fame hereafter, to endeavour to make them turn out to his temporal interest here.

Whatever be the motives which induce men to write, whether avarice or fame, the country becomes most wise and happy in which they most serve for instructors.

GOLDSMITH:

Citizen of the World, Letter LXXV.

Homer is the first poet and beggar of note among the ancients; he was blind, and sung his ballads about the streets; but it is observed that his mouth was more frequently filled with verses than with bread. Plautus, the comic poet, was better off; he had two trades,-he was a poet for his diversion, and helped to turn a mill in order to gain a livelihood. Terence was a slave, and Boethius died in gaol.

Among the Italians, Paulo Burghese, almost as good a poet as Tasso, knew fourteen different trades, and yet died because he could get employment in none. Tasso himself, who had the most amiable character of all poets, has often been obliged to borrow a crown from some friend, in order to pay for a month's subsistence: he has left us a pretty sonnet, addressed to his cat, in which he begs the light of her eyes to write by, being too poor to afford himself a candle. But Bentivoglio, poor Bentivoglio! chiefly demands our pity. His comedies will last with the Italian language: he dissipated a noble fortune in acts of charity and benevolence; but, falling into misery in his old age, was refused to be admitted into an hospital which he himself had erected.

In Spain, it is said, the great Cervantes died of hunger; and it is certain that the famous Camoens ended his days in a hospital.

If we turn to France, we shall there find even

stronger instances of the ingratitude of the pub: lic. Vaugelas, one of the politest writers and

one of the honestest men of his time, was surnamed The Owl, from his being obliged to keep within all day, and venture out only by night, through fear of his creditors.

...

But the sufferings of the poet in other countries is nothing when compared to his distresses here; the names of Spenser and Otway, Butler and Dryden, are every day mentioned as a national reproach: some of them lived in a state of precarious indigence, and others literally died of hunger. GOLDSMITH:

Citizen of the World, Letter LXXXIV. Who can withstand the fascination and magic of his eloquence? The excursions of his genius are immense. His imperial fancy has laid all nature under tribute, and has collected riches from every scene of the creation and every walk of art. His eulogium on the Queen of France is a masterpiece of pathetic composition: so select are its images, so fraught with tenderness, and so rich with colours " dipped in heaven," that he who can read it without rapture may have merit as a reasoner, but must resign all pretensions to taste and sensibility. His imagination is, in truth, only too prolific: a

world of itself, where he dwells in the midst of chimerical alarms, is the dupe of his own enchantments, and starts, like Prospero, at the spectres of his own creation.

ROBERT HALL:

Apology for the Freedom of the Press,
Sect. IV. (On Edmund Burke.)

When, at the distance of more than half a century, Christianity was assaulted by a Woolston, a Tindal, and a Morgan, it was ably sup ported both by clergymen of the established church and writings among Protestant dissenters. The labours of a Clarke and a Butler were associated with those of a Doddridge, a Leland, and a Lardner, with such equal reputation and success as to make it evident that the intrinsic excellence of a religion needs not the aid of external appendages; but that, with or without a dowry, her charms are of sufficient power to fix and engage the heart.

ROBERT HALL:

Modern Infidelity, Preface.

solicits the regard of a multitude fluctuating in He that endeavours after fame by writing pleasures, or immersed in business, without time for intellectual amusements: he appeals to by prejudices, which preclude their approbation judges prepossessed by passions, or corrupted of any new performance. Some are too indolished; others too envious to promote that fame lent to read anything till its reputation is estabwhich gives them pain by its increase. What is new is opposed, because most are unwilling to be taught; and what is known is rejected, because it is not sufficiently considered that men more frequently require to be reminded than informed. The learned are afraid to declare reputation in hazard; the ignorant always imtheir opinion early, lest they should put their agine themselves giving some proof of delicacy, finds his way to reputation through all these when they refuse to be pleased; and he that obstructions must acknowledge that he is indebted to other causes besides his industry, his learning, or his wit.

DR. S. JOHNSON: Rambler, No. 2.

If we look back into past times, we find innumerable names of authors once in high reputation, read perhaps by the beautiful, quoted by the witty, and commented on by the grave, but of whom we now know only that they existed. If we consider the distribution of literary fame in our own time, we shall find it a possession of very uncertain tenure; sometimes bestowed by a sudden caprice of the public, and again transferred to a new favourite, for no other reason than that he is new; sometimes refused to long labour and eminent desert, and sometimes granted to very slight pretensions; lost sometimes by security and negligence, and sometimes by too diligent endeavours to retain it.

