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"spirit, with one supported for the sordid purposes of a bookseller. "It might not become us to say more on this subject." The sordid bookseller was not so delicate, and did say much more; calling in for the purpose the pen of Kenrick, a notorious and convicted libeller. "It requires a good deal of art and temper," said the Monthly Review, after objections to the whole treatise, some just enough, on the score of its want of learning and too hasty decision on national literatures, others, connected with the subject of patronage, shallow as they were severe, "for a man to "write consistently against the dictates of his own heart. Thus, "notwithstanding our author talks so familiarly of us, the great, "and affects to be thought to stand in the rank of Patrons, we "cannot help thinking that in more places than one he has "betrayed, in himself, the man he so severely condemns for draw"ing his quill to take a purse. We are even so firmly convinced "of this, that we dare put the question home to his conscience, "whether he never experienced the unhappy situation he so feel"ingly describes in that of a Literary Understrapper? His "remarking him as coming down from his garret, to rummage the "bookseller's shop, for materials to work upon, and the knowledge "he displays of his minutest labours, give great reason to suspect" (generous and forbearing Griffiths !) "he may himself have had "concerns in the bad trade of bookmaking. Fronti nulla fides. "We have heard of many a Writer, who, patronised only by his ""bookseller,' has nevertheless affected the Gentleman in print, “and talked full as cavalierly as our Author himself. We have 66 even known one hardy enough publicly to stigmatise men of the "first rank in literature, for their immoralities, while conscious "himself of labouring under the infamy of having, by the vilest "and meanest actions, forfeited all pretensions to honour and "honesty. If such men as these, boasting a liberal education, "and pretending to genius, practise at the same time those arts "which bring the Sharper" (the reader will remember this word in the affecting letter of remonstrance against Griffiths) "to the "cart's-tail or the pillory, need our Author wonder that 'learning 66 6 'partakes the contempt of its professors.' If characters of this stamp are to be found among the learned, need any one be surprised that the great prefer the society of Fiddlers, Gamesters, "and Buffoons?"

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The time will come when Mr. Griffiths, with accompaniment such as that of his ancient countryman's friend when the leek was offered, will publicly withdraw these vulgar falsehoods; and meanwhile they are not deserving of remark. Indeed the quarrel, or interchange of foul reproach, as between author and bookseller, may claim at all times the least possible part of attention. It is a

third more serious influence to which appeal is made, and on whose right interference the righteous arrangement must at last depend. But at the close of the second epoch, so brief yet so sorrowful, in the life of this great and genuine man of letters, it becomes us at least to understand the appeal he would have entered against the existing controul and government of the destinies of literature. It was manifestly premature, and some passages of his after-life will plainly avow as much: but it had too sharp an experience in it not to have also much truth, and it would better have become certain bystanders in that age to have gone in and parted the combatants, than, as they did, make a ring around them for enjoyment of the sport, or in philosophic weariness abandon the scene altogether.

"You know," said Horace Walpole to one of his correspondents, "how I shun authors, and would never have been one myself, if it "obliged me to keep such bad company. They are always in "earnest, and think their profession serious, and dwell upon trifles, "and reverence learning. I laugh at all these things, and divert "myself." "It is probable," said David Hume, "that Paris will "be long my home. . I have even thoughts of settling in Paris "for the rest of my life. . I have a reluctance to think of living among the factious barbarians of London. Letters are there "held in no honour. The taste for literature is neither decayed

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nor depraved here, as with the barbarians who inhabit the banks "of the Thames. . . Learning and the learned are on a very "different footing here, from what they are among the factious "barbarians."

