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'dronish is an encroachment on the prerogative of a folio.' For one example of the evil, he instanced the power of a single monosyllable in these productions, to express the victory over humour among us. Does the poet 'paint the absurdities of the vulgar, then he is low: does 'he exaggerate the features of folly to render it more 'thoroughly ridiculous, he is then very low.' And he laughingly suggested that check might possibly be given to it by some such law enacted in the republic of letters as we find takes effect in the House of Commons. As 'no man there can show his wisdom, unless qualified by 'three hundred pounds a-year, so none here should possess gravity, unless his work amounted to three hundred 'pages.' In other parts of the treatise he guards himself from being supposed to wish that a mere money-service, a system of flattery and beggary, should replace that of the booksellers. He would object, he says, to indigence and effrontery subjecting learning itself to the contempts incurred by its professors; but he would no more have an author draw a quill merely to take a purse, than present a pistol for the same purpose.

These passages in the Enquiry were startling, and not to be protected from notice by even the obscurity of the writer. They struck at the seat of a monstrous evil. 'We must observe' said Smollett, noticing the book in the Critical Review, that, against his own 'conviction, this author has indiscriminately censured the 'two Reviews; confounding a work undertaken from

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'public 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 said 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, shallow as they were severe, to write consistently against the dictates of his 'own heart. Thus, notwithstanding our author talks

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so familiarly of us, the great, and affects to be thought 'to stand in the rank of patrons, we cannot help think'ing that in more places than one he has betrayed in 'himself the man he so severely condemns for drawing his 'quill to take a purse. We are even so firmly convinced 'of this, that we dare put the question home to his con'science, whether he never experienced the unhappy situa'tion he so feelingly describes in that of a literary under'strapper? 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 re'course to 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 even known one hardy enough' (Goldsmith had, as was pointed out in another part

of the notice, spoken in the Enquiry of the Marquis d'Argens as attempting to add the character of a philosopher to the vices of a debauchee) 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 to the cart's-tail or the pillory, need 'our author wonder that learning partakes the contempt 'of its professors.'

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 will 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 seem to 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 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 feel little inclination to the factious bar'barians of London. 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 dependant 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. 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 had 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 modified assent and adhesion of Goldsmith himself which he certainly did not directly contemplate, perhaps wholly overlooked, when the Enquiry was planned, and a protest against booksellers entered into it. To complete that protest now (a most essential part of this chapter in his fortunes), I will add proof, from other parts of the

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