Robert Dodsley's fortnightly, The Museum: or, Literary and Historical Register (London, 1746-1747) survives as a rather comprehensive portrait of its age. Edited by Mark Akenside, this periodical did not imitate the Gentleman's Magazine, as has been suggested. Unlike Cave's production, the Museum did not chronicle the times but rather reflected them. In its simple four-part format—essays, poetry, literary memoirs, and historical memoirs—the Museum more resembled the literary journal than the magazine by showing the larger aspects of the age's philosophical, political, religious, esthetic, and social concerns.

Furthermore, whereas the Gentleman's republished essays and poetry from other periodicals, the Museum's contents were entirely original. By 1746, Dodsley's reputation as the fashionable London publisher of belle lettres drew original contributions from the three Wartons, “Kit” Smart, William Collins, Joseph Spence, David Garrick, Horace Walpole, and Samuel Johnson among a host of other authors whose reputations have dimmed with time. In fact, so formidable was the entire enterprise that Cave seemed threatened at its inception.

Besides poetry and essays, the Museum provided reviews of significant publications, both domestic and foreign, as well as historical portraits of several national powers, together with a brief history of the '45, sometimes attributed to Henry Fielding. The Museum's role in the production of Dodsley's famous Collection of Poetry is certified by many authorial, editorial, and publishing circumstances.

Since the nature of their unwieldy tasks often forces literary historians to rely on specialized studies for information about minor figures and works, authors and literary productions which have failed to attract the attentions of modern scholars, understandably, receive short, vague, or no treatment at all. It is easy to understand, then, that in the prolific but little-studied field of the eighteenth-century periodical, the tendency to popularize that which has been studied and to neglect the obscure occasionally has produced unwarranted generalizations resulting in the perpetration of false images.

Robert Dodsley's fortnightly The Museum; or Literary and Historical Register (March 29, 1746—September 12, 1747) unfortunately has suffered such a false generalization. In the fullest and most available survey of eighteenth-century periodicals, Walter Graham's English Literary Periodicals,¹ the image of The Museum has been much distorted. Graham's chapter entitled “Later Magazines of the Eighteenth Century” begins with the new movement in periodicals initiated by Edward Cave's Gentleman's Magazine (1731) and then proceeds to review, one by one, the principal imitators of Cave's enterprise. Graham begins by saying that “the Gentleman's Magazine had plenty of rivals as soon as it began to prosper” and then, by a very lamentable positioning in his treatment, perpetrates the false image of The Museum. Rightfully placed immediately after the exposition of the Gentleman's are considerations of two other monthlies, the London Magazine (1732) and the Scots Magazine (1739), slavish imitators of Cave's production. However, the next two periodicals to be considered by Graham are Dodsley's Public Register (1741) and The Museum. That the slighter Public Register imitated and attempted to compete with the Gentleman's on a weekly basis might be defended,² but certainly The Museum has no place here. Although the latter might have rivaled the Gentleman's for sales, this was merely because it was another respectable periodical, not because it imitated Cave's magazine. Truly, The Museum was conceived with a totally different intent and executed in an entirely different design and format.

First of all, the intention of Dodsley's fortnightly was clearly different from the Gentleman's, which a glance at their contents reveals immediately. Indeed, very little of the London scene or of England's domestic or foreign affairs escaped the Gentleman's attention. Debates and acts of Parliament, significant speeches, inventions, new medicines, trials, bankruptcies, stocks, births, deaths, preferments, digests of the best articles from the many London journals—all provided matter for a marvelous compendium of the age. As Lennart Carlson has said,³ the avowed purpose of the Gentleman's was to “chronicle” the times, and this it did most admirably.

The Museum, on the other hand, did not attempt to chronicle the times. In its regular forty pages, Dodsley's periodical published no trivia of purely local or contemporary interest. In its four simple, well defined categories—essays, poetry, literary memoirs, and historical memoirs—The Museum attempted to rise above time and locale by presenting matter of enduring literary worth. Although its essays patently reflected the concerns of the times, they could survive when those times had passed. In regard to intention and accomplishment, then, it might be said that The Museum reflects the tastes of the times, whereas the Gentleman's Magazine portrays the times in detail.

