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HISTORY OF PRINTING.
ship ; but they are not spoken of as very nu- merous. The paper is a remonstrance against any such interlopers being allowed to be em- ployed.
1666. John Forbes, who had succeeded Mr. Brown* as printer to the town of Aberdeen, was among the first Scottish printers who were pos- sessed of music-types ; and printed in this year a Collection of cantos and songs set to music, with a brief introduction to the art as taught by TTiomas Davison in the music school of Aberdeen : which work he reprinted in the year 1682.
1666, Feb. 1—5. The London Gazette, No. 24.
1666, June 4. The Current Intelligencer.
1666. Intelligence, by J. Macock. ^ 1667, April 27. Milton executes this day the
contract disposing of the copy-right of his Para- dise Lost to Samuel Simmons, a printer and stationer of London, for the present sum of five pounds, and five pounds more when 1300 copies of the first impression should be sold in retail, and the like sum at the end of the second and third editions, to be accounted as aforesaid; and that {each of 1 the said first three impressions sluill rust exceed fifteen books or volumes of the said manuscript. The price of the small 4to. edition was 3s. in plain binding.
This national epic, when ready for the press, was nearly being suppressed through the igno- rance and malice of the licenser, who saw or fancied treason in the following noble simile of Satan with the rising sun, in the first book : —
As when the San, new risen * Looks throQ^h the horizontal misty air, Shorn of his beams ; or from behind the moon. In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds On half the nations, and with fear of chan^ Perplexes monarchs.
The second edition, which was brought out under the superintendence and correction of the author, in 1674, is ushered in by two copies of verses; the first in English, by Andrew Marvel; and the second in Latin, by Samuel Barrow, physician to the army under General Monk, and who had been actively concerned in bringing about the restoration ; in the latter of which the poem is expressly placed "above all Greek, above all Roman fame." Drydeu, the poet- laureat, and the most popular writer of verses in that period, had, with the author's permission, turned Milton's story into an opera, entitled the State of Innocence, which was also published in 1674. In the preface to this performance. Dry- den observes — -'What I have here borrowed will be so easily discerned from my mean produc-
- Mr. Brown died in 1662, when John Forbes, stationer,
purchased from Agrnes Ruttierfotd, his widow, the whole types, printing-presses, and apparatus, which had be- longed to her husband ; and on the S3d of April, that year, Mr. Forbes and his son jointly, were appointed by the maeistratea and council, printers to the town and univer- sities, with the exdasive privilegre of printing. As an encouragement to prosecute the business, they were pro- vided with a printlne-olBce on the north side of the Castle- street, and a dwelling house, rent free ; and by an act of eoundl all merchants and chapmen were prohibited from importing Into the town aqy pamphlets or small books to their pr^udice. — Kennedy's .Innals of Airrdem.
Uons, that I shall not need to point the reads to the places, the original being undoubtedly one of the greatest, most noble, and sublime poems, which either this age or nation has produced."
This is one of the earliest authenticatol instances of a copy-money being g^ven by previ- ous agreement for an original work. Posteritr. in its real or fictitious admiration of Milton, has set down this bargain as in the highest degree disgraceful to Mr. Simmons; but when ne l^jii that the first impression of the poem does not seem to have been fully sold ofl" before the expi- ration of seven years, nor till the bookseller hai given it five new title-pages by way of vrets ui the-puBlic appeffie, the transaclfoir^ill appeu quite accordant with the natural course of thinp- at the period. The second five pounds »8s received by Milton, and no further profit »»• realised by the family, except eight pounds, for which sum his widow, in 1680, resigned to Sim- mons the full copyright. The Paradite Last may therefore be said to have been sold to tk/ trade* for eighteen pounds. Sir Walter Scott, in his Life of Dryden, remarks, that prubabh the trade had no very good bargain of it- The copyright, however, afterwarcte fell into the hands of Jacob Tonson, who, according to Mr. DTsraeli, rode in his carriage from the profits.
However ill paid Milton might have been, the editors of that poet were better rewarded : Dr. Bentley, got one hundred guineas for his edition ; and Dr. Newton no less than six hundred and thirty pounds for the Paradise Lost, and one hundred and five pounds for the Regained.
It was an extraordinary misjudgment of the celebrated Waller, who speaks thus of the fiisi appearance of Paradise Lost : — '* The old blind schoolmaster, John Milton, hath published a tedious poem on the Fall of Man : if its length be not considered as its merit, it has no other."— Poor Milton was obliged to keep school for ha livelihood.
1667. Wisingsburg, an island in the lake of Wetter, in the province of JUnkoping, in Sweden. Its proprietor, the count Peter Brahe, who is called Drotzetus regni, having established a school at this place, in the year 1666, for the furtherance of literature erected there a press of his own, which continued until 1681, when the island was ceded to Sweden. In 1688 the press was removed to Jiinkoping. The first printer was Johannes Kankel, himself a learned man, who declares the first specimen of his press to be Itinerarium Nicolai Matthia Kiopingi, dated 1667. Gestrin and Axner, who published a special dissertation on the Wisingsburg printing establishment, (4to. Upsal, 1733,) enumerate mi describe twenty-eight books, executed here, chiefly in the Swedish language, declaring at the same time that all of them are rare, and some of them extremely so, from the small number of copies which were struck oflT.
- The booksellers, having much commercial intenoane
with each other, have acquired a had>it of terming tben- selves the trade, in contradistinction to the pttbUc.
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