A successful author is equally in danger of the diminution of his fame, whether he continues or ceases to write. The regard of the public is not to be kept but by tribute, and the

remembrance of past service will quickly languish unless successive performances frequently revive it. Yet in every new attempt there is new hazard, and there are few who do not, at some unlucky time, injure their own characters by attempting to enlarge them.

DR. S. JOHNSON: Rambler, No. 21.

It has been remarked, that authors are genus irritabile, a generation very easily put out of temper, and that they seldom fail of giving proofs of their irascibility upon the slightest attack of criticism, or the most gentle or modest offer of advice and information.

Writers, being best acquainted with one an

Simonides was an excellent poet, insomuch that he made his fortune by it.

L'ESTRANGE.

No writings we need to be solicitous about the meaning of but those that contain truths we are to believe or laws we are to obey: we may be less anxious about the sense of other authors. LOCKE.

We are beholden to judicious writers of all ages for those discoveries and discourses they have left behind them for our instruction.

few have equalled.

LOCKE.

LOCKE.

There have been times when men of letters

The quarrels of writers, indeed, are more observed, because they necessarily appeal to the decision of the public. Their enmities are incited by applauses from their parties, and prolonged by treacherous encouragement for general diversion, and when the contest happens to rise higher between men of genius and learning, its memory is continued for the same reason as its vehemence was at first promoted, because

it gratifies the malevolence or curiosity of read. ers, and relieves the vacancies of life with amusement and laughter. The personal disputes, therefore, of rivals in wit, are sometimes transmitted to posterity, when the grudges and the heart-burnings of men less conspicuous, though carried on with equal bitterness, and productive of greater evils, are exposed to the knowledge of those only whom they nearly affect, and suffered to pass off and be forgotten among common and casual transactions.

DR. S. JOHNSON: Rambler, No. 40. The chief glory of every people arises from

its authors.

DR. S. JOHNSON: Preface to his Dictionary.

Every other author may aspire to praise: the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach; and even this negative recompense has been granted to very few.

DR. S. JOHNSON.

looked, not to the public, but to the government, or to a few great men, for the reward of their exertions. It was thus in the time of Mæcenas and Pollio at Rome, of the Medici at Florence, of Louis the Fourteenth in France, of Lord Halifax and Lord Oxford in this country. Now, Sir, I well know that there are cases in which it is fit and graceful, nay, in which it is a sacred duty, to reward the merits or to relieve the distresses of men of genius by the exercise of this species of liberality. But these cases are exceptions. I can conceive no system more fatal to the integrity and independence of literary men than one under which they should favour of ministers and nobles. Í can conceive be taught to look for their daily bread to the no system more certain to turn those minds which are formed by nature to be the blessings and ornaments of our species into public scandals and pests. LORD MACAULAY:

Speech on Copyright, Feb. 5, 1841.

In an age in which there are so few readers that a writer cannot subsist on the sum arising from the sale of his works, no man who has not an independent fortune can devote himself to

literary pursuits unless he is assisted by patronage. In such an age, accordingly, men of letters too often pass their lives in dangling at the heels of the wealthy and powerful; and all the faults which dependence tends to produce, pass into their character. They become the parasites and slaves of the great." It is melancholy to think how many of the highest and most exquisitely formed of human intellects have been condemned to the ignominious labour of disposing the commonplaces of adulation in new forms and brightening them into new splendour. Horace invoking Augustus in the most enthusiastic language of religious veneration, Statius flattering a tyrant, and the minion of a tyrant, for a morsel of bread, Ariosto versifying the extolling the heroic virtues of the wretched whole genealogy of a niggardly patron, Tasso creature who locked him up in a mad-house, these are but a few of the instances which might easily be given of the degradation to which those must submit who, not possessing a com

petent fortune, are resolved to write when there are scarcely any who read.

