rature reach the poor inhabitants
of Grub Street. Addison's poetical power might suggest or justify the
gift of a place from his elegant friends; but a man like De Foe, who
really looked to his pen for great part of his daily subsistence, was
below the region of such prizes, and was obliged in later years not only
to write inferior books for money, but to sell himself and act as a spy
upon his fellows. One great man, it is true, made an independence by
literature. Pope received some L8000 for his translation of Homer, by
the then popular mode of subscription--a kind of compromise between the
systems of patronage and public support. But his success caused little
pleasure in Grub Street. No love was lost between the poet and the
dwellers in this dismal region. Pope was its deadliest enemy, and
carried on an internecine warfare with its inmates, which has enriched
our language with a great satire, but which wasted his powers upon low
objects, and tempted him into disgraceful artifices. The life of the
unfortunate victims, pilloried in the _Dunciad_ and accused of the
unpardonable sins of poverty and dependence, was too often one which
might have extorted sympathy even from a thin-skinned poet and critic.

Illustrations of the manners and customs of that Grub Street of which
Johnson was to become an inmate are only too abundant. The best writers
of the day could tell of hardships endured in that dismal region.
Richardson went on the sound principle of keeping his shop that his shop
might keep him. But the other great novelists of the century have
painted from life the miseries of an author's existence. Fielding,
Smollett, and Goldsmith have described the poor wretches with a vivid
force which gives sadness to the reflection that each of those great men
was drawing upon his own experience, and that they each died in
distress. The _Case of Authors by Profession_ to quote the title of a
pamphlet by Ralph, was indeed a wretched one, when the greatest of their
number had an incessant struggle to keep the wolf from the door. The
life of an author resembled the proverbial existence of the flying-fish,
chased by enemies in sea and in air; he only escaped from the slavery of
the bookseller's garret, to fly from the bailiff or rot in the debtor's
ward or the spunging-house. Many strange half-pathetic and
half-ludicrous anecdotes survive to recall the sorrows and the
recklessness of the luckless scribblers who, like one of Johnson's
a