Milton’s publisher, good Mr. Symonds, probably thought, if he thought about it at all, that he was buying Paradise Lost for ever when he registered it as his ‘copy’ in the books of his Company; but into the calculations he made to discover how much he could afford to give the author posterity did not and could not enter.  How was Symonds to know that Milton’s fame was to outlive Cleveland’s or Flatman’s?

How many of the books published in 1905 would have any copyright cash value in A.D. 2000?  I do not pause for a reply.

The modern author need have no quarrel with the statutory periods fixed by the Act of 1842,[A] though common-sense has long since suggested that a single term, the author’s life and thirty or forty years after, should be substituted for the alternative periods named in the Act.

[Footnote A:  Author’s life plus seven years, or forty-two years from date of publication, whichever term is the longer.  The great objection to the second term is that an author’s books go out of copyright at different dates, and the earlier editions go out first.]

What the modern author alone desiderates is a big, immediate, and protected market.

The United States of America have been a great disappointment to many an honest British author.  In the wicked old days when the States took British books without paying for them they used to take them in large numbers, but now that they have turned honest and passed a law allowing the British author copyright on certain terms, they have in great measure ceased to take; for, by the strangest of coincidences, no sooner were British novels, histories, essays, and the like, protected in America, than there sprang up in the States themselves, novelists, historians, and essayists, not only numerous enough to supply their own home markets, but talented enough to cross the Atlantic in large numbers and challenge us in our own.  Such a reward for honesty was not contemplated.

International copyright and the Convention of Berne are things to be proud of and rejoice over.  As the first chapter in a Code of Public European Law, they may mark the beginning of a time of settled peace, order, and disarmament, but they have not yet enriched a single author, though hereafter possibly an occasional novelist or play-wright may prosper greatly under their provisions.

The copyright question is now at last really a settled question, save in a single aspect of it.  What, if anything, should be done in the case of those authors, few in number, whose literary lives prove longer than the period of statutory protection?  Should any distinction in law be struck between a Tennyson and a Tupper? between—­But why multiply examples?  There is no need to be unnecessarily offensive.

The law and practice of to-day give the meat that remains on the bones of the dead author after the expiration of the statutory period of protection to the Trade.  Any publisher who likes to bring out an edition can do so, though by doing so he does not gain any exclusive rights.  A brother publisher may compete with him.  As a result the public is usually well served with cheap editions of those non-copyright authors whose works are worth reprinting the moment the copyright expires.