This evil the progress of the human mind tends to remove. As a taste for books becomes more and more common, the patronage of individuals becomes less and less necessary. In the middle of the last century a marked change took place. The tone of literary men, both in this country and in France, became higher and more independent. Pope boasted that he was the "one poet" who had "pleased by manly

ways:" he derided the soft dedications with which Halifax had been fed, asserted his own superiority over the pensioned Boileau, and gloried in being not the follower, but the friend, of nobles and princes. The explanation of all this is very simple. Pope was the first Englishman who by the mere sale of his writings

realized a sum which enabled him to live in

comfort and in perfect independence. Johnson extols him for the magnanimity which he showed in inscribing his Iliad not to a minister or a peer, but to Congrève. In our time this would scarcely be a subject for praise. Nobody is astonished when Mr. Moore pays a compliment of this kind to Sir Walter Scott, or Sir Walter Scott to Mr. Moore. The idea of either of

those gentlemen looking out for some lord who would be likely to give him a few guineas in return for a fulsome dedication seems laughably incongruous. Yet this is exactly what Dryden or Otway would have done; and it would be hard to blame him for it. Otway is said to have been choked with a piece of bread which he devoured in the rage of hunger; and, whether this story be true or false, he was beyond all question miserably poor. Dryden, at near seventy, when at the head of the literary men of England, without equal or second, received three hundred pounds for his Fables, a collection of ten thousand verses, and of such verses as no man then living, except himself, could have produced. Pope, at thirty, had laid up between six and seven thousand pounds, the fruits of his poetry. It was not, we suspect, because he had a higher spirit or a more scrupulous conscience than his predecessors, but because he had a larger income, that he kept up the dignity of the literary character so much better than they had done. From the time of Pope to the present day the readers have been constantly becoming more and more numerous, and the writers, consequently, more and more independent. It is assuredly a great evil that men fitted by their talents and acquirements to enlighten and charm the world should be reduced to the necessity of flattering wicked and foolish patrons in return for the sustenance of life. But, though we heartily rejoice that this evil is removed, we cannot but see with concern that another evil has succeeded to it. The public is now the patron, and a most liberal patron. All that the rich and powerful bestowed on authors from the time of Maecenas to that of Harley would not, we apprehend, make up a sum equal to that which has been paid by English booksellers to fifty-three authors during the last fifty years.

use

Men of letters have accordingly ceased to court individuals, and have begun to court the public. They formerly used flattery. They now puffing. LORD MACAULAY: Mr. Robert Montgomery's Poems, April, 1830. Just such is the feeling which a man of liberal education naturally entertains towards the great minds of former ages. The debt which he owes to them is incalculable. They have guided him and graceful images. They have stood by him to truth. They have filled his mind with noble in all vicissitudes, comforters in sorrow, nurses in sickness, companions in solitude. These friendships are exposed to no danger from the occurrences by which other attachments are weakened or dissolved. Time glides on; for-. which seemed indissoluble are daily sundered tune is inconstant; tempers are soured; bonds by interest, by emulation, or by caprice. But no such cause can affect the silent converse which we hold with the highest of human intellects. That placid intercourse is disturbed by no jealousies or resentments. These are the old friends who are never seen with new faces, who are the same in wealth and in poverty, in glory and in obscurity. With the dead there is no rivalry. In the dead there is no change. Plato is never sullen. Cervantes is never petulant. Demosthenes never comes unseasonably. Dante never stays too long. No difference of political opinion can alienate Cicero. No heresy can

excite the horror of Bossuet.

LORD MACAULAY: Lord Bacon, July, 1837.

A most idle and contemptible controversy had arisen in France touching the comparative merit of the ancient and modern writers. It was certainly not to be expected that in that age the question would be tried according to those large and philosophical principles of criticism which guided the judgments of Lessing and of Herder. But it might have been expected that those who undertook to decide the point would at least take the trouble to read and understand the authors on whose merits they were to pronounce. Now, it is no exaggeration to say that among the disputants who clamoured, some for the ancients and some for the moderns, very few were decently acquainted with either ancient or modern literature, and hardly one was well acquainted with both. In Racine's amusing preface to the Iphigénie the reader may find noticed a most ridiculous mistake into which one of the champions of the moderns fell about a passage in the Alcestis of Euripides. Another writer is so inconceivably ignorant as to blame Homer for mixing the four Greek dialects, Doric, Ionic, Æolic, and Attic, just, says he, as if a French poet were to put Gascon phrases and Picard phrases into the midst of his pure Parisian writing. On the other hand, it is no exaggeration to say that the defenders of the ancients were entirely unacquainted with the greatest productions of later times; nor, indeed, were the defenders of the moderns better informed. The parallels which were

