awaked, Derrick started up; ’My dear Floyd, I am sorry to see you in this destitute state; will you go home with me to my lodgings?’” Authors in such circumstances might be forced into such a wonderful contract as that which is reported to have been drawn up by one Gardner with Rolt and Christopher Smart.  They were to write a monthly miscellany, sold at sixpence, and to have a third of the profits; but they were to write nothing else, and the contract was to last for ninety-nine years.  Johnson himself summed up the trade upon earth by the lines in which Virgil describes the entrance to hell; thus translated by Dryden:—­

  Just in the gate and in the jaws of hell,
  Revengeful cares and sullen sorrows dwell. 
  And pale diseases and repining age,
  Want, fear, and famine’s unresisted rage: 
  Here toils and Death and Death’s half-brother, Sleep—­
  Forms, terrible to view, their sentry keep.

“Now,” said Johnson, “almost all these apply exactly to an author; these are the concomitants of a printing-house.”

Judicious authors, indeed, were learning how to make literature pay.  Some of them belonged to the class who understood the great truth that the scissors are a very superior implement to the pen considered as a tool of literary trade.  Such, for example, was that respectable Dr. John Campbell, whose parties Johnson ceased to frequent lest Scotchmen should say of any good bits of work, “Ay, ay, he has learnt this of Cawmell.”  Campbell, he said quaintly, was a good man, a pious man.  “I am afraid he has not been in the inside of a church for many years; but he never passes a church without pulling off his hat.  This shows he has good principles,”—­of which in fact there seems to be some less questionable evidence.  Campbell supported himself by writings chiefly of the Encyclopedia or Gazetteer kind; and became, still in Johnson’s phrase, “the richest author that ever grazed the common of literature.”  A more singular and less reputable character was that impudent quack, Sir John Hill, who, with his insolent attacks upon the Royal Society, pretentious botanical and medical compilations, plays, novels, and magazine articles, has long sunk into utter oblivion.  It is said of him that he pursued every branch of literary quackery with greater contempt of character than any man of his time, and that he made as much as L1500 in a year;—­three times as much, it is added, as any one writer ever made in the same period.

The political scribblers—­the Arnalls, Gordons, Trenchards, Guthries, Ralphs, and Amhersts, whose names meet us in the notes to the Dunciad and in contemporary pamphlets and newspapers—­form another variety of the class.  Their general character may be estimated from Johnson’s classification of the “Scribbler for a Party” with the “Commissioner of Excise,” as the “two lowest of all human beings.”  “Ralph,” says one of the notes to the Dunciad, “ended in the common sink of all such writers, a political