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With the faces of most of them the world is familiar. Here are six of the Kit-Kat Club portraits that were painted for Jacob Tonson. First in order Tonson himself, the very personification of the nourishing publisher and patron of authors, with the pleasant air of the happy discoverer of genius, and the maker of its fortune as well as of his own.
"He formed," said Tonson, "the design of getting that lady from the time when he was first taken into the family." In what part of his life he obtained the recommendation, or how long, and in what manner he lived in the family, I know not.
His works are collected, and printed in one volume, published by Tonson. NICHOLAS ROWE, Esq; This excellent poet was descended from an ancient family in Devonshire, which had for many ages made a very good figure in that county, and was known by the name of the Rowes of Lambertowne. Mr.
He holds a folio copy of "Paradise Lost"; it is Tonson patting Milton on the back. Dryden, Vanbrugh, Congreve, Steele, Addison, and Lord Chancellor Somers are the other five of these celebrated portraits. What a congress of wits! But we have besides, Atterbury, and Pope, and Lady Mary Wortley Montague, and Prior, and Tickell, and Swift.
As she wandered on with her story he mentally felt himself actually dragged into the shrimp-pink bedroom and standing an onlooker when the footman outside the door "did not know" where Tonson had gone. For a moment he felt conscious of the presence of some scent which would have been sure to exhale itself from draperies and wardrobe.
"And Tonson once said that the only places the sun came into below stairs were the pantry and kitchen and it only stayed about an hour early in the morning. I must get there as soon as I can."
Pictures and statues have been staled by copy and description, until everything is stereotyped, from the Dying Gladiator, with his "young barbarians all at play," and all that, down to the Beatrice Cenci, the Madame Tonson of the shops, that haunts one everywhere with her white turban and red eyes.
Tonson pretended to guess it; no other mortal ever suspected it; and Pope might have reflected that a man who had been Secretary of State in the Ministry of Sunderland knew a nearer way to a bishopric than by defending religion or translating the Psalms. It is related that he had once a design to make an English dictionary, and that he considered Dr. Tillotson as the writer of highest authority.
On one occasion Dryden asked for an advance of money, but Tonson refused upon the grounds that the poet's overdraft already exceeded the limits of reasonableness.
When the "n" is not in the surname, at least the Christian contains the indispensable letter, as John Murray, Elkin Matthew. Even when it can find refuge nowhere else the "n" creeps into the "and" of the firm or into the "Sons." The very Clarendon Press has the trademark. Who is the stock publisher of the eighteenth century? Tonson! Who were the first publishers of Shakespeare? Condell & Heminge.
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