BOOK THE THIRD. CHAPTER I. WRITING THE BEE. 1759. THE Booksellers were never more active than at the close 1759. of 1759. If literature had anything to hope from such Et. 31. 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 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 "num"bered with the puppies in the mud: " but the parents of * See the list in Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, iv. 38-97. 1759. the dull blind offspring had meanwhile eaten and drank, Æt. 31. 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 Magazine; and the British Magazine, or Monthly Repository for Gentlemen and Ladies. See all her progeny, illustrious sight! In homage to the Mother of the sky, A hundred sons, and ev'ry son a God: Not less with glory mighty Dullness crown'd, Shall take thro' Grub-street her triumphant round; And her Parnassus glancing o'er at once, 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 Grub-street 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. For there, as occasion called, he was still to be seen: poor, persevering, proud ; "Unplaced, unpension'd, no man's heir or slave;" 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 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 * Johnson told Murphy that he and Savage, on one occasion, walked round Grosvenor Square till four in the morning; in the course of their conversation not only falling foul of Walpole for laying restraints upon the stage, neglecting the arts, and letting science go unrewarded, but themselves reforming the world generally, dethroning princes, establishing new forms of government, giving laws to different states, and, when at last fatigued with their legislative office, and sorely in need of refreshment and rest, finding themselves both together unable to make up more And see than the sum of fourpence-halfpenny. Monthly Review, lxxvi. 281-282. Murphy's Essay, 17. 1759. Et. 31. |