many people should have attempted this impossibility. Grub Street, one feels, had, after all, only itself to thank. No one was compelled to live there, and most who chose to live there must have soon regretted their choice. Johnson must often, in his early days in London, have come to see the sound sense in the suggestion of one of the first booksellers to whom he applied-that "it would be his wisest course to buy a porter's knot and carry trunks."

At the one end of the scale, then, it must be admitted, there was the company of Grub street, who, we are told, lived in a condition of destitution to which there is probably no parallel among journalists to-day, though I am myself more than half inclined to agree with Professor Saintsbury's scepticism about the reality of this society and though God knows that even to-day among the motley army of ghosts and free lances who haunt the slums of the newspaper world are to be found lives not so notably more affluent than those of Savage or of the dunces of the Dunciad.

At the other end of the scale, compulsory education, which has given to everyone in the country a certain capacity to read, has created a quite new class—the bestseller writer who makes, if not by his pen, at the least by his dictaphone, sums many times greater than anybody ever made in the eighteenth century. Cheap printing has brought it about that scarcely any are so poor that they cannot afford to pay someone else to do their thinking for them. This privilege was previously confined to the more well-to-do.

Between these two classes came, however, the men who, having acquired a certain position, wrote good books on sensible subjects. This third class the class to which Johnson came to belong-seems, from the figures, to have done very fairly well for itself. Leslie Stephen has made an

interesting collection of the fees which some of such men received.

"The copyright of Tillotson's sermons was sold, it is said, upon his death for £2,500. . . . It is said that 4,600 people subscribed to the two posthumous volumes of Conybeare's Sermons. Young made more than £3,000 for the Satires, called the Universal Passion, published, I think, on the same plan; and the Duke of Wharton is said, though the report is doubtful, to have given him £2,000 for the same work. Gay made £1,000 by his poems, £400 for the copyright of the Beggar's Opera, and three times as much for its second part, Polly. Among historians, Hume seems to have received £700 a volume; Smollett made £2,000 by his catch-penny rival publication; Henry made £3,300 by his history; and Robertson, after the booksellers had made £6,000 by his History of Scotland, sold his Charles V for £4,500. Among the novelists, Fielding received £700 for Tom Jones and £1,000 for Amelia; Sterne for the second edition of the first part of Tristram Shandy and for two additional volumes received £650; besides Lord Faulconberg gave him a living (most inappropriate acknowledgment, one would say) and Warburton a purse of gold. Goldsmith received 60 guineas for the immortal Vicar, a fair price, according to Johnson, for a work by a then unknown author. By each of his plays he made about £500, and for the eight volumes of his Natural History received 800 guineas. Towards the end of the century Mrs. Radcliffe got £500 for the Mysteries of Udolpho and £800 for her last work, the Italian. Perhaps the largest sum given for a single book was £6,000 paid to Hawkesworth for his account of the South Sea Expedition. Horne Tooke received from £4,000 to £5,000 for the Diversions of Purley; and it is added by

happened otherwise, you will forgive the trouble occasioned by the mistake."

The Life of Savage, also, is certainly one which it is more amusing to read than to have lived. Assuredly never was there a man who had a more hearty contempt for unnecessary whining than had Johnson, and yet to him the memory of those first years in London was so dreadful that he could hardly bear to recall it. All those evils which Virgil imagined to reside in the very mouth of hell Johnson thought to be "the concomitant of a printer's house."

Vestibulum ante ipsum, primisque in faucibus orci,
Luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae;

Pallentesque habitant Morbi, tristisque Senectus,
Et Metus et malesuada Fames, et turpis Egestas,
Terribiles visu formæ ; Lethumque laborque.1

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During these years he was but a Party hack, when he was lucky enough to be able to be that, and " a scribbler for a Party" he was afterwards to class in the company of " Commissioner of Excise" as the two lowest of human beings. His unhappiness was soon to become so intense that he began to look upon his previous misery as a sort of

content.

Johnson's manner was doubtless not one wholly favourable to a young man anxious for his first step. He was for a time, Murphy records, employed by Osborne, the bookseller, to make a catalogue of his stock. Not content merely to copy down the titles, Johnson used sometimes to look inside at the contents. To Osborne the reading of a book