instituted in the course of this dispute are inexpressibly ludicrous. Balzac was selected as the rival of Cicero. Corneille was said to unite the merits of Eschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. We should like to see a Prometheus after Corneille's fashion. The Provincial Letters, masterpieces undoubtedly of reasoning, wit, and eloquence, were pronounced to be superior to all the writings of Plato, Cicero, and Lucian together, particularly in the art of dialogue; an art in which, as it happens, Plato far excelled all men, and in which Pascal, great and admirable in other respects, is notoriously very deficient. LORD MACAULAY:

Sir William Temple, Oct. 1838.

This childish controversy [touching the comparative merit of the ancient and modern wri ters] spread to England; and some mischievous dæmon suggested to Temple the thought of undertaking the defence of the ancients. As to his qualifications for the task, it is sufficient to say that he knew not a word of Greek. But his vanity, which, when he was engaged in the conflicts of active life and surrounded by rivals, had been kept in tolerable order by his discretion, now, when he had long lived in seclusion, and had become accustomed to regard himself as by far the first man of his circle, rendered him blind to his own deficiencies. In an evil hour he published an Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning. The style of this treatise is very good, the matter ludicrous and contemptible to the last degree. There we read how Lycurgus travelled into India, and brought the Spartan laws from that country; how Orpheus made voyages in search of Knowledge, and attained to a depth of learning which has made him renowned in all succeeding ages; how Pythagoras passed twenty-two years in Egypt, and, after graduating there, spent twelve years more at Babylon, where the Magi admitted him ad eundem; how the ancient brahmins lived two hundred years; how the earliest Greek philosophers foretold earthquakes and plagues, and put down riots by magic; and how much Ninus surpassed in abilities any of his successors on the throne of Assyria. The moderns, Sir William owns, have found out the circulation of the blood; but, on the other hand, they have quite lost the art of conjuring; nor can any modern fiddler enchant fishes, fowls, and serpents by his performance. He tells us that "Thales, Pythagoras, Democritus, Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus made greater progresses in the several empires of science than any of their successors have since been able to reach;" which is just as absurd as if he had said that the greatest names in British science are Merlin, Michael Scot, Dr. Sydenham, and Lord Bacon. Indeed, the manner in which Temple mixes the historical and the fabulous reminds us of those classical dictionaries, intended for the use of schools, in which Narcissus the lover of himself and Narcissus the freedman of Claudius, Pollux the son of Jupiter and Pollux the author of the Onomasticon, are ranged under the same headings

and treated as personages equally real. The effect of this arrangement resembles that which would be produced by a dictionary of modern names consisting of such articles as the following: "Jones, William, an eminent Orientalist, and one of the Judges of the Supreme Court of Judicature in Bengal-Davy, a fiend, who destroys ships-Thomas, a foundling, brought up by Mr. Allworthy." It is from such sources as these that Temple seems to have learned all that he knew about the ancients. He puts the story of Orpheus between the Olympic games and the battle of Arbela: as if we had exactly the same reasons for believing that Orpheus led beasts with his lyre which we have for believing that there were races at Pisa, or that Alexander conquered Darius.

He manages little better when he comes to the moderns. He gives us a catalogue of those whom he regards as the greatest writers of later times. It is sufficient to say that in his list of Italians he has omitted Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso; in his list of Spaniards, Lope and Calderon; in his list of French, Pascal, Bossuet, Molière, Corneille, Racine, and Boileau; and in his list of English, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton.

LORD MACAULAY: Sir William Temple.

