of the business, and, though publishing negotiations were thenceforth often initiated by Williams, there were few that were not concluded personally by Smith.
For some time after he became sole owner and manager at Cornhill Smith felt himself in no position to run large risks in the publishing department. A cautious policy was pursued; but fortune proved kind. It was necessary to carry to completion those great works of scientific travel by Sir Andrew Smith, Hinds, and Darwin, the publication of which had been not only contracted for, but was actually in progress during Smith's pupilage. The firm had also undertaken the publication of a magnum opus of Sir John Herschel—his 'Astronomical Observations made at the Cape of Good Hope'—towards the expense of which the Duke of Northumberland had offered 1,000l. The work duly appeared in 1846 in royal quarto, with eighteen plates, at the price of four guineas. A like obligation incurred by the firm in earlier days was fulfilled by the issue, also in 1846, of the naturalist Hugh Falconer's 'Fauna Antiqua Sivalensis.' Nine parts of this important work were issued at a guinea each in the course of the three years 1846-9. In 1846, too, Ruskin completed the second volume of his 'Modern Painters,' of which an edition of 1,500 copies was issued; and in 1849 Smith brought out the second of Ruskin's great prose works, 'The Seven Lamps of Architecture,' which was the earliest of Ruskin's books that was welcomed with practical warmth on its original publication.
In fiction the chief author with whom Smith in the first years of his reign at Cornhill was associated was the grandiloquent writer of blood-curdling romance, G. P. R. James. In 1844 Smith, Elder, & Co. had begun an elaborate collected edition of his works, of which they issued eleven volumes by 1847, ten more being undertaken by another firm. Unhappily Smith, Elder, & Co. had also independently entered into a contract with James to publish every new novel that he should write; 600l. was to be paid for the first edition of 1,250 copies. The arrangement lasted for four years, and then sank beneath its own weight. The firm issued two novels by James in each of the years 1845, 1846, 1847, and no less than three in 1848. Each work was in three volumes, at the customary price of 31s. 6d.; so that between 1845 and 1848 Smith offered the public twenty-seven volumes from James's pen at a total cost to the purchasers of thirteen and a half guineas. James's fertility was clearly greater than the public approved. The publisher requested him to set limits to his annual output. He indignantly declined, but Smith persisted with success in his objections to the novelist's interpretation of the original agreement, and author and publisher parted company. In 1848 Smith issued a novel by his friend, George Henry Lewes, entitled 'Rose, Blanche, and Violet.' Although much was expected from it, nothing came.
While the tragi-comedy of James was in its last stage, Smith became the hero of a publishing idyll which had the best possible effect on his reputation as a publisher and testified at the same time to his genuine kindness of heart. Few episodes in the publishing history of the nineteenth century are of higher interest than the story of his association with Charlotte Brontë. In July
