or one of the others I have named,
then he is something much worse--that is, a capitalist publisher. We can
none of us who have to earn a living run away from the patronage of
capital, and when Sir Leslie Stephen was being paid a salary by the late
Mr. George Smith for editing the _Dictionary of National Biography_, and
was told, as we remember that he frequently was, that it was not a
remunerative venture and that, as Mr. Smith was fond of saying, his
publishing business did not pay for his vineries, Sir Leslie Stephen was
experiencing a patronage, if he had known it, not less melancholy than
anything Crabbe suffered from Edmund Burke or the Duke of Rutland.

When one meets a writer who desires to walk on high stilts and to talk of
the independence of literature, one is entitled to ask him if it was a
greater indignity for Lord Tennyson in his younger days to have received
200 pounds a year from the Civil List than for Crabbe to have received
the same sum as the Duke of Rutland's chaplain; in fact, Crabbe earned
the money, and Tennyson did not. There are, as I have said, some most
wonderful and pathetic touches in the account of Crabbe's attempt to
conquer London. There are his letters to his sweetheart, for example,
his "dearest Mira," in one of which he says that he is possessed of
6.25_d._ in the world. In another he relates that he has sold his
surgical instruments in order to pay his bills. Nevertheless, we find
him standing at a bookstall where he sees Dryden's works in three
volumes, octavo, for five shillings, and of his few shillings he ventures
to offer 3_s._ 6_d._--and carries home the Dryden. What bibliophile but
must love such a story as that, even though a day or two afterwards its
hero writes, "My last shilling became 8_d._ yesterday." But what a good
investment withal. Dryden made him a much better poet. Then comes the
famous letter to Burke, and the less known second letter to which I have
referred, and Burke's splendid reception of the writer. Nothing, I
repeat, in the life of any great man is more beautiful than that. As
Crabbe's son finely says: "He went in Burke's room a poor young
adventurer, spurned by the opulent and rejected by the publishers, his
last shilling gone, and his last hope with it. He came out virtually
secure of almost all the good fortune that by successive stages
afterwards fell to his lot." The success that comes to most men is built
up on such chances, on the kind h