BOOK THE THIRD. CHAPTER I. WRITING THE BEE. 1759. 1759. THE Booksellers were never more active than at the close of 1759. If literature had anything to hope from such exertions, its halcyon days were come. If it could live; Et. 31. on magazines and reviews; if strength, subsistence, and respect, lay in employment of the multitudinous force of Grubstreet; if demand and supply were law sufficient for its higher interests; literature was prosperous at last, and might laugh at all Pope's prophecies. Every week had its spawn of periodical publications; feeble, but of desperate fecundity. Babblers, and Schemers; Friends, and Advisers; Auditors, Comptrollers, and Grumblers; Spendthrifts, and Bachelors; Free-Enquirers, Scrutators, and Investigators; Englishmen, Freeholders, and Moderators; Sylphs, and Triflers; Rangers, and Cottagers; Templars, Gentlemen, and Skeptics,—in constant succession rose and fell. "Sons of a "day, just buoyant on the flood," next day might see them "numbered with the puppies in the mud :" but the parents of the dull blind offspring had meanwhile eaten and drank, and the owners or masters profited. Of magazines alone, weekly and monthly, I will enumerate the specimens which a very few weeks, between the close of 1759 and the beginning of 1760, added to a multitude already wearing out their brief existence. They were the Royal Magazine, or Gentleman's Monthly Companion; the Impartial Review, or Literary Journal; the Weekly Magazine, or Gentlemen and Ladies' Polite Companion; the Ladies' Magazine; the Public Magazine; the Imperial Magazine; the Royal Female Magazine; the Universal Review; the Lady's Museum; the Musical Maga zine; and the British Magazine, or Monthly Repository for Gentlemen and Ladies. See all her progeny, illustrious sight! Behold, and count them, as they rise to light. Not less with glory mighty Dullness crown'd, Behold a hundred sons, and each a Dunce. Whether with equal triumph she beheld the new recruit advance to take his place, may admit of question. But her favourite Purdons, Hills, Willingtons, Kenricks, Shiels, Bakers, Guthries, Wotys, Ryders, Collyers, Joneses, Pilkingtons, Huddlestone Wynnes, and Hiffernans, were always at hand to comfort her: and there was an ill-fashioned out-of-the-way corner, in even her domain, for temporary reception of the Smolletts and the Johnsons; men who owed her no allegiance, but had not yet deserted Grubstreet altogether. “It is a street in London," was Johnson's definition, four years before the present, "much inhabited by "writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems: "whence any mean production is called Grub-street." Why, a man might enter even Grub-street, then, with bold and cheerful heart, seeing the author of the English Dictionary there. there, as occasion called, he was still to be seen: poor, persevering, proud; "Unplaced, unpension'd, no man's heir or slave;" For inviting the world to take heed that indeed he was there, "tugging "at the oar." With that great, independent soul of his, Samuel Johnson had no reproach for Fortune: she might come to him now, or stay away for ever. What other kind of man he might have been, if something more than fourpence halfpenny a day had welcomed him in the outset ; or if houseless and homeless street-wanderings with Savage, and resolutions to stand by his country, had been forestalled by house and home, and resolution of his country to stand by him; is not in his case a matter of much importance. He dealt with life as he found it; toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail, he grappled with as they came; and the profession of literature he had now quietly, and finally, accepted upon its own terms. Repulsed from the west-end mansion, he turned to the counters of the east; insulted by bookseller Osborne, he knocked him down with one of his own folios; decently paid by bookseller : Millar, he told the world to honour him for raising the rewards of books and treating authorship, since the world would have it so, as any other trade, and still heartily embracing poverty as a trusted and honourable companion, was content in Grub-street, or any other street, to work out his case as he could. "Seven years, "my lord, have now past, ," he wrote to Lord Chesterfield, on appearance of the Dictionary four years before, "since I waited in "your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during "which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties, "of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, "to the verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one "word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. . . . Is not a "patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, "encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been "pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind : "but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy "it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, "and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not "to confess obligations where no benefit has been received; or to “be unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a patron, which Providence has enabled me to do for myself." What! said he in more familiar mood to Garrick, have I sailed a long and difficult voyage round the world of the English language, and does he now send out his cock-boat to tow me into harbour? And from this man, even now, there was nothing to separate the humblest of literary workmen. Here were his words, as a trumpet, to call them to the field; and there he was himself, in person, to animate the struggle. "What reception I shall meet "with on the shore, I know not whether the sound of bells, "and acclamations of the people, which Ariosto talks of in his "last Canto, or a general murmur of dislike, I know not whether "I shall find upon the coast a Calypso that will court, or a Poly"pheme that will resist. But if Polypheme comes, have at his eye." To what, then, should he first look, who, hitherto a compelled and reluctant dweller on the threshold of literature, was now of his own resolute choice advancing within to try his fortune, if not to this great, unyielding figure of Samuel Johnson, for courage and sustainment? There, beyond a doubt, were the thoughts of Oliver Goldsmith now ;-with poverty, not simply endured, but made a badge of honour; with independence, though indeed but a bookseller's servant; without remonstrance or uneasy resistance, should even the worst attendants of the garret continue to be his lot for ever. "He assured me," says the author of the Rambler of his friend Ofellus "that thirty pounds a year was K |