works supply us with a case in point--here, to possess a set of
Tennyson's poems, a reader must pay something like 38_s_. or 40_s_.--in
Boston you may buy a magnificent edition of all his works in two volumes
for something like 15_s_., and a small edition for some four or five
shillings. The result is the purchasers in England are numbered by
hundreds, in America by thousands. In Germany we have almost a parallel
case. There the works of the great German poets, of Schiller, of Goethe,
of Jean Paul, of Wieland, and of Herder, are at the present time 'under
the protecting privileges of the most illustrious German Confederation,'
and, by special privilege, the exclusive property of the Stuttgart
publishing firm of J. G. Cotta. On the forthcoming 9th of November this
monopoly will cease, and all the works of the above-mentioned poets will
be open to the speculation of German publishers generally. It may be
interesting to our readers to learn the history of these peculiar legal
restrictions, which have so long prevailed in the German booktrade, and
the results likely to follow from their removal.

"Until the beginning of this century literary piracy was not prohibited
in the German States. As, however, protection of literary productions
was, at last, emphatically urged, the Acts of the Confederation (on the
reconstruction of Germany in the year 1815) contained a passage to the
effect, that the Diet should, at its first meeting, consider the
necessity of uniform laws for securing the rights of literary men and
publishers. The Diet moved in the matter in the year 1818, appointing a
commission to settle this question; and, thanks to that supreme
profoundness which was ever applied to the affairs of the father-land by
this illustrious body, after twenty-two years of deliberation, on the
9th of Nov., 1837, decreed the law, that the rights of authorship should
be acknowledged and respected, at least, for the space of ten years;
copyright for a longer period, however, being granted for voluminous and