Dodsley was all politeness, and though he declined to incur any risk--this was doubtless borne by Burke--he promised his best endeavours to make the poem a success.

_The Library_ was published, anonymously, in June 1781.

The _Monthly_ and the _Critical Reviews_ awarded it a certain amount of faint praise, but the success with the general public seems only to have been slight.
When Burke selected this poem to lay before Dodsley, he had already read portions of _The Village,_ and it seems strange that he should have given _The Library_ precedence, for the other was in every respect the more remarkable.

But Burke, a conservative in this as in other matters, probably thought that a new poet desiring to be heard would be wiser in not at once quitting the old paths.

The readers of poetry still had a taste for didactic epigram varied by a certain amount of florid rhetoric.