both poet and publisher were summoned
before the House of Lords. Whitehead, who
hung loose on society, sculked and escaped,
but Dodsley's shop and family made his
appearance necessary. After a week's
confinement, and on his petition, he was, on his
knees, reprimanded by the Lord Chancellor,
and discharged on paying the fees. The
whole process, it is thought, was intended
rather to intimidate Pope than punish
Whitehead. Pope understood it as such, and
suppressed a third Dialogue. The complaint
was made by Sherlock, Bishop of Salisbury
The fees were seventy pounds.

The money lost by this prosecution was
more than made up by the active
sympathy expressed in his behalf. The next
morning, as he told Dr. Warton, the
neighbouring street was crowded with the carriages
of some of the first noblemen and gentlemen,
who, came to offer him their services and to
be his bail. Among those who thus honoured
him, he named to Warton, five lords, Chesterfield,
Marchmont, Granville, Bathurst, and
Essex, aud two well-known members of the
House of Commons, Mr. Pulteney and Mr.
Lyttelton.

Dodsley's next publications of note were
the Night Thoughts of Dr. Young (of which
he published the first six) and The Pleasures
of Imagination, of Dr. Akenside. For the
first three Night Thoughts he gave two
hundred guineas, and for Akenside's poem one
hundred and twenty pounds. Speaking of
Akenside's poem, Johnson observes, "I have
heard Dodsley, by whom it was published,
relate, that when the copy was offered him,
the price demanded for it, which was a
hundred and twenty pounds, being such as he
was not inclined to give precipitately, he
carried the work to Pope, who, having looked
into it, advised him not to make a niggardly
offer, for this was no every-day writer."

His business as a bookseller did not
altogether interfere with his cultivation of the
Muse. In seventeen hundred and forty-three
he published The Cave, of Pope—a
Prophecy in which he foretells the interest
and veneration with which the grotto of the
poet will be viewed hereafter by pilgrims
from all parts of the world; and the next year,
on the death of Pope, he produced a copy of
verses, in which, he speaks of himself as the
poet's humblest friend, and of the grateful
tear he has to pay to so honoured a memory.

As a publisher he did not confine his
attention to the manuscripts submitted to his
judgment: but carried out happy suggestions
of his own.  Thus we owe to him that excellent
collection of our old plays, known as
Dodsley's Collection, of which the first edition,
in ten neat pocket-volumes, included fifty
plays. To this sensible and industrious man
we are indebted for that collection of scattered
poetry of his own time, still known as Dodsley's
Collection, to which he was fond of
appealing, and of which the first edition,
in three volumes, appeared in seventeen
hundred and forty-eight. To the same tact in
supplying the public we were indebted for an
evening newspaper—The London Chronicle,
or Universal Evening Post, that rendered
admirable service in its day; it was
published thrice a week, and had the largest
continental sale of any newspaper of its time.
But a greater obligation that we owe to him
is that of the Annual Register, which still
usefully exists, and which Robert Dodsley
had the sense to start, and to employ as its
editor a young man then but little known—
Edmund Burke. Few booksellers have been
more happy in their judgment of what is
good than the livery-servant turned publisher.
"Dodsley," said Johnson, " first mentioned to
me the scheme of an English Dictionary, but
I had long thought of it."

It has been well remarked that the
successors of The Spectator and the Tatler, even
those that have been most popular, have not
been fortunate in their titles. There is,
however, an exception, and that is in the title of
The World, to which Lord Chesterfield and
Horace Walpole were among the earliest and
most constant contributors. This significant
title was given to it by the sensible publisher
of it, Mr. Robert Dodsley, who at a meeting
held for the purpose of a name, universally gave
the preference to his proposal to any they had
suggested themselves, or had heard suggested.
A happy title, it has been said, is half a success.

It was the good fortune of Dodsley to rank
among his friends the best authors of the age
in which he lived, and to have been the
publisher of some of the best. I have already
enumerated Pope, Dr. Young, Akenside, the
two Wartons, and Dr. Johnson; I have now
to add Shenstone, Bishop Percy, Spence, and
John Dyer to the list of authors who were
often at Tully's Head, and that from Dodsley's
shop in Pall Mall issued the first editions
of Gray's Elegy, of Gray's Odes, of Johnson's
Vanity of Human Wishes, of Goldsmith's
first work, of Sterne's Tristram
Shandy, and of Percy's Reliques.

Johnson was particulary partial to Dodsley,
or Doddy, as he delighted to call him. Doddy
gave him one hundred pounds for his tragedy
of Irene, and fifteen guineas for his Vanity
of Human Wishes; the former sum was too
much, the latter too little.

Whilst Dodsley was busy concocting new
publications to take the taste of the town, he
published apoem of his own in blank verse called
Public Virtue, and sought to pit, box, and
gallery it by a tragedy called Cleone. The
poem was a failure, (Public Virtue he
discovered was not a subject to interest the age),
but the tragedy was a hit. Cleone had been
refused by Garrick, then manager supreme at
Drury Lane. This was galling to a man who
had given laws to letters for some twenty
years, and was still a judge looked up to
by young and old. But the success of the
play was not a little annoying to Garrick.