Public, the generous Public, the judicious Public, the liberal Public, the discerning Public, and so forth. Nay your bare title THE PUBLIC, oftentimes stands alone _par excellence_ in its plain majesty like that of the king, as if needing no affix to denote its inherent and pre-eminent importance. But I will speak truth to you my Public. Be not deceived! I have no bended knees, No supple tongue, no speeches steep'd in oil, No candied flattery, nor honied words![2] [Footnote 1: EURIPIDES.] [Footnote 2: RANDOLPH'S ARISTIPPUS.] I must speak the truth to you my Public, _Sincera verità non vuol tacersi._[3] Where your enlightenedness (if there be such a word) consists and your generosity, and your judgement, and your liberality, and your discernment, and your majesty to boot,—to express myself as Whitfield or Rowland Hill would have done in such a case (for they knew the force of language)—I must say, it would puzzle the Devil to tell. _Il faut librement avec verité francher ce mot, sans en estre repris; ou si l'on est, c'est très-mal à propos._[4] [Footnote 3: CHIABRERA.] [Footnote 4: BRANTOME.] I will tell you what you are; you are a great, ugly, many headed beast, with a great many ears which are long, hairy, ticklish, moveable, erect and never at rest. Look at your picture in Southey's Hexameters,—that poem in which his laureated Doctorship writes verses by the yard instead of the foot,—he describes you as “many headed and monstrous,”