One also gets the impression that The Museum, under the direction of litterateurs in their own right, approached publication with a more professional literary attitude. Cave, primarily a printer, seemed to be providing a service for the public while Dodsley and his editor, Mark Akenside, were providing a service for authors. Hence, the only claim to originality which the Gentleman's could make—digests of articles from essay journals—was essentially unoriginal; whereas every one of The Museum's essays was an original composition. Likewise, The Museum's poetry was always original, never that which had first gained a reputation elsewhere, as was frequently the case with the Gentleman's.

Nor did Cave's magazine carry any sections comparable to The Museum's Literary Memoirs and Historical Memoirs. Although the former periodical frequently ran some book reviews, these usually appeared in the form of reader correspondence and were by no means as thorough as Dodsley's. Likewise, during 1746, the Gentleman's gave much space to the coverage of the '45 and had a commendable foreign news report, but never did the magazine carry a full historical account of the rebellion nor anything so well integrated and complete as The Museum's serialized “A View of the Present State of Europe.”

Furthermore, The Museum's reserved tone quite obviously contrasted with that of the Gentleman's. Cave frequently stooped to conquer with sensational materials to attract the curious. In March, 1746 occurred: “Surprising Account of the Vinefrett which propogates it Species without a Conjunction of the Sexes,” and in April of the same year, a feature article on the first rhinoceros to have been brought to England in many years. In the description of this animal are the vivid details of its sexual life, including the length, shape, and color of its penis when extracted by the keeper's use of a stick. Such materials would never have made the respectable pages of The Museum.

In essence then, The Museum differed from the Gentleman's Magazine and its imitators in that Dodsley's was a literary periodical, not a magazine. Although The Museum's concerns were not always strictly literary (it published articles on various arts and sciences), it always stayed well within the scope of the higher aspects of culture and never deviated into the sensational or trivial. Adhering closely to its four simple categories of literature, it clearly differed from the commercial, popular magazine, such as the London, Scots, and Newcastle General which, following the format set by Cave, enjoyed wide circulation.

That Cave had feared the inception of the powerful Museum, however, is quite clear. After The Museum had finally discontinued publication in 1747, the Preface to the collected edition of the Gentleman's of that year breathed an obvious sigh of relief. The writer, presumably Cave, gloats over the demise of The Museum, especially in so far as Dodsley's periodical was intended as “a super-excellent Magazine, which was entirely to extirpate all others … a work of genius and learning. …” This Preface was also accompanied by a poem chastizing The Museum and the pretentions of its projectors, thereby further revealing Cave's delight with its passing.

The reasons for Cave's fear of the periodical leads us to our next concern—The Museum's host of contributors. By 1746, Robert Dodsley, besides having earned an enviable reputation as poet and playwright,⁴ had managed to gather a vast network of first-rate literary acquaintances through his publishing business. Defoe had endorsed his work;⁵ Pope had helped to set up his bookseller shop in 1735;⁶ Johnson called him “my patron … Doddy” because Dodsley had published his first poem London and had recommended the Doctor for the production of the Dictionary;⁷ and Horace Walpole employed Dodsley as his bookseller. Dodsley's rich literary resources projected such high expectations for The Museum that the publisher was even able to distract the “new” doctor, Mark Akenside, from medical practice in order to serve as his editor.⁸

As might be expected, then, The Museum enjoyed the efforts of the most fashionable authors of the age. Although the eighteenth century's penchant for anonymity still obscures most of The Museum's authorship, scholarship has now determined a considerable number of attributions,⁹ and the list reads like a roster of famous and near-famous authors of the mid-century. Original essays by the editor Mark Akenside include “The Table of Modern Fame,” a piece modeled on Addison's essay of a similar title evaluating the merits of various ancient figures; and the qualitative assessment of the twenty best poets since Homer entitled the “Balance of Poets.” Pope's friend, Joseph Spence contributed eight narrative essays, including “Florio: A Moral History,” a tragic tale of a good-natured but imprudent hero, highly suggestive of Tom Jones. The poet laureate William Whitehead is represented by a three-installment essay on the “Shield of Aeneas,” and the poet William Collins was responsible for The Museum's most inspired criticism, “Of the Essential Excellencies in Poetry.” The second number of The Museum opened with Horace Walpole's witty “A Scheme for raising a large Sum of Money for the Use of the Government by Laying a Tax on Message Cards and Notes,” a delightful satire spoofing Sir John Barnard's proposal to a distressed Parliament in terms of contemporary feminine foibles.¹⁰

Most of The Museum's best satire, however, came from the pen of the prolific John Gilbert Cooper. Among Cooper's eighteen prose contributions to the periodical are the ironic “A Persuasive to erect an Academy for Lying,” “The Folly of Noblemen and Gentlemen's paying their Debts,” and “An Account of the Kingdom of Beggars.” The last mentioned has the touch of Swift, as it cleverly works an intricate analogy of the plight of the poor and the despicable system of aristocratic preferment. Although some of Cooper's essays are weighed down by heavy moralizing, his satires are bright spots in The Museum's pages.

