99/116 ed.)] [Footnote 241: Diderot's _Lettre sur le Commerce de la Librairie_ (1767). _Oeuv._, xviii.] [Footnote 242: Those who are interested in the history of authorship may care to know the end of the matter. Copyright is no modern practice, and the perpetual right of authors, or persons to whom they had ceded it, was recognised in France through the whole of the seventeenth century and three-quarters of the eighteenth. The perpetuity of the right had produced literary properties of considerable value; for example, Boudot's Dictionary was sold by his executors for 24,000 livres; Prevot's Manual Lexicon and two Dictionaries for 115,000 livres. |