productions a very much larger protection than they now enjoy, he
does comparatively little for the works of men in the full
maturity of their powers, and absolutely nothing for any work
which is published during the last three years of the life of the
writer. For, by the existing law, the copyright of such a work
lasts twenty-eight years from the publication; and my noble
friend gives only twenty-five years, to be reckoned from the
writer's death.

What I recommend is that the certain term, reckoned from the date
of publication, shall be forty-two years instead of twenty-eight
years. In this arrangement there is no uncertainty, no
inequality. The advantage which I propose to give will be the
same to every book. No work will have so long a copyright as my
noble friend gives to some books, or so short a copyright as he
gives to others. No copyright will last ninety years. No
copyright will end in twenty-eight years. To every book
published in the course of the last seventeen years of a writer's
life I give a longer term of copyright than my noble friend
gives; and I am confident that no person versed in literary
history will deny this,--that in general the most valuable works
of an author are published in the course of the last seventeen
years of his life. I will rapidly enumerate a few, and but a
few, of the great works of English writers to which my plan is
more favourable than my noble friend's plan. To Lear, to
Macbeth, to Othello, to the Fairy Queen, to the Paradise Lost, to
Bacon's Novum Organum and De Augmentis, to Locke's Essay on the
Human Understanding, to Clarendon's History, to Hume's History,
to Gibbon's History, to Smith's Wealth of Nations, to Addison's
Spectators, to almost all the great works of Burke, to Clarissa