The list of poetry contributors is even more impressive. John Lord Hervey's “Arisbe to Marius Jr.” is one of the longest sustained pieces of realized passion in The Museum. Despite its employment of some very conventional examples of neoclassic poetic diction, epithets, imagery, etc., the poem's realistic psychological twists are quite convincing. Of slighter but similar character are Hervey's other two epistles “Flora to Pompey” and “Paris to Oenone.” Another fashionable Lord-versifier, George Lyttelton, also published in The Museum one of his many elegies written in honor of his beloved wife, Lucy.

Although at odds on the Origin of Evil, Soame Jenyns and Samuel Johnson contributed poems using the same theme and much the same materials. Both Jenyns's “To a Lady with a Present of Shells” and Johnson's “To the Honorable Miss Carpenter” propound Pope's neoclassical dictum that true art consists in “nature to advantage dressed.” Johnson's other poem in The Museum, “On a Lady's presenting a Sprig of Myrtle to a Gentleman,” involves the clever use of a multiple-meaning, but is a much lesser work. Jenyns, however, was the author of one of The Museum's best epistolary pieces, “An Epistle, wrote from the Country,” a cynical, witty, vulgar exposition of country pastimes, exhibiting many good lines.

The Warton family also had a hand in The Museum. Among their offerings are Joseph's “To Superstition,” Thomas Sr.'s “Ode on a Beauty with Ill Qualities,” and Thomas Jr.'s “Ode on a Beautiful Grotto.” Joseph's Oxford schoolmate, William Collins, besides his essay on poetry already mentioned, contributed at least one poem to Dodsley's periodical, “Ode to a Lady on the Death of Colonel Ross.” Also, besides their essays, John Gilbert Cooper and Joseph Spence were responsible for several poems, including “Estimate of Life” and “An Epistle from a Swiss Officer” respectively.

Other works by authors who had gained considerable reputation in their own time include Christopher Smart's “Warlike Music and Church Music,” William Whitehead's “Double Conquest,” the thresher poet Stephen Duck's “Two Beavers,” Isaac Hawkins Browne's “H. B———to C———Y———,” and even David Garrick's “Inscriptions on a Monument.” Some of the best pieces in The Museum were the works of persons whose reputation did not outlive their years. Henry Hervey Aston's Female Drum cleverly satirizes the penchant for cardplaying among the contemporary ladies of leisure. Glocester Ridley, executor of Pope's will, provided Dodsley with at least three poems, one of which, “Psyche,” combines quite successfully Spenser's archaic style and the theme of Paradise Lost, although the piece never reaches the heights of either of its models.

Other authors whose poetry has been identified in The Museum include: Robert Vansittart, William Thompson, Edward Rolle, Christopher Pitt, Robert Bedingfield, Nicholas Herbert, Robert Lowth, and James Merrick. In all, when one considers that only a little more than one third of The Museum poetry has been identified, this partial listing of its authors is quite impressive.

The Museum poetry looms particularly valuable when considered in relation to Dodsley's important Collection of Poems by Several Hands (1748-1758),¹¹ long considered the mirror of mid-eighteenth-century poetic taste¹² because it contains the works of almost every major and minor poet of the age. First of all, The Museum's causal influence on the Collection seems inescapable. Twenty-eight Museum poems were subsequently re-published in the Collection, revealing a very direct influence of the former. Furthermore, all The Museum poets were well represented in the Collection, in fact, in several cases, they dominated the later work.¹³ This is to say, of course, that the same poets materially produced most of both works.

One especially convincing piece of evidence in determining the relationship of the two works is the fact that Dodsley began publishing the Collection less than four months after he dropped The Museum. The fact that The Museum had been carrying only three or four poems every two weeks for a year and a half suggests that Dodsley, with all his literary connections, must have amassed a considerable amount of poetry in the production of the periodical, poetry that he could not even find room for. It is not unlikely, then, that such reserves might have suggested to Dodsley the idea of such a collection. This conclusion seems substantiated by the fact that three entire volumes of the Collection (containing twenty-three Museum poems) appeared only four months after the demise of the periodical, and Dodsley had to wait another seven years before he could issue the single fourth volume of the Collection in 1755.

