succesful, yet upon detection or miscarriage, the fault was sure to fall upon poor Cave.

At last his mistress, by some invisible means, lost a favourite cock; Cave was, with little examinatien, stigmatized as the thief or murderer, not because he was more apparently criminal than others, but because he was more easily reached by vindictive justice. From that time Mr. Holyock withdrew his kindness visibly from him, and treated him with harshness, which the crime in its utmost aggravation could scarcely deserve, and which surely he would have forborne, had he considered how hardly the habitual influence of birth and fortune is resisted, and how frequently men, not wholly without sense of virtue, are betrayed to acts more atrocious than the robbery of a henroost, by a desire of pleasing their superiors.

Those reflections his master never made, or made without effect; for under pretence that Cave obstructed the dicipline of the school, by selling clandestine assistance and supplying exercises to idlers, he was oppressed with unreasonable tasks, that there might be an opportunity of quarrelling with his failure; and when his diligence had surmounted them, no regard was paid to the performance. Cave bore this persecution awhile, and then left the school, and the hope of a literary education, to seek some other means of gaining a livelihood.

He was first placed with a collector of the excise. He used to recount, with some pleasure, a journey or two which he rode with him, as his clerk, and relate the victories he gained over the exciseman in grammatical disputations. But the insolence of his mistress, who employed him in servile slavery, quickly disgusted him, and he went up to London in quest of more suitable employment.

He was recommended to a timber merchant at the Bank-side, and while he was there on liking, is said to have given hopes of great mercantile abilities; but this place he soon left, I know not for what reason, and was bound apprentice to Mr. Collins, a printer of some reputation, and deputy alderman,

This was a trade for which men were formerly qualified by a literary education, and which was pleasing to Cave, because it furnished some employment for his scholastic attainments. Here, therefore, he resolved to settle, though his master and mistress lived in perpetual discord, and their house therefore could be no comfortable habitation.

From the inconveniences of these domestic tumults he was soon released, having in only two years attained so much skill in his art, and gained so much the confidence of his master, that he was sent without any superintendant, to conduct a printing house at Norwich, and publish a weekly paper. In this undertaking he met with some opposition, which produced a public controversy, and procured young Cave the reputation of a writer.

His master died before his apprenticeship was expired, and as he was not able to bear the preverseness of his mistress. He therefore lived out of the house upon a stipulated allowance, and married a young widow, with whom he lived at Bow.

When his apprenticeship was over, he worked as a journeyman at the printing house of Mr. Barber, a man much distinguished and employed by the tories, whose principles had at that time so much prevalence with Cave, that he was for some years a writer in Mist's Journal; which though he afterwards obtained, by his wife's interest, a small place in the post-office, he for some time continued. But as interest was powerful, and conversation, however mean, in time persuasive, he, by degrees inclined to another party; in which, however, he was always moderate, though steady and determined.

When he was admitted into the post-office he still contiuued, at his intervals of attendance, to exercise his trade, or to apply himself with some typographical business. He corrected the "Gradus ad Parnassum," and was honourably rewarded by the Company of Stationers. He wrote an "Account of the Criminals," which had for some time a considerable sale; and published many little pamphlets that accident brought into his hands, of which it would be very difficult to recover the memory. By the correspondence which his place in the postoffice facilitated, he procured country newspapers, and sold their intelligence to a journalist of London for a guinea a week.

He was afterwards raised to the office of clerk of the franks, in which he acted with great spirit and firmness; and often stopped franks which were given by members of parliament to their friends,

because he thought such extension of a peculiar right illegal. This raised many complaints, and having stopped, among others, a frank given to the old Duchess of Marlborough by Mr. Walter Plummer, he was cited before the house, as for breach of privilege, and accused I suppose very unjustly, of opening letters to detect them. He was treated with great harshness and severity, but declining their questions by pleading his oath of secresy, was at last dismissed. And it must be recorded to his honour, that when he was ejected from his office, he did not think himself discharged from his trust, but continued to refuse to his nearest friends any information about the man. agement of the office. By this constancy of diligence and diversification of employment, he in time collected a sum sufficient for the purpose of a small printing house, and began the Gentleman's Magazine, a periodical pamphlet, of which the scheme is known wherever the English language is spoken. To this undertaking, he owed the affluence in which he passed the last twenty years of his life, and the fortune that he left behind him, which, though large, had been yet larger, had he not rashly and wantonly impaired it by innumerable projects, of which I know not that ever one succeeded.

