Note 9 — Chapter III · A GROUP OF BOOK-LOVERS AND PUBLIC BENEFACTORS.

To give but one example: Samuel Burder—the author of the excellent work, so illustrative of Biblical literature, entitled Oriental Customs—states, in his MS. correspondence now before me, that the only effective reward given to him, in the course of his long labours, was given by Lord Bridgewater. The book above mentioned was ‘successful,’ ‘but,’ he says, ‘the booksellers, as usual, reaped the harvest,’ not the author. It is—shall I say?—an amusing comment on this latter clause, to find that in one of his letters to Lord Bridgewater, Burder states that the person who took the most kindly notice of his literary labours, next after Lord Bridgewater himself, was—the Emperor of Russia (Alexander I).