Besides the causal influence which the periodical exerted in the production of the Collection, the similarity of the poetry in both implies even a further value of The Museum's poetry. Except for the absence of such longer poems as Matthew Green's The Spleen (1737), entirely impractical for periodical publication, The Museum's poetry reflects the same editorial standards and literary taste as does the larger work. Neither departs from the poetry of the past, although occasionally new voices and romantic tendencies are sounded. The heroic couplet and a heavy moralistic tone are ever present, as are conventional poetic diction and frequent classical mottoes and allusions. Likewise, each work contains the favorite Augustan poetic genres—Horatian epistles and odes, landscape and prospect verse, descriptive and reflective poems, songs and hymns, fables and character-drawings, satire and epigrams. It seems a necessary conclusion from all these factors—production by the same authors, similarity of content and style—that if A Collection of Poems by Several Hands is to be considered a mirror of mid-eighteenth-century poetic taste, then the poetry of The Museum, although on a far slighter scale, ought to be regarded at least as an ancillary index to the same study.

A decided service for Museum readers (and for modern scholarship) was the periodical's Literary Memoirs, or book review section. Although Mark Akenside's manner of reviewing in no way departed from the traditional abstract, the reviewing standard for the previous fifty years, The Museum's editor brought to the public's attention many works, especially of foreign authors, which had been denied notice elsewhere. Consciously attempting to aid English collectors in the purchase of significant works for their libraries, Akenside actually reviewed more works from abroad than he did native productions.¹⁴ Included among these reviews are outstanding names in all areas of writing and scholarship, persons such as Voltaire, Linnaeus, Duclos, and Fenelon. On the other hand, the Memoirs reflect the most respected works of contemporary domestic authors. The presence of Joseph Spence's Polymetis, Gilbert West's Observations … of the Resurrection, William Melmoth's Letters of Pliny, as well as the foresighted preview of Johnson's Dictionary,¹⁵ shows that Akenside had not neglected the mainstream of domestic literature in his foragings abroad.

Although he occasionally enlivened the Memoirs with a bit of intrigue and adventure by reviewing such accounts as Richard Pococke's Description of the East, Akenside usually restricted The Museum's concerns to intellectual and scholarly pursuits. Fiction has not a notice. Hence, in both form and content, The Museum once more reflects the enduring neoclassic attitude. Although the next decade would see some innovations in the Monthly Review (1749) and the Critical Review (1756), book reviewing was still awaiting both a new standard of criticism and a friendlier attitude toward fiction.

One of the intriguing mysteries of attribution in The Museum concerns the authorship of a portion of the Historical Memoirs, the last section in the periodical. While it is certain that the voluminous John Campbell¹⁶ wrote all but five of the Memoirs, the authorship of the remaining five entries has been, with some hesitancy, attributed to Henry Fielding. A record of Fielding's authorship of a work entitled History of the Rebellion in Scotland (late 1745) led his chief biographer Wilbur Cross¹⁷ to assume that The Museum's “A Succinct History of the Rebellion,” later published under its own cover as A Complete and Authentick History of the Rise, Progress, and Extinction of the Late Rebellion (1747), was actually Fielding's account. Admitting that he had never seen a copy of the History, Cross made the attribution principally on the basis of a similarity of style. This addition to the Fielding canon was generally accepted until R. C. Jarvis more recently called attention to a modern edition of Fielding's History of the Rebellion in Scotland, and showed quite certainly that Cross's assumption was unfounded; the two versions of the rebellion were clearly different works.¹⁸

Nevertheless, in spite of Jarvis's discovery, the case for Fielding's authorship of The Museum account is far from closed. The strength of Jarvis's argument lay solely in its negative effect of undermining the official biographer's assumption by producing the “missing” text. However, Jarvis failed to consider certain affirmative evidence and even argued mistakenly regarding the very relevant facts of Fielding's subsequent career.¹⁹ Hence Fielding is not finally excluded from the authorship of these entries in The Museum.