The Gentleman's Magazine, which has subsisted nearly a century,* and still continues equally to enjoy the favour of the world, is one of the most successful and lucrative pamphlets which literary history has upon record, and therefore deserves, in this narrative, particular notice. Mr. Cave, when he formed the project, was far from expecting the success which he found; and others had so little prospect of its consequence, that though he had for several years talked of his plan among printers and booksellers, none of them thought it worth the trial. That they were not restrained by virtue from the execution of another man's design, was sufficiently apparent as soon as that design began to be gainful; for in a few years a multitude of magazines arose and perished; only the London Magazine, supported by a powerful association of booksellers, and circulated with all the art, and all the cunning of trade, exempted itself from the general fate of Cave's invaders, and obtained, though not an equal, yet a considerable sale.

Cave now began to aspire to popularity, and being a greater lover of poetry than any other art, he some time offered subjects for poems, and proposed prizes for the best performances. The first prize was

fifty pounds, for which, being but newly acquainted with wealth, and thinking the influence of fifty pounds extremely great, he expected the first authors in the kingdom to appear as competitors; and offered the allotment of the prize to the Universities. But when the time came, no name was seen among his writers that was ever seen before; the Universities and several private men rejected the province of assigning the prize. At all this Mr. Cave wondered for awhile, but his natural judgment, and a wider acquaintance with the world, soon cured him of his astonishment, as of many other prejudices and errors. Nor have many men been seen raised by accident or industry to sudden riches, that retained less of the meanness of their former state.

He continued to improve his Magazine, and had the satisfaction of seeing its success proportionate to his diligence, till the year 1751, his wife died of an asthma. He seemed not, at first, much affected at her death, but in a few days lost his sleep and his appetite; which he never recovered; but after having lingered about two years, with many vicissitudes of amendment and relapse, fell, by drinking acid liquors, into diarrhea, and afterwards into a kind of lethargic insensibility, in which one of the last acts of reason which he exerted, was fondly to press the hand which is now writing this little narrative. He died on January 10, 1754, aged 63, having just concluded the twenty-third annual collection.

He was a man of large stature, not only tall but bulky; and was, when young, of remarkable strength and activity. He was generally healthful, and capable of much labour and long application; but in the latter years of his life was afflicted with the gout, which he endeavoured to cure or alleviate, by a total abstinence both from strong liquors and animal food. From animal food he abstained about four years, and from strong liquors much longer; but the gout continued unconquered, perhaps unabated.

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His resolution and perseverance were very uncommon; whatever he undertook, neither expence nor fatigue were able to repress him; but his constancy was calm, and, to those who did not know him, appeared faint and languid, but he always went forward, though slowly.

The same chilness of mind was observable in his conversation: he was watching the minutest accent of those whom he disgusted by seeming inattention; and his visitant was surprised, when he came a second time, by preparations to execute the scheme which he supposed never to have been heard.

He was, consistently with this general tranquillity of mind, a tenacious maintainer, though not a clamorous demander, of his right. In his youth, having summoned his fellow journeymen to concert measures against the oppression of their masters, he mounted a kind of rostrum, and harangued them so efficaciously, that they determined to resist all future invasions; and when the stamp officers demanded to stamp the last half-sheet of the magazines, Mr. Cave alone defeated their claim, to which the proprietors of the rival magazines would meanly have submitted.

He was a friend rather easy and constant, than zealous and active; yet many instances might be given, where both his money and his diligence were liberally employed for others. His enmity was in like manner cool and deliberate; but though cool, it was not insidious, and though deliberate, not pertinacious.

His mental faculties were slow. He saw little at a time, but that little he saw with great exactness. He was long in finding the right, but seldom failed to find it at last. His affections were not easily gained, and his opinion not quickly discovered. His reserve, as it might hide his faults, concealed his virtues; but such he was, as they who best knew him have most lamented.

Mr. Humfrey Wanley, son of Nathaniel Wanley, was born at Coventry, March 21, 1761-2. What time he could spare from the trade of a draper, to which his father put him, he employed in turning over old MSS. and copying the various hands, by which he acquired an uncommon faculty of distinguishing their dates. Dr. Smith, his diocesan, sent him to St. Edmund's Hall, Oxford, of which Dr. Mill was then principal, whom he greatly assisted in his collations of

* Author of the "Wonders of the little World, and of the Memoirs of the Family of Fielding," in the history of Leicestershire.