regarded by the London publishers as an interference with the
honorary copyright which booksellers then respected among
themselves. They said also that it was inaccurately printed and its
type was small. A few booksellers agreed, therefore, among
themselves to call a meeting of proprietors of honorary or actual
copyright in the various Poets. In Poets who had died before 1660
they had no trade interest at all. About forty of the most
respectable booksellers in London accepted the invitation to this
meeting. They determined to proceed immediately with an elegant and
uniform edition of Poets in whose works they were interested, and
they deputed three of their number, William Strahan, Thomas Davies,
and Cadell, to wait on Johnson, asking him to write the series of
prefatory Lives, and name his own terms. Johnson agreed at once,
and suggested as his price two hundred guineas, when, as Malone
says, the booksellers would readily have given him a thousand. He
then contemplated only "little Lives." His energetic pleasure in
the work expanded his Preface beyond the limits of the first design;
but when it was observed to Johnson that he was underpaid by the
booksellers, his reply was, "No, sir; it was not that they gave me
too little, but that I gave them too much." He gave them, in fact,
his masterpiece. His keen interest in Literature as the soul of
life, his sympathetic insight into human nature, enabled him to put
all that was best in himself into these studies of the lives of men
for whom he cared, and of the books that he was glad to speak his
mind about in his own shrewd independent way. Boswell was somewhat
disappointed at finding that the selection of the Poets in this
series would not be Johnson's, but that he was to furnish a Preface
and Life to any Poet the booksellers pleased. "I asked him," writes
Boswell, "if he would do this to any dunce's works, if they should
ask him. JOHNSON. "Yes, sir; and SAY he was a dunce."