still have their humble and their disreputable
followers— their drudges and their drones; but
not their pariah class. The very penny-a-liner
is only a vagrant because the necessities of his
calling make him one; not necessarily from a
love of dissipation. It was not so in the time
of Dr. Johnson, and during the preceding age.
In those days, a large proportion of working
literary men were little better than outcasts—
persons exiled from decent society, partly by
their own vices, partly by the fact of their following
a profession which had hardly acquired a
recognised standing in the world, or found for
itself a definite and indisputable sphere of usefulness.
The reading public was not sufficiently
large to maintain an extensive fraternity of
writers; and the writers consequently often
starved and broke their hearts in wretched
garrets, or earned a despicable living by flattering
the great.

That this was the case not merely with the
race of Grub-street pamphleteers, but with
men of conspicuous abilities and acquirements,
let some of the best-known names in English
literature attest. Otway, living in debauchery,
and dying in indigence; Nat. Lee, living in indigence,
and dying in a drunken street frolic,
so poor that he was buried by the parish; Savage,
compelled by his vices and his needs to herd in
cellars with the scum of the town; Goldsmith,
composing his Vicar of Wakefield in penury and
trouble, and saved from the debtors' prison by
the interposition of Johnson; Johnson himself,
dining behind a screen at Cave the bookseller's,
because he was too shabby to appear, and pacing
the streets of London all night with Savage, because
neither had money to procure even the
meanest lodging; the boy Chatterton perishing
by his own hand in hunger, heart-sickness, and
despair;— all these are instances of the equivocal
position in which literary men were placed in
former times. Those were days in which English
literature had very little existence except in
London. Even Edinburgh and Dublin looked
almost entirely to the banks of the Thames for
their supply of books; and the provincial towns
of England could boast of nothing better than
some paltry local Gazette. The consequence was
that every wit who happened to be born in the
country, in Scotland, or in Ireland—every disappointed
scholar—every one who either was or
fancied himself a genius, bom to astonish the
world and make his own fortune— hurried up to
London from all quarters of the compass. The
literary adventurer became as common a character
as the military adventurer of an earlier
age. The world was his oyster, as it was to
Pistol, only that he proposed to open it with pen
instead of with sword. He would make his way
to the metropolis anyhow; sometimes on foot,
sometimes in a waggon. Perhaps he had but a
few shillings in his pocket when he arrived; but
he would carry with him the manuscript of a
poem which was to be the foundation of his
fortune, like the street merchant's basket of frail
wares in the Arabian Nights. Thus Johnson
brought with him his tragedy of Irene. Even
in his case, the period that elapsed before success,
or even comfortable subsistence, was attained,
proved to be long and bitter. But if the literary
adventurer were a dull man, with no higher inspiration
than his self-conceit, the misery of his
condition was limited only by his life. Perhaps
he would get an introduction to some lord, and
for a few occasional and penurious favours would
debase his soul to the level of a parasite. Johnson
has no more lamentable figure in his Vanity
of Human Wishes than that of the poor scholar
whose existence is divided between

Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.

Perhaps he became the over-worked, under-paid
drudge of a bookseller; and we know what his
fate was, from the testimony of Goldsmith, who,
despite his genius, had to go through that
wretched experience:

Here lies poor Ned Purdon, from misery freed,
Who long was a bookseller's hack:
He led such a damnable life in this world,
I don't think he'll wish to come back.

Perhaps, even when his youth was past, and he
had the encumbrance of a wife and child, he clung
desperately to the dream of earning a living by
poetry; and then he became the miserable creature
depicted by Hogarth, cudgelling his dull
brains in a garret by the aid of Bysshe, surrounded
by the sights and sounds of poverty,
and distracted by importunate duns. Drury-lane
was one of his principal haunts, and Pope
has shown, him to us as he lay there in an
attic,

Lull'd by soft zephyrs through the broken pane:
an abject being who

Rhymes ere he wakes, and prints before Term ends,
Obliged by hunger, and request of friends.

Goldsmith places the bedroom of Scroggen in
the same street:

There in a lonely room, from bailiffs snug,
The Muse found Scroggen stretch'd beneath a rug.
The morn was cold; he views with keen desire
The rusty grate unconscious of a fire.
With beer and milk arrears the frieze was scored,
And five crack'd teacups dress'd the chimney board.
A nightcap deck'd his brows, instead of bay;
A cap by night—a stocking all the day.

Such was the hack author of the Eighteenth
Century! Yet even as late as forty years
ago, Washington Irving— perhaps drawing,
however, more from book knowledge of the
past than from actual experience of London
literary life—thought "the Poor Devil Author"
a fitting subject for one of his lively sketches.
The Tom Dribble of the American humorist is
a village poet who comes to London hoping to
clear the heights of Parnassus at a bound, and
who, after a period of desperate want, finds
sustenance and contentment in the humble
work of penny-a-lining. There is more in the
moral than possibly Irving himself perceived.
The newspaper press has put an end to "the
Poor Devil Author."