Dickens’s visit was not merely for pleasure or observation, and in his endeavors to promote the cause of international copyright legislation the _Post_ was already keenly interested. As early as 1810 Coleman, under the heading, “Imposition,” had attacked the pirating of “Travels in the Northern Part of the United States,” by Edward A. Kendall, an Englishman whom Coleman knew, as not only “a trespass upon the rights of the author,” but a fraud upon the public, since the edition was mutilated. In 1826 he or Bryant had commented acridly upon the appearance of a Cambridge edition of Mrs. Barbauld’s poems at the same time that the New York publishers, G. and C. Carvill, brought out an authorized edition the profits of which went to the author’s heirs. Miss Martineau, sojourning in America in 1836, had taken up the question with Bryant. Upon returning home she had sent him a copy of a petition by many English writers, including Dickens and Carlyle, to Congress, together with copies of brief letters by Wordsworth, Miss Edgeworth, Lord Brougham, and others indorsing it; and it was published with hearty commendation in the _Evening Post_. The question was one in which Bryant, like Cooper and Irving, had a selfish as well as altruistic interest. All American authors were trying to sell their wares to publishers and readers who could get English books without payment of royalty. Each of Dickens’s works, as it appeared, was snapped up and placed on the market for twenty-five cents or less. “Barnaby Rudge,” during his tour of this country, was advertised in the _Evening Post_ as available, complete, in two issues of the _New World_, for a total cost of sixteen and one-fourth cents. The next week it was issued under one cover for twenty-five cents. The novels of Bulwer, Disraeli, and Ainsworth were presented in the same way, as was the poetry of Hood and Tennyson. Napier’s “Peninsular War” was advertised in the _Post_ in 1844 by J. S. Redfield in nine volumes at a quarter dollar apiece, and Milman’s edition of Gibbon, with his notes copyright in England, by Harpers in fifteen parts at the same price. In his speech at the Boston dinner “Boz” boldly set forth the injustice which he believed the lack of an American international copyright law was doing English writers. Several Boston journals were offended, while the paper-makers belonging to the “Home League” in New York met to express opposition to any new copyright legislation. Bryant at once (on Feb. 11) took Dickens’s side in the _Evening Post_. If the American laws allowed every foreigner to be robbed of his money and baggage the moment he landed, he wrote, and closed the courts to his claims for redress, the nation would be condemned as a den of thieves. “When we deny a stranger the same right to the profits of his own writings as we give to our citizens, we commit this very injustice; the only difference is that we limit the robbery to one kind of property.”