pleasing to see a descendant of Shakespeare living in opulence on
the fruits of his great ancestor's genius. A house maintained in
splendour by such a patrimony would be a more interesting and
striking object than Blenheim is to us, or than Strathfieldsaye
will be to our children. But, unhappily, it is scarcely possible
that, under any system, such a thing can come to pass. My
honourable and learned friend does not propose that copyright
shall descend to the eldest son, or shall be bound up by
irrecoverable entail. It is to be merely personal property. It
is therefore highly improbable that it will descend during sixty
years or half that term from parent to child. The chance is that
more people than one will have an interest in it. They will in
all probability sell it and divide the proceeds. The price which
a bookseller will give for it will bear no proportion to the sum
which he will afterwards draw from the public, if his speculation
proves successful. He will give little, if anything, more for a
term of sixty years than for a term of thirty or five and twenty.
The present value of a distant advantage is always small; but
when there is great room to doubt whether a distant advantage
will be any advantage at all, the present value sink to almost
nothing. Such is the inconstancy of the public taste that no
sensible man will venture to pronounce, with confidence, what the
sale of any book published in our days will be in the years
between 1890 and 1900. The whole fashion of thinking and writing
has often undergone a change in a much shorter period than that
to which my honourable and learned friend would extend posthumous
copyright. What would have been considered the best literary
property in the earlier part of Charles the Second's reign? I
imagine Cowley's Poems. Overleap sixty years, and you are in the
generation of which Pope asked, "Who now reads Cowley?" What