um; and was liberally rewarded by the company of stationers. He
wrote an account of the criminals, which had, for some time, a
considerable sale; and published many little pamphlets, that accident
brought into his hands, of which it would be very difficult to recover
the memory. By the correspondence which his place in the post-office
facilitated, he procured country newspapers, and sold their
intelligence to a journalist in London, for a guinea a week.

He was afterwards raised to the office of clerk of the franks, in
which he acted with great spirit and firmness; and often stopped
franks, which were given by members of parliament to their friends,
because he thought such extension of a peculiar right illegal. This
raised many complaints, and having stopped, among others, a frank
given to the old dutchess of Marlborough by Mr. Walter Plummer, he was
cited before the house, as for a breach of privilege, and accused, I
suppose very unjustly, of opening letters to detect them. He was
treated with great harshness and severity, but, declining their
questions, by pleading his oath of secrecy, was at last dismissed. And
it must be recorded to his honour, that, when he was ejected from his
office, he did not think himself discharged from his trust, but
continued to refuse, to his nearest friends, any information about the
management of the office.

By this constancy of diligence and diversification of employment, he
in time collected a sum sufficient for the purchase of a small
printing-office, and began the Gentleman's Magazine, a periodical
pamphlet, of which the scheme is known wherever the English language
is spoken. To this undertaking he owed the affluence in which he
passed the last twenty years of his life, and the fortune which he
left behind him, which, though large, had been yet larger, had he not
rashly and wantonly impaired it, by innumerable projects, of which I
know not that ever one succeeded.

The Gentleman's Magazine, which has now subsisted fifty years, and
still continues to enjoy the favour of the world [60], is one of the
most successful and lucrative pamphlets which literary history has
upon record, and therefore deserves, in this narrative, particular
notice.

Mr. Cave, when he formed the project, was far from expecting the
success which he found; and others had so little prospect of its
consequence, that though he had, for several years, talked of his plan
among printers and booksellers, none of t