r demand for books to read that came of this quickening gave
a new extension and vigour to their sale. Addison tells us how large and
rapid was the sale of his "Spectator"; and the sale of Shakspere's works
shows the amazing effect of the new passion for literature on the
diffusion of our older authors. Four issues of his plays in folio, none
of them probably exceeding five hundred copies, had sufficed to meet the
wants of the seventeenth century. But through the eighteenth ten
editions at least followed each other in quick succession; and before
the century was over as many as thirty thousand copies of Shakspere
were dispersed throughout England. Reprints of older works however were
far from being the only need of English readers. The new demand created
an organ for its supply in the publisher, and through the publisher
literature became a profession by which men might win their bread. That
such a change was a healthy one time was to show. But in spite of such
instances as Dryden, at the moment of the change its main result seemed
the degradation of letters. The intellectual demand for the moment
outran the intellectual supply. The reader called for the writer; but
the temper of the time, the diversion of its mental energy to industrial
pursuits, the influences which tended to lower its poetic and
imaginative aspirations, were not such as to bring great writers rapidly
to the front. On the other hand, the new opening which letters afforded
for a livelihood was such as to tempt every scribbler who could handle a
pen; and authors of this sort were soon set to hack-work by the Curles
and the Tonsons who looked on book-making as a mere business. The result
was a mob of authors in garrets, of illiterate drudges as poor as they
were thriftless and debauched, selling their pen to any buyer, hawking
their flatteries and their libels from door to door, fawning on the
patron and the publisher for very bread, tagging rimes which they called
poetry, or abuse which they called criticism, vamping up compilations
and abridgements under the guise of history, or filling the journals
with empty rhetoric in the name of politics.

[Sidenote: Pope.]

It was on such a literary chaos as this that the one great poet of the
time poured scorn in his "Dunciad." Pope was a child of the Revolution;
for he was born in 1688, and he died at the moment when the spirit of
his age was passing into larger and grander forms in 1744. But from all
active c