has Italy's greater day, or the magnificence which crowded the Court of Augustus, left behind them a name of any earthly interest, to compare with his who restored land to Virgil, and who succoured the fugitive Horace. These are results which have obtained in all countries, and been confessed by every age; and it will be well when they win for Literature other living regards, and higher present consideration, than it has yet been able to obtain. Men of genius can more easily starve, than the world, with safety to itself, can continue to neglect and starve them. What new arrangement, what kind of consideration may be required, will not be very distant from the simple acknowledgment that greater honour and respect ARE due. This is what Literature has wanted in England, and not the laced coat and powdered wig which have on rare occasions been substituted for it. The most liberal patronage vouchsafed in this country to living men-of-letters, has never been unaccompanied by degrading incidents; nor their claims at any time admitted without discourtesy or contumely. It is a century and a half since an Act of Parliament was passed to 'protect' them, under cover of which their most valuable private rights were confiscated to the public use; and it is not fourteen years since another act was passed with a sort of kindly consideration on their behalf, by favour of which the poet and the teacher of writing, the historian and the teacher of dancing, the philosopher and the royal coachman, Sir Christopher Wren's great grand-daughter and the descendant of Charles the Second's French riding-master, are permitted to appear in the same annual charitable list. But though statesmen have yet to learn what the State loses by such unwise scorn of what enlightens and refines it, they cannot much longer remain ignorant to what extent they are themselves enslaved by the power they thus affect to despise, or of the special functions of government and statesmanship which it is gradually assuming to itself. Its progress has been uninterrupted since Johnson's and Goldsmith's time, and cannot for as many more years continue unacknowledged. Pitt sneered when the case of Burns was stated to him, and talked of Literature taking care of itself. It can do so, and in a different and larger sense from what the minister intended; but can Society take care of itself, is also a material question. Toward its solution, one sentence of Goldsmith's protest is an offering from his sorrow in these times of Authorship by Compulsion, not less worthy than his more cheerful offerings in those days of Authorship by Choice, to which the reader is now invited. 'An author may be considered as a merciful substitute to the legislature. He acts not 'by punishing crimes, but by preventing them.' END OF SECOND BOOK. BOOK 111.. Authorship by Choice. 1759 TO 1767 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 on Magazines and Reviews; if strength, subsistence, and respect, lay in employment of the multitudinous force of Grub-street; 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 BB |