some half dozen months, had been tenant of a spunginghouse. No man throve that was connected with letters unless connected with their trade and merchandise as well, and, like RICHARDSON, could print as well as write books.

'Had some of those,' cried Smollett, in his bitterness, 'who were pleased to call themselves my friends, been at 'any pains to deserve the character, and told me ingenu'ously what I had to expect in the capacity of an author, 'when I first professed myself of that venerable fraternity, 'I should, in all probability, have spared myself the incre'dible labour and chagrin I have since undergone.' 'I 'don't think,' said Burke, in his first London letter to his Irish friends, written seven years before this date, 'there 'is as much respect paid to a man of letters on this side 'the water as you imagine. I don't find that Genius, the 'rathe primrose, which forsaken dies,'

'is patronized by any of the nobility. Writers of the first 'talents are left to the capricious patronage of the public. 'A man will make more by the figures of arithmetic 'than the figures of rhetoric, unless he can get into the 'trade wind, and then he may sail secure over Pactolean 'sands.'

It was, in truth, one of those times of Transition which press hardly on all whose lot is cast in them. The patron was gone; and the public had not come. The seller of books had as yet exclusive command over the destiny of those who wrote them; and he was difficult of access; without

certain prospect of the trade wind, hard to move.

'The

'shepherd in Virgil,' said Johnson to Lord Chesterfield, 'grew at last acquainted with love, and found him a native 'of the rocks.' Nor had adverse circumstances been without their effect upon the literary character itself. Covered with the blanket of Boyse, and sheltered by the night-cellar of Savage, it had forfeited less honour and self-respect than as the paid client of the ministries of Walpole and Henry Pelham. As long as its political services were acknowledged by offices in the state; as long as the coarse wit of Prior could be paid by an embassy, or the delicate humour of Addison win its way to a secretaryship; while Steele and Congreve, Swift and Gay, sat at ministerial tables, and were of account in cabinet councils; its slavery was not less real than in later years, yet all externally went well with it. Though even flat apostacy, as in the case of Parnell, might in those days be the claim of literature to worldly esteem, still it was esteemed by the crowd, and had the rank and consideration which worldly means could give to it. But when another state of things succeeded; when politicians had too much shrewdness to despise the helps of the pen, and too little intellect to honour its claims and influence; when it was thought that to strike at its dignity was to command its more complete subservience; when corruption in its grosser forms had become chief director of political intrigue, and it was less the statesman's office to wheedle a vote than the minister's business to give hard cash in

return for it; Literature, or the craft so called, was thrust from the House of Commons into its lobbies and waitingrooms, and ordered to exchange the dignity of the counciltable for the comforts of the great man's kitchen.

The order did not of necessity make the Man of Genius a servant or a parasite; its sentence upon him was simply, that he must descend in the social scale, peradventure starve. But though it could not disgrace or degrade him, it called a class of writers into existence whose degradation and disgrace reacted upon him; who flung a stigma on his pursuits, and made the name of man-of-letters the synonyme for dishonest hireling. Of the fifty thousand pounds which the Secret Committee found to have been expended by Walpole's ministry on daily scribblers for their daily bread, not a sixpence was received, either then or when the Pelhams afterwards followed the example, by a writer whose name is now enviably known. All went to the Guthries, the Amhursts, the Arnalls, the Ralphs, and the Oldmixons. A Cook was pensioned, a Fielding solicited Walpole in vain. What the man of genius received, unless the man of rank had wisdom to adorn it by befriending him, was nothing but the shame of being confounded, as one who lived by using his pen, with those who lived by its prostitution and abuse.

It was in vain he strove to escape this imputation. It increased and it clove to him. To become author was to be treated as adventurer: a man had only to write, to be classed with what Johnson calls the lowest of all human

beings, the scribbler for party. One of Fielding's remarks in the True Patriot is but a bitter sense of this injustice, under cover of a grave sneer. 'An author, in a country 'where there is no public provision for men of genius, 'is not obliged to be a more disinterested patriot than 'any other. Why is he, whose livelihood is in his pen, 'a greater monster in using it to serve himself, than he who uses his tongue for the same purpose?'

Nor was this injustice the work of the vulgar or unthinking; it was strongest in the greatest of living statesmen. If had told William Pitt that a new man of merit, any one called Goldsmith, was about to try the profession of literature, he would have turned aside in scorn. It had been sufficient to throw doubt upon the career of Edmund Burke, that, in this very year, he opened it with the writing of a book. It was Horace Walpole's vast surprise and bitter complaint, four years later, that so sensible a man as 'young Mr. Burke' should not have 'worn off his authorism ' yet! He thinks there is nothing so charming as writers, ' and to be one: he will know better one of these days.'

Such was the worldly account of Literature, when, as I have said, deserted by the patron, and not yet supported by the public, it was committed to the mercies of the bookseller. They were few and rare. It was the mission of Johnson to extend them, and to replace the writer's craft, in even its worldliest view, on a dignified and honourable basis; but Johnson's work was just begun. He was himself, as yet, one of the meaner workers for

hire; and though already author of the Dictionary, was too glad in this very year to have Robert Dodsley's guinea for writing paragraphs in the London Chronicle. Had you, 'sir, been an author of the lower class, one of those who are 'paid by the sheet,' remonstrated worthy printer Bowyer with an author who could pay, who did not need to be paid, and who would not be trifled with by the man of types. Of the lower class, unlike that dignitary Mr. John Jackson, still was Samuel Johnson; he was but a Grub Street man, paid by the sheet, when Goldsmith entered Grub Street, periodical writer and reviewer.

Periodicals were the fashion of the day. They were the means of those rapid returns, of that perpetual interchange of bargain and sale, so fondly cared for by the present arbiters of literature; and were now, universally, the favourite channel of literary speculation. Scarcely a week passed in which a new magazine or paper did not start into life, to die or live as might be. Even Fielding had turned from his Jonathan Wild the Great, to his Jacobite Journal, True Patriot, and Champion; and from his Tom Jones and Amelia, sought refuge in his Covent Garden Journal. We have the names of fifty-five papers of the date of a few years before this, regularly published every week. A more important literary venture, in the nature of a review, and with a title expressive of the fate of letters, the Grub Street Journal, had been brought to a close in 1737. Six years earlier than that, for a longer life, Cave issued the first number of the Gentleman's

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