Matter of diversion for one, of disgust and avoidance for others, the factious barbarian struggle was left to a man more single-hearted, who thought the business of life a thing to be serious about, and who, unlike the Humes and Walpoles, was solely dependent for his bread on the very booksellers, of the danger of whose absolute power he desired to give timely warning. This he might do, as it seems to me, without personal injustice, and without pettish spite to the honest craft of bookselling, or to any other respectable trade. So far he had a perfect right to use the bitter experience he had acquired, and to argue from his particular case to the general question before him. He might believe that those trade-indentures would turn out ill for literature; that in enlarging its channels by vulgar means, might be mischief rather than good; that facilities for appeal to a wide circle of uninformed readers, were but facilities for employment to a circle of writers nearly as wide and quite as uninformed; that, in raising up a brood of writers whom any other earthly employment would have better fitted, lay the danger of bringing down the man of genius to their level; and, in short,

that literature, properly understood and rightly cherished, had altogether a higher duty and significance than the profit or the loss of a tradesman's counter. In this I hold him to have taken fair ground. The reputations we have lived to see raised on these false foundations, the good clerks and accountants whom magazines have turned into bad literary men, the readers whose tastes have been pandered to and yet further lowered, the writers whose better talents have been disregarded and wasted, the venal puffery and pretence which have more depressed the modern man of letters than ever shameless flattery and beggary reduced his predecessors; are good evidence on that point.

But when Goldsmith wrote, there was still a certain recognised work for the bookseller to do. With the aftercourse of this narrative it will more fully appear, even in that entire assent and adhesion of Goldsmith himself which he certainly did not contemplate when the Enquiry was planned, yet which, at the close of the experience of his life, he would almost seem to have silently withdrawn, by leaving the book revised for a posthumous edition with its protest against booksellers unabated and unmodified. To complete that protest now (a most essential part of this chapter in his fortunes), I will add proof, from other parts of the Enquiry, of the manly and unselfish bearing of the appeal which was built upon it. There will be found no inconsistency between the opening and closing lines of the sentences first given, by those who have studied the disclosures made recently by men who take the deepest interest in the welfare of our universities; and who contrast them, as they now are, with the original purpose for which the grand foundations of princely prelates, and nobles in advance of their age, first arose in Cambridge and Oxford.

No nation gives greater encouragement to learning than we do; yet none are so injudicious in the application. We seem to confer them with the same view that statesmen have been known to grant employments at Court, rather as bribes to silence than incentives to emulation. All our magnificent endowments of colleges are erroneous; and at best, more frequently enrich the prudent than reward the ingenious. Among the universities abroad I have ever observed their riches and their learning in a reciprocal proportion, their stupidity and pride increasing with their opulence. . . . What then are the proper encouragements of genius? I answer, subsistence and respect, for these are rewards congenial to its nature.

This is not the language of one who would have had literature again subsist, as of old, on servile adulation and vulgar charity. Goldsmith indeed seems rather to have thought with an earnest man of genius in our own day, that subscriptions and grants of money are by no means the chief things wanted for proper organisation of the literary class. "To give our men of letters,"

says Mr. Carlyle, "stipends, endowments, and all furtherance of "cash, will do little toward the business. On the whole, one is 66 weary of hearing about the omnipotence of money. I will say "rather, that, for a genuine man, it is no evil to be poor. . Money, "in truth, can do much, but it cannot do all. We must know "the province of it, and confine it there; and even spurn it back, "when it wishes to get farther." One of the lively illustrations of the Enquiry is not very unlike this. "The beneficed divine," says Goldsmith, "whose wants are only imaginary, expostulates as "bitterly as the poorest author that ever snuffed his candle with finger and thumb. Should interest or good fortune advance the "divine to a bishopric, or the poor son of Parnassus into that place "which the other has resigned, both are authors no longer. The 66 one goes to prayers once a day, kneels upon cushions of velvet, "and thanks gracious Heaven for having made the circumstances "of all mankind so extremely happy; the other battens on all the "delicacies of life, enjoys his wife and his easy chair, and sometimes, for the sake of conversation, deplores the luxury of these degenerate days. All encouragements to merit are therefore “misapplied, which make the author too rich to continue his "profession."

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But he would not therefore starve him, or to the mercies of blind chance altogether surrender him. He recals a time he would wish to see revived, when, with little of wealth or worldly luxury, the writer could yet command esteem for himself and reverence for the claims of his calling (for this, and not the vulgar thought of merely feasting with a lord, is what he intends by the allusion to Somers); and he dwells upon the contrast of existing times, in language which will hereafter connect itself with the deliberate dislike of Walpole, and the uneasy jealousy of Garrick.

