.

Elizabeth Harriotts of Trysall in Staff.,
October 23, 1726.

But I must leave this fascinating volume. I cannot find time to tell you
all it has to say about the Porter family. Mr. Reade is as informative
when treating of the Porters, of Mrs. Johnson and her daughter Lucy, as
he is with the family trees of which I have spoken.

I hasten on to Dr. Hill's _Life_, with which I am only concerned here at
the point where it is affected by Mr. Reade's book. The reflection
inevitably arises that it is well-nigh impossible efficiently to do work
involving research unless one has an income derived from other sources.
Your historian in proportion to the value of his work must be a rich man,
and so must the biographer. Good as Brother Birkbeck Hill's work was, it
would have been better if he had had more money. He might have had many
of these wills and other documents copied, upon the securing of which Mr.
Reade must have expended such very large sums. Dr. Hill was fully alive
to this. "If I had not some private means," he wrote to a friend in
1897, "I could never edit Johnson and Boswell; but I do not get so well
paid as a carpenter." As a matter of fact, I find that he lost exactly 3
pounds by publishing _Dr. Johnson_: _his Friends and his Critics_. He
made 320 pounds by the first four years' sale of the "Boswell." This 320
pounds, including American rights, made the bulk of his payments for his
many years' work, and the book has not yet gone into a second edition. I
think 2,000 were printed. There were between 40,000 and 50,000 copies of
Croker's editions sold, so that we must not be too boastful as to the
improved taste of the present age. 320 pounds is a mere bagatelle to
numbers of our present writers of utterly foolish fiction. Several of
them have been known to spend double that sum on a single motor-car. In
connexion with this matter I cannot refrain from giving one passage from
a letter of Brother Hill's:--

My old friend D--- lamented that the two new volumes (of my _Johnson
Miscellanies_) are so dear as to be above his reach. The net price is
a guinea. On Sunday he had eight glasses of hollands and seltzer--a
shilling each, a pint of stout and some cider, besides half a dozen
cigars or so. Two days' abstinence from cigars and liquor would have
paid for my book.

Mrs. Crump, who writes her father's life, has expressed regret to me that
there is so little in the book conce