not only to write inferior books for money, but to sell himself and act as a spy upon his fellows.  One great man, it is true, made an independence by literature.  Pope received some L8000 for his translation of Homer, by the then popular mode of subscription—­a kind of compromise between the systems of patronage and public support.  But his success caused little pleasure in Grub Street.  No love was lost between the poet and the dwellers in this dismal region.  Pope was its deadliest enemy, and carried on an internecine warfare with its inmates, which has enriched our language with a great satire, but which wasted his powers upon low objects, and tempted him into disgraceful artifices.  The life of the unfortunate victims, pilloried in the Dunciad and accused of the unpardonable sins of poverty and dependence, was too often one which might have extorted sympathy even from a thin-skinned poet and critic.

Illustrations of the manners and customs of that Grub Street of which Johnson was to become an inmate are only too abundant.  The best writers of the day could tell of hardships endured in that dismal region.  Richardson went on the sound principle of keeping his shop that his shop might keep him.  But the other great novelists of the century have painted from life the miseries of an author’s existence.  Fielding, Smollett, and Goldsmith have described the poor wretches with a vivid force which gives sadness to the reflection that each of those great men was drawing upon his own experience, and that they each died in distress.  The Case of Authors by Profession to quote the title of a pamphlet by Ralph, was indeed a wretched one, when the greatest of their number had an incessant struggle to keep the wolf from the door.  The life of an author resembled the proverbial existence of the flying-fish, chased by enemies in sea and in air; he only escaped from the slavery of the bookseller’s garret, to fly from the bailiff or rot in the debtor’s ward or the spunging-house.  Many strange half-pathetic and half-ludicrous anecdotes survive to recall the sorrows and the recklessness of the luckless scribblers who, like one of Johnson’s acquaintance, “lived in London and hung loose upon society.”

There was Samuel Boyse, for example, whose poem on the Deity is quoted with high praise by Fielding.  Once Johnson had generously exerted himself for his comrade in misery, and collected enough money by sixpences to get the poet’s clothes out of pawn.  Two days afterwards, Boyse had spent the money and was found in bed, covered only with a blanket, through two holes in which he passed his arms to write.  Boyse, it appears, when still in this position would lay out his last half-guinea to buy truffles and mushrooms for his last scrap of beef.  Of another scribbler Johnson said, “I honour Derrick for his strength of mind.  One night when Floyd (another poor author) was wandering about the streets at night, he found Derrick fast asleep upon a bulk.  Upon being suddenly