When the link between patronage and learning was entire, then all whe deserved fame were in a capacity of attaining it. When the great Somers was at the helm, patronage was fashionable among our nobility. The middle ranks of mankind, who generally imitate the great, then followed their example, and applauded from fashion if not from feeling. I have heard an old poet [he alludes to Young] of that glorious age say, that a dinner with his lordship has procured him invitations for the whole week following; that an airing in his patron's chariot has supplied him with a citizen's coach on every future occasion. For who would not be proud to entertain a man who kept so much good company? But this link now seems entirely broken. Since the days of a certain prime-minister of inglorious memory, the learned have been kept pretty much at a distance. A jockey, or a laced player, supplies the place of the scholar, poet, or the man of virtue. . . Perhaps of all mankind an author in these times is used most hardly. We keep him poor and yet revile his poverty. Like angry parents, who correct their children till they cry, and then correct them for crying, we reproach him for living by his wit, and yet allow him no other means to live. His taking refuge in garrets and cellars has of late been violently objected to him, and that by men who I dare

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hope are more apt to pity than insult his distress. Is poverty the writer's fault? No doubt he knows how to prefer a bottle of champaign to the nectar of the neighbouring alehouse, or a venison pasty to a plate of potatoes. Want of delicacy is not in him but in us, who deny him the opportunity of making an elegant choice. Wit certainly is the property of those who have it, nor should we be displeased if it is the only property a man sometimes has. We must not underrate him who uses it for subsistence, and flies from the ingratitude of the age even to a bookseller for redress. If the profession of an author is to be laughed at by the stupid, it is certainly better to be contemptibly rich than contemptibly poor. For all the wit that ever adorned the human mind will at present no more shield the author's poverty from ridicule, than his high-topped gloves conceal the unavoidable omissions of his laundress. To be more serious, new fashions, follies, and vices, make new monitors necessary in every age. An author may be considered as a merciful substitute to the legislature; he acts not by punishing crimes but preventing them; however virtuous the present age, there may be still growing employment for ridicule or reproof, for persuasion or satire. If the author be therefore still so necessary among us, let us treat him with proper consideration as a child of the public, not a rent-charge on the community. And indeed a child of the public he is in all respects; for while so well able to direct others, how incapable is he frequently found of guiding himself! His simplicity exposes him to all the insidious approaches of cunning; his sensibility to the slightest invasions of contempt. Though possessed of fortitude to stand unmoved the expected bursts of an earthquake, yet of feelings so exquisitely poignant as to agonise under the slightest disappointment. Broken rest, tasteless meals, and causeless anxiety, shorten his life, or render it unfit for active employment; prolonged vigils and intense application still farther contract his span, and make his time glide insensibly away. Let us not then aggravate those natural inconveniences by neglect; we have had sufficient instances of this kind already. Sale and Moore will suffice for one age at least. But they are dead, and their sorrows are over. The neglected author of the Persian Eclogues [Collins], which, however inaccurate, excel any in our language, is still alive. Happy, if insensible of our neglect, not raging at our ingratitude. It is enough that the age has already produced instances of men pressing foremost in the lists of fame, and worthy of better times, schooled by continued adversity into an hatred of their kind, flying from thought to drunkenness, yielding to the united pressure of labour, penury, and sorrow, sinking unheeded, without one friend to drop a tear on their unattended obsequies, and indebted to charity for a grave.

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These words had been written but a very few years, when the hand that traced them was itself cold; and, yielding to that united pressure of labour, penury, and sorrow, with a frame exhausted by unremitting and ill-rewarded drudgery, Goldsmith was indebted to the forbearance of creditors for a peaceful burial. is not, then, in the early death of learned Sale, driven mad with those fruitless schemes of a society for encouragement of learning, which he carried, it may be hoped, to a kinder world than this; it is not from the grave of Edward Moore, with melancholy playfulness anticipating, in his last unsuccessful project, the very day on which his death would fall; it is not even at the shrieks of poor distracted Collins, heard through the melancholy cathedralcloister where he had played in childhood: but it is in this life,

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