The recent judgment of Lord Campbell in Boosey _v._ Jeffreys, which has settled finally the much litigated question of the right of a foreigner to copyright in this country, whether of books, pictures, or music, has been alleged as an excuse for a public meeting of authors and publishers, to appeal against the concession of such a right, and to procure a reversal of the decision, should his lordship be disposed to overrule his own judgment in the House of Lords. The direct impulse to the present agitation, however, appears to have been certain proceedings commenced against Mr. Bohn and others, by Mr. Murray, for their alleged invasion of his copyrights in the works of Washington Irving; of which cheap editions have been issued, on the faith of a recent opinion of Lord Cranworth, wholly at variance with that which has lately been pronounced by the Court of Error, by no fewer than four publishers. The defendants in these cases are of course the leading instigators of this movement, and appear to have prevailed upon Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton to take the chair at a public meeting of Authors and Publishers, at the Hanover Square Rooms, for the purpose of discussing the question in all its bearings. Although the authors and publishers of England were but slenderly represented on the occasion, and even those who were present were far from unanimous, several ingenious and even brilliant speeches were delivered, and resolutions were carried, tending to support the Chairman's view of the subject; viz., to procure a revision of the law which declares foreign authors resident abroad, to be entitled to copyright in this country; to form a society to consider the steps necessary to obtain the proposed readjustment of the law; and lastly, to collect subscriptions to indemnify the gentlemen now acting on the defensive, in the various actions for the alleged invasion of copyright, in the expensive process of appealing against Lord Campbell's decision to the House of Lords. We confess that we have not been convinced by any of the arguments adduced on this occasion, able and plausible as many of them were, that we should violate that great principle of justice, which forbids that we should do evil that good may come; and that because foreign nations cannot be brought to a sense of the dishonesty of their habitual invasions of British Copyright, we should make reprisals upon their authors, and deny them that protection which they so dishonestly withhold to us. Still less can we affirm a proposition which would go back from twenty five to thirty years, and deprive English booksellers of copyrights for which, on the faith of the law as it then stood, they have paid very considerable sums of money. The impression, that if we deprive American authors of the copyright they have hitherto enjoyed in England, we shall force them and their readers to agree to an international arrangement, we believe to be entirely fallacious. There are very few