On Friday week Lord Rosebery addressed the Associated Booksellers of
Great Britain and Ireland at Edinburgh, and made some entertaining confessions of his views on literature. Before an audience of publishers and booksellers' he claimed to speak for the consumers. In his opinion; there was no contemporary literature,—the word must be reserved for the great dead, and no literary reputation could properly 136 said to exist till after the lapse of at least a century. Using the word "literature," however, in the common sense, he dealt with the commercial side of it, urging that the golden age of the author had been the first half of the nineteenth century, when Longman gave Moore the equivalent of £8,000 to-day for a poem unwritten, and even unnamed. He concluded by declaring that " the truest contemporary test of literature was when a book began to sell second-hand, and the highest test was when no copy of the first edition was known to exist."
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