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By Root 1932 0

deposit" could be accepted, in return for a blanket extension of the copyright term to twenty-eight years. (That may have been a concession too: at least one writer had thought it "essentially necessary" to revoke Donaldson v. Becket and reintroduce perpetual copyright.) 12 Villiers swiftly advanced a bill to this end in the Commons, arguing that it was vital to the future of education and learning. But there it met with unexpected opposition. Sir Samuel Romilly in particular rose to protest against its unanticipated implications for the most expensive of books -books that were practically immune from piracy given the costs of their production. Faced with his opposition, the bill stalled.

As the attempted compromise collapsed, the libraries and the publishers faced the prospect of a long conflict. Cambridge University's Syndics resorted to a test case in a bid to forestall it. To considerable public surprise, theywon.13 Suddenly it looked as though the publishing industry faced a comprehensive, legally enforceable, deposit requirement. The publishers and their allies were aghast, and the bibliographical antiquarian Joseph Haslewood wrote that the verdict was "fatal to literary property." Thrown onto the defensive, they immediately clamored to revive aparlia- mentary solution. This time they got their new law. But, as had been the case almost exactly a century earlier, the result was not at all what they had sought. The bill they proposed would have enshrined a twenty-eight-year copyright in return for deposits partially paid for by the libraries, and would have permitted publishers to renounce copyright protection altogether in return for depositing only one copy. Christian was determined and unyielding in his opposition to this measure, and succeeded in killing it. Instead, the new Copyright Act of 1814 incorporated most of Christian's own claims into law. The publishers found themselves subject to blanket demands for eleven copies of all works, copyrighted or not. It was this measure, therefore - the first clear legal provision for a universal library- that provoked the real crisis.14

GENEALOGY AND GENIUS

Who was Sir Egerton Brydges? The question is a key one, if only because he himself posed it incessantly from the 1790s through to his death in 1837. The problem was that his own answers bore little relation to any acknowledged by his contemporaries. Brydges's own view was that he was Baron Chandos of Sudeley, a title that he claimedperlegem terrae-by common law, rather than by the normal criteria of the college of arms. What he meant by this was that the House of Lords had denied him the noble rank that he felt was his due. It was a contradiction that plagued his life. A convinced Burkean, Brydges exalted the peerage as the country's senate - the only body capable of deciding grand issues in circumstances of quiet, disinterested reflection, secluded from the sirens of urban cunning and political faction. But he found his own identity destroyed by that very institution. Even his "Sir" had a certain taint about it: it was not a British honor at all, but a privilege conferred by the Swedish order of St. Joachim, and was in conventional terms worthless (he finally became a baronet in 1814, resolving that particular problem and taking what his friend Francis Wrangham called a small step "toward the ancient honours of your ancestry").15 Resenting the peers' refusal as an injustice founded in corruption and national malaise -as serious as their lordships' reception of Byron- for decades everything Brydges did, said, and wrote was tinged with indignation at personal honor affronted.16 Ironically, his peerage did come to define Brydges, but by its denial rather than its possession.

Brydgeswas at least a gentleman. He came from a relatively prosperous Kent farming family andwas educated at Cambridge, which he left in 1782 without a degree. Although qualified as a barrister, he declined the profession in favor of living the life of a rural squire. He lived first in Hampshire, where he rented a parsonage from George Austen and