Farrar's "Life of Christ"
at Harrow. I spent more than one delightful day with him at Harrow discussing the matter, which was finally settled."
The book was seen through the press by John Williams, who found that his author had a schoolmaster's natural disinclination to be set right on the rare occasions when his scholarship limped. It appeared in volume form in 1874. The demand for it, both in this country and in America, was prodigious, and for months the printing presses at La Belle Sauvage could only with difficulty keep pace with it. Within a year twelve "editions," as they were then called, were exhausted, and when the first "run" upon the book had ceased it was still in such active demand that it had frequently to be reprinted. The "Life and Work of St. Paul" followed in 1879, and the series was completed by "The Early Days of Christianity," issued in 1882. The second of the three works also had an enormous sale, but the third was less successful, partly perhaps because the subject was less appealing, and partly because the author's style, under the stimulus of success, had become more and more flamboyant.
In 1890 Archdeacon Farrar, as he then was, in a paper read at the Church Congress on Commercial Morality made a reference to "sweating publishers, which was interpreted by many to be directed against the House of Cassell. It led to the appearance in the Times of October 8, 1890, of a letter from the House (it was written by Sir Wemyss Reid, who, however, had nothing to do with the making of the arrangements which he defended):
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