Bute, who had always been considered as a man of taste and reading, affected from the moment of his elevation the character of a Mæcenas. If he expected to conciliate the public by encouraging literature and art, he was griev ously mistaken. Indeed, none of the objects of his munificence, with the single exception of Johnson, can be said to have been well selected; and the public, not unnaturally, ascribed the selection of Johnson rather to the Doctor's political prejudices than to his literary merits: for a wretched scribbler named Shebbeare, who had nothing in common with Johnson except violent Jacobitism, and who had stood in the pillory for a libel on the Revolution, was honoured with a mark of royal approbation similar to that which was bestowed on the author of the English Dictionary and of the Vanity of Human Wishes. It was remarked that Adam, a Scotchman, was the court architect; and that Ramsay, a Scotchman, was the court painter, and was preferred to Reynolds. Mallet, a Scotchman, of no high literary fame, and of infamous character, partook largely of the liberality of the government. John Home, a Scotchman, was rewarded for the tragedy of Douglas, both with a pension and with a sinecure place. But when the author of The Bard and of the Elegy in a Country Churchyard ventured to ask for a Professorship, the emoluments of which he much needed, and for the duties of which he was, in many respects, better qualified than any man living, he was refused; and the post was bestowed on the pedagogue under whose care the favourite's son-in-law, Sir James Lowther, had made such signal proficiency in the graces and in the humane virtues. LORD MACAULAY:

The Earl of Chatham, Oct. 1844.

Epicurus, we are told, left behind him three hundred volumes of his own works, wherein he had not inserted a single quotation; and we have it upon the authority of Varro's own words that he himself composed four hundred and ninety books. Seneca assures us that Didymus the grammarian wrote no less than four thousand; but Origen, it seems, was yet more prolific, and extended his performances even to six thousand treatises. It is obvious to imagine with what sort of materials the productions of such expeditious workmen were wrought up: sound thoughts and well-matured reflections could have no share, we may be sure, in these hasty performances. Thus are books multiplied, whilst authors are scarce; and so much easier

is it to write than to think! But shall I not myself, Palamedes, prove an instance that it is so, if I suspend any longer your own more important reflections by interrupting you with such MELMOTH:

as mine?

We know the highest pleasure our minds are capable of enjoying with composure, when we read sublime thoughts communicated to us by men of great genius and eloquence. Such is the entertainment we meet with in the philosophic parts of Cicero's writings. Truth and good sense have there so charming a dress, that they could hardly be more agreeably represented with the addition of poetical fiction and the power of numbers.

SIR R. STEELE: Spectator, No. 146. These look up to you with reverence, and would be animated by the sight of him at whose soul they have taken fire in his writings.

SWIFT: To Pope.

They do but trace over the paths that have been beaten by the ancients; or comment, critic, and flourish upon them. SIR W. TEMPLE.

I am sure there are few who would not shrink from affirming, at least if they at all realized the words they were using, that they comprehended Shakspeare, however much they apprehend in him. R. C. TRENCH.

There is in Shaftesbury's works a lively pertthat we should be bound to admire the reveries. ness and a parade of literature; but it is hard DR. I. WATTS.

The laboured works of Master Johnson; the no less worthy composures of the both worthily excellent Master Beaumont and Master Fletcher. JOHN WEBSTER, 1612.

his Essays, one of the most suggestive authors He [Bacon] is throughout, and especially in

that ever wrote.

WHATELY.

Those works of fiction are worse than unprofitable that inculcate morality, with an exclusion of all reference to religious principle. This is obviously and notoriously the character of Miss Edgeworth's Moral Tales. And so entire and resolute is this exclusion, that it is maintained at the expense of what may be called poetical truth it destroys, in many instances, the probability of the tale, and the naturalness of the characters. That Christianity does exist, every one must believe as an incontrovertible truth; nor can any one deny that, whether true or false, it does exercise-at least is supposed to exercise -an influence on the feelings and conduct of some of the believers in it. To represent, therefore, persons of various ages, sex, country, and station in life, as practising, on the most trying occasions, every kind of duty, and encountering every kind of danger, difficulty, and hardship, while none of them ever makes the least refervariance with reality-what is called in works ence to a religious motive, is as decidedly at of fiction unnatural-as it would be to represent Mahomet's enthusiastic followers as rushing into battle without any thought of his WHATELY: promised paradise.

Annot. on Bacon's Essay, Of Studies.

AUTHORSHIP.

If writings are thus durable, and may pass from age to age through the whole course of time, how careful should an author be of committing anything to print that may corrupt posterity and poison the minds of men with vice and error! Writers of great talents who employ their parts in propagating immorality, and seasoning vicious sentiments with wit and humour, are to be looked upon as the pests of society, and the enemies of mankind. They leave books behind them (as it is said of those who die in distempers which breed an ill-will towards their own species) to scatter infection and destroy their posterity. They act the coun