Note 278 — Chapter VIII · COVENT GARDEN CONTINUED AND LEICESTER SQUARE.

Works of Dryden, vol. i., p. 387. Sir Walter thus notices a letter of Tonson's on the subject of Dryden's contribution to one of the volumes known under the title of his Miscellanies:—"The contribution, although ample, was not satisfactory to old Jacob Tonson, who wrote on the subject a most mercantile expostulatory letter to Dryden, which is fortunately still preserved, as a curious specimen of the minutiæ of a literary bargain in the seventeenth century. Tonson, with reference to Dryden, having offered a strange bookseller six hundred lines for twenty guineas, enters into a question in the rule of three, by which he discovers and proves, that for fifty guineas he has only 1,446 lines, which he seems to take more unkindly, as he had not counted the lines until he had paid the money; from all which Jacob infers, that Dryden ought, out of generosity, at least to throw him in something to the bargain, especially as he had used him more kindly in Juvenal, which, saith old Jacob, is not reckoned so easy to translate as Ovid."—Vol. i., p. 379.