in October Tonson printed Steele's Ladies' Library. Tonson appears in Rowe's Dialogue between Tonson and Congreve, in imitation of Horace: Thou, Jacob Tonson, were, to my conceiving, The cheerfullest, best, honest fellow living. In the same year Tonson, with Barnaby Bernard Lintot and William Taylor, was appointed one of the printers of the parliamentary votes. Next year he paid fifty guineas for the copyright of Addison's comedy, The Drummer, and published Thomas Tickell's translation of the first book of the Iliad, which gave offence to Pope. On 6 February 1718 Lintot entered into a partnership agreement with Tonson for the purchase of plays during eighteen months following that date. In one of several amusing letters from Vanbrugh, now at Bayfordbury, Tonson, who was then in Paris, was congratulated upon his luck in South Sea stock, and there is other evidence that he made a large sum in connection with Law's Mississippi scheme. "He has got £40,000" wrote Robert Arbuthnot; "riches will make people forget their trade." In January 1720 Tonson obtained a grant to himself and his nephew of the office of stationer, bookseller, and printer to some of the principal public offices; and on 12 October 1722 he assigned the whole benefit of the grant to his nephew. The grant was afterwards renewed by Robert Walpole, in 1733, for a second term of forty years. The elder Tonson seems to have given up business about 1720. He had bought the Hazells estate at Ledbury, Herefordshire, and in 1721 he was sending presents of cider to the Dukes of Grafton and Newcastle, the latter of whom called Tonson "my dear old friend," and asked him to give him his company in Sussex. Henceforth we may suppose, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that "Tonson" in contemporary allusions means the nephew. Steele's Conscious Lovers appeared in 1722, and Tonson assigned to Lintot half the copyright for £70. He had to apply to the court of chancery for an injunction to stop Robert Tooke and others printing a pirated edition of the play; the sum paid for the copyright was £40. In the same year Tonson published the Duke of Buckingham's Works, and in 1725 Pope's edition of Shakespeare. Proposals were issued by Tonson in January 1729 for completing the subscription to the new edition of Rymer's Fœdera, in seventeen folio volumes (of which fifteen were then printed), at fifty