pressible fury, and, like the offended Marius of ancient Rome, made such havoc among his countrymen as must be the work of two or three ages to repair. It must be confessed the redoubted Mr. Buckley has shed as much blood as the former; but I cannot forbear saying (and I hope it will not look like envy) that we regard our brother Buckley as a kind of Drawcansir, who spares neither friend nor foe, but generally kills as many of his own side as the enemy's. It is impossible for this ingenious sort of men to subsist after a peace. Every one remembers the shifts they were driven to in the reign of King Charles II., when they could not furnish out a single paper of news without lighting up a comet in Germany, or a fire in Moscow. There scarce appeared a letter without a paragraph on an earthquake. Prodigies were grown so familiar that they had lost their name, as a great poet of that age has it. I remember Mr. Dyer, who is justly looked upon by all the foxhunters in the nation as the greatest statesman our country has produced, was particularly famous for dealing in, whales, insomuch that in five months' time. (for I had the curiosity to examine his letters on that occasion) he brought three into the mouth of the River Thames, besides two porpoises and a sturgeon. The judicious and wary Mr. Ichabod Dawks hath all along been the rival of this great writer, and got himself a reputation from plagues and famines; by which, in those days, he destroyed as great multitudes as he has lately done by the sword. In every dearth of news Grand Cairo was sure to be unpeopled."

With all his hard work, Gent could get a peep at

some of these vehicles of popular instruction and entertainment, and might learn better to qualify himself for something higher than the lot of a printer's apprentice, who was half-starved, and sometimes beaten. When the dreaded halfpenny duty was imposed on the 12th of August, 1712, Swift wrote to Stella, "Do you know that Grub-street is dead and gone last week? No more ghosts or murders now for love or money. I plied it close the last fortnight, and published at least seven papers of my own, besides some of other people's." But Grubstreet was not even then "dead and gone:" there was still abundant work for "the hawkers." The Tories had driven the Whigs from power, and in spite of the pillory and the gallows with which Bolingbroke threatened obscure scribblers, and which modes of keeping things quiet Swift advocated, the war of pamphlets was furiously carried on. It mattered little to many printers and publishers what side they took; and so probably the young Irishman, who was serving out his apprenticeship with Mr. Midwinter, was as indifferent to party considerations as his master. He was about twenty years of age when he says of the tyrant, "I was severely beaten for sending him a letter to Islington, complaining I was in a poor philosopher's condition, for want of a pair of breeches." But this jackal of hawkers began to find out the youth's value: "Upon my writing Dr. Sacheverel's sermon after his suspension, for which I waited from morning to evening to hear him, he gave me what I wanted, and a crown piece besides, because he took near thirty pounds that week by it."

G

But Midwinter parted with Gent in a friendly manner, as he was not more full of business than his regular hands could do. The youth soon got employ, and continued at work so briskly that by Saturday night he had earned seventeen shillings. He was, however, fond of novelty, and went to work at another place, from which he was discharged as a foreigner in about three weeks. He was not a freeman of London; so he got no regular employment, but laboured here and there without settlement, upon what was called "smouting work." By this he obtained a tolerable subsistence. But through the recommendation of a hawker, he formed an engagement with Mr. White, of York, who "wanted a young man at the business." This old gentleman was King's printer for York and five counties, which preferment he had obtained by printing the Declaration of the Prince of Orange, when all the printers of London had refused to undertake so dangerous a piece of work. Mr. White, Gent says, had plenty of business, there being few printers except in London at that time-"none then, I am sure, at Chester, Liverpool, Whitehaven, Preston, Manchester, Kendal, and Leeds."

When Gent arrived at Mr. White's door at York, he records "it was opened by the head-maiden, that is now my dear spouse." Southey has detailed the course of the true love which the young printer felt for Mistress Alice Guy, "upper maiden to Mrs. White." Prudential considerations long prevented him from completing the engagement with "his dear at York." After some years the over-cautious lover found that the lady had married. He consoled

himself, when he heard this sad news in London, by writing a copy of verses, entitled The Forsaken Lover's Letter to his former Sweetheart," which production he gave to Mr. Dodd, a ballad printer, who "sold thousands of them, for which he offered me a price; but, as it was on my own proper concern, I scorned to accept of anything except a glass of comfort or so." Other amorous poets have not been quite so disinterested, nor have they exercised so much reticence about their " own proper concern." When he heard, in 1724, that the quondam Alice Guy had become a widow, he started at once in the stage-coach from the Black Swan in Holborn, which took him to York in four days' time. "Here I found my dearest once more, though much altered to what she was about ten years before, that I had not seen her: there was no need for new courtship; but decency suspended the ceremony of marriage for some time."

Having thus happily disposed of the domestic affairs of Thomas Gent, I return to his first interview with old Mr. White, who was at his dinner by the fireside, sitting in a noble arm-chair, with a good large fire before him. "I had a guinea in my shoe-lining, which I pulled out to ease my foot, at which the old gentleman smiled, and pleasantly said it was more than he had ever seen a journeyman save before." This was pretty much the case when the writer of these Shadows first knew something of the habit of printers in his father's office. There was one exception. A compositor who worked for him at Windsor for many years was proud to show a guinea, which

he said he had always kept in his pocket to unscrew his composing-stick. Gent appears to have boarded in the family of Mr. White, in which he lived as happy as he could wish until the year was at an end for which he had been hired. An irrepressible desire then came over him to visit his friends in Ireland. Young ladies of the middle rank were even then novel-readers, although they had no light reading but the cumbrous folios or interminable duodecimos translated from the French of M. de la Calprenede and Mademoiselle Scudery. There were as yet no Defoes, or Richardsons, or Fieldings. So Thomas Gent, in describing his pleasant intercourse with his "dear niece Anne Standish, a perfect beauty," says, "Often did we walk till late hours in the garden; she could tell me almost every passage in 'Cassandra,' a celebrated romance that I had bought for her at London." There was a choice of the works of Calprenede, whose Pharamond,' 'Cassandra,' and 'Cleopatra' rivalled the great heroic romances of Scudery, in which Greeks and Romans talked the language of the Court of Louis Quatorze. Gent's pleasant hours in Dublin-where he had obtained work with one who printed many good books-were cut short by "a sad persecution from my old master Powell, who employed officers to seize me for leaving my apprenticeship with him." He rejoices that he had a good kingdom to return to, and determined to leave Ireland privately. There is again a break in his narrative; but, in 1716, we find him again in the employ of his old master, Midwinter. In 1717 he became, as he said, absolutely free both in England