In substance and accomplishment, however, “A Succinct History of the Rebellion” is a decidedly lesser work than John Campbell's “A View of the Present State of Europe.” The former, written during the progress of the rebellion, is predictably uneven both in design and execution. “A View,” on the other hand, following the new trend in history writing,²⁰ was a masterful synthesis of the recent histories, resources, constitutions, rulers, interests, and pretentions of all the major powers of Europe. Campbell's thorough, integrated picture of Western politics, unique in periodical literature of the first half of the eighteenth century, was so successful that it was later re-published as The Present State of Europe (1750), passing through six editions during the author's lifetime and gaining for him an international reputation.²¹

Together, the two-part Historical Memoirs made The Museum a good investment for English readers, whether on the fortnightly basis or in the periodical's collected editions. Here, readers could not only enjoy passing entertainment but also gain comprehensive and integrated views of contemporary domestic and foreign affairs, a service for which there had been no precedent in periodical literature.

At this point one might ask—if The Museum was so valuable to its age, why did it lapse after only a year and a half? In the absence of any significant statement either in Dodsley's papers or in contemporary records, we have no certain answer to this puzzling question. In an age when periodicals frequently lasted but an issue or two, any number of reasons for the discontinuance could be alleged, poor circulation, of course, being the chief. But this does not seem to have been the case with The Museum.²²

An answer, however, might be found in a publishing phenomenon of the eighteenth century to which Walter Graham has directed our attention.²³ Recognizing the book value of bound editions of periodicals, many shrewd contemporary publishers looked forward to only a predetermined number of issues after which they would conclude publication and re-issue the work in a collected edition. This practice could earn a second profit on their initial investment.²⁴ Hence if a publisher had been fortunate to engage a well known author, or group of authors, for his enterprise, book publication was almost assured of success.

Whether or not Dodsley's Museum had been slated for this type of publication is a moot question. Certainly the universal character of the periodical's contents, escaping the limits of time and place, would have lent itself to such publication. Likewise the roster of fashionable Museum contributors was quite adequate to reward re-publication. Also not to be forgotten was Dodsley's penchant for the publication of such enterprising projects as anthologies of poetry and plays, educational handbooks, memorandum books for ladies, etc., all reflecting his shrewd business sense. Particularly significant in the matter, however, is the fact that Dodsley's next periodical, The World (1753-1756), was designed with re-publication in mind.²⁵

The only contemporary statement indicating terminal publication as Dodsley's intention for The Museum seems particularly convincing because it comes from the publisher's chief competitor in periodical literature, Edward Cave. In the forementioned Preface to the 1747 bound edition of the Gentleman's Magazine, Cave, gloating over his magazine's continued success while The Museum had been dropped, contends that Dodsley's Museum had been established “by a combination and subscription, to set up and support a super-excellent Magazine, which was entirely to extirpate others, and then, for the good of the trade, it seems, be generously discontinued.” Whether or not September 12, 1747 was the termination date that Dodsley allegedly had in mind, we have no way of knowing, but there seems to have been no doubt, in Cave's mind at least, of Dodsley's original intention. Whatever the case, the possibility remains that The Museum's discontinuance merely reflected the realization of the publisher's original intent, even though his alleged purpose “to extirpate others” had failed.

Notes

1. Walter Graham, English Literary Periodicals, New York, 1930.

2. The sixteen-page Public Register had “up-staged” the Gentleman's and other monthlies by providing news reports and Parliamentary debates on a weekly basis. According to Dodsley's remarks in the twenty-fourth and last number of the Public Register, it was the pressure brought to bear by other publishers led by Cave that had forced him to discontinue the periodical. See Ralph Straus, Robert Dodsley, Poet, Publisher, and Playwright (New York, 1910), pp. 67-72.

3. Lennart C. Carlson, The First Magazine: A History of the “Gentleman's Magazine” (Providence, 1938), p. vii.

4. Dodsley's poems, “Servitude” (1729), “The Modern Reasoners” (1734), “Beauty, or the Art of Charming” (1735), “Colin's Kisses” (1742), “On the Death of Mr. Pope” (1745) had gained much praise with Pope and his circle. His plays The Toy-shop (1735), The King and the Miller of Mansfield (1736), and Sir John Cockle at Court (1737) were all running in London theaters within one month of 1737, making him the most successful author of that theatrical season.

5. Defoe wrote a preface, introduction, and a postscript for an edition of Dodsley's Servitude in 1729. See William Lee, The Life and Newly Discovered Writings of Daniel Defoe (London, 1869), I, 449.

6. Dodsley used his profits from the Toy-shop and a £100 contribution from Pope to set up his shop at Tully's Head in 1735.

7. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill (6 vols., 1904, rev. L. F. Powell, 1934-1950), I, 326; I, 182-183; III, 405.

8. Dodsley published Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination in 1744, after which the future editor was off to Holland where he was awarded an M.D. at Leyden in the same year. After a year or so of medical practice, Akenside signed a contract on January 20, 1746 to edit The Museum. See Straus, pp. 82-83.

9. Of the total 111 essays and 142 poems in The Museum, 35 essays and 52 poems have been identified. These attributions are derived from contemporary correspondence, anthologies, memoirs, publications of Dodsley and his circle, etc., too numerous to mention here. However, the bulk of poetry attributions were found in the 1782 edition of Dodsley's Collection of Poems by Several Hands in which James Dodsley appended the author's names; and also in Alexander Chalmer's Works of the English Poets for which Chalmers had the advantage of Joseph Warton's annotated copy of Dodsley's Collection and Thomas Warton's copy of The Museum. The 1782 edition's publication of John Gilbert Cooper's poetry revealed the identity of “Philaretes” and the authorship of eighteen essays and three poems. The subsequent republication of eight essays in Joseph Spence's Moralities (1753), and thirty-five Historical Memoirs in John Campbell's The Present State of Europe (1750) revealed further attributions. Only circumstantial evidence attributes the bulk of the Literary Memoirs to The Museum's editor.

10. Barnard's “Plan for Raising Three Million for the Service of the Government,” explaining a proposed lottery, appeared in the March, 1746 Gentleman's Magazine. Walpole's satire appeared in The Museum the very next month.

11. Volumes I-III, January, 1748; IV, 1755; V-VI, 1758.

12. See Raymond D. Havens, “Changing Taste in the Eighteenth Century: A Study of Dryden's and Dodsley's Miscellanies,” PMLA, XLIV (1929), 501-536. Also George Sherburn and Donald F. Bond, “The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century,” A Literary History of England, ed. Albert C. Baugh (New York, 1967), p. 1005.

13. For instance, the first thirty-five pages of Volume V consist entirely of Akenside's poems.

14. Ninteen of the forty-two reviewed were French, two were Italian, and one in Latin was of anonymous foreign origin.

15. A review of Johnson's Plan appeared in the August 1, 1747 issue of The Museum. However, Straus (p. 334) designates October 25, 1747 as the date when The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language was published by Knapton, Longman, Shewell, Hitch, Millar, and Dodsley. Two other handwritten copies seem to have circulated privately before this time. See Boswell's Life, I, 182-185.

16. Campbell's penchant for travel and foreign places led him to editing, as well as writing, vast bulks of material, such as the four-volume Lives of the Admirals and Other Eminent Seamen (1742-1744).

17. Wilbur Cross, The History of Henry Fielding (New Haven, 1918), II, 55.

18. R. C. Jarvis, “Fielding, Dodsley, Marchant, and Ray. Some Fugitive Histories of the '45,” N & Q, CLXXXIX (1945), 90-92, 117-120, 138-141, refers to Ifan Kyrle Fletcher's limited edition of Fielding's History published at Newport, Monmouthshire in 1934.

19. Jarvis says that Fielding's duties as a judge would have not allowed time for the author to be writing the 1746 Museum account, and also that Fielding's interest in journalism was on the wane at that time. On the contrary, Fielding was not called to be a justice at Bow Street Court until 1748; also if his interest in journalism had been on the wane, he would not have begun the Jacobite's Journal at the end of 1747.

20. The new history writing gave attention to a nation's trade, commerce, natural resources, terrain, climate, customs, manners, etc., in attempting to give a fuller interpretation of its history. Actually Campbell's work pre-dated the great French works, Voltaire's Age of Louis XIV (1751) and Montesquieu's The Spirit of Laws (1754).

21. Catherine the Great of Russia sent her personal portrait to Campbell in recognition of the continental reputation which he had gained, principally through the Present State of Europe.

22. The Preface to the second volume of the collected edition (one year after its inception) speaks very optimistically of the “favourable Reception” which The Museum had enjoyed.

23. Graham, p. 127.

24. The Tatler and Spectator in bound form were used as handbooks for the education of youth well into the mid-century. Some others that enjoyed success in bound form were: Mist's Weekly Journal, Freethinker, The Bee, Common Sense, The Rambler, The Student, Gray's Inn Journal, and The Adventurer.

25. See Dodsley's contract with the editor Edward Moore in Straus, pp. 186-187.