I have a little budget of news myself.  I hope you had my letter —­sent by young Sumner—­saying that we meant to print the French Revolution here for the Author’s benefit.  It was published on the 25th of December.  It is published at my risk, the booksellers agreeing to let me have at cost all the copies I can get subscriptions for.  All the rest they are to sell and to have twenty percent on the retail price for their commission.  The selling price of the book is $2.50; the cost of a copy, $1.26; the bookseller’s commission, 50 cts.; so that T.C. only gains 74 cts. on each copy they sell.  But we have two hundred subscribers, and on each copy they buy you have $1.26, except in cases where the distant residence of subscribers makes a cost of freight.  You ought to have three or four quarters of a dollar more on each copy, but we put the lowest price on the book in terror of the Philistines, and to secure its accessibleness to the economical Public.  We printed one thousand copies:  of these, five hundred are already sold, in six weeks; and Brown the bookseller talks, as I think, much too modestly, of getting rid of the whole edition in one year.  I say six months.  The printing, &c. is to be paid and a settlement made in six months from the day of publication; and I hope the settlement will be the final one.  And I confide in sending you seven hundred dollars at least, as a certificate that you have so many readers in the West.  Yet, I own, I shake a little at the thought of the bookseller’s account.  Whenever I have seen that species of document, it was strange how the hopefulest ideal dwindled away to a dwarfish actual.  But you may be assured I shall on this occasion summon to the bargain all the Yankee in my constitution, and multiply and divide like a lion.

The book has the best success with the best.  Young men say it is the only history they have ever read.  The middle-aged and the old shake their heads, and cannot make anything of it.  In short, it has the success of a book which, as people have not fashioned, has to fashion the people.  It will take some time to win all, but it wins and will win.  I sent a notice of it to the Christian Examiner, but the editor sent it all back to me except the first and last paragraphs; those he printed.  And the editor of the North American declined giving a place to a paper from another friend of yours.  But we shall see.  I am glad you are to print your Miscellanies; but—­forgive our Transatlantic effrontery—­we are beforehand of you, and we are already selecting a couple of volumes from the same, and shall print them on the same plan as the History, and hope so to turn a penny for our friend again.  I surely should not do this thing without consulting you as to the selection but that I had no choice.  If I waited, the bookseller would have done it himself, and carried off the profit.  I sent you (to Kennet) a copy of the French Revolution.