a single man who has done any thing to extend the domain of knowledge.  I think you will not.  Next look and see if you do not find in it the names of those who furnish the world with new forms of old ideas, and are largely paid for so doing.  The most active advocate of international copyright is Mr. Dickens, who is said to realize $70,000 per annum from the sale of works whose composition is little more than amusement for his leisure hours.  In this country, the only attempt that has yet been made to restrict the right of translation is in a suit now before the courts, for compensation for the privilege of converting into German a work that has yielded the largest compensation that the world has yet known for the same quantity of literary labor.

We are constantly told that regard to the interests of science requires that we should protect and enlarge the rights of authors; but does science make any such claim for herself?  I doubt it.  Men who make additions to science know well that they have, and can have, no rights whatever.  Cuvier died very poor, and all the copyright that could have been given to him or Humboldt would not have enriched either the one or the other.  Laplace knew well that his great work could yield him nothing.  Our own Bowditch translated it as a labor of love, and left by his will the means required for its publication.  The gentlemen who advocate the interests of science are literary men who use the facts and ideas furnished by scientific men, paying nothing for their use.  Now, literature is a most honorable profession, and the gentlemen engaged in it are entitled not only to the respect and consideration of their fellow-men, but also to the protection of the law; but in granting it, the legislator is bound to recollect, that justice to the men who furnish the raw materials of books, and justice to the community that owns those raw materials, require that protection shall not, either in point of space or time, be greater than is required for giving the producer of books a full and fair compensation for his labor.  How the present system operates in regard to English and American authors, I propose to consider in another letter.

LETTER III.

We are assured that justice requires the admission of foreign authors to the privilege of copyright, and in support of the claim that she presents are frequently informed of the extreme poverty of many highly popular English writers.  Mrs. Inchbald, so well known as author of the “Simple Story” and other novels, as well as in her capacity of editor, dragged on, as we are told, to the age of sixty, a miserable existence, living always in mean lodgings, and suffering frequently from want of the common comforts of life.  Lady Morgan, so well known as Miss Owenson, a brilliant and accomplished woman, is now to some extent dependent upon the public charity, administered in the form of a pension of less than five hundred