distinctions of right and wrong were never confounded, and
that his faults had nothing of malignity or design, but proceeded from
some unexpected pressure or casual temptation." A higher eulogium,
from so rigid a moralist, could not be pronounced on a man whose life
was, for many years, unsettled and perplexed; and those only who have
experienced the pressure of pecuniary necessities can be aware of
the difficulty of resisting meanness, or avoiding vice, if not in the
sense in which these terms are usually understood, at least in a sense
to which they may as properly be applied--that of refusing to prostitute
talents to purposes foreign to the conviction and taste of their
possessor.

On this mainly depend the annoyances and dangers of him who seeks a
subsistence from his pen. The opinions which he may be desirous to
express, or the subject he may be capable of illustrating, may not be
popular, and the more important or learned they be, the more likely is
such to be the case. Of course his labours would be rejected by
publishers, who cannot buy what will not sell; hence no alternative
remains but for him to manufacture marketable commodities; and when the
_popular_ taste of the present, as well as of former times, is
remembered, the degradation to which a man of high intellect must often
submit, when he neglects that for which nature and study peculiarly
qualified him, for what is in general demand, may be easily conceived.
It is not requisite to advert to the taste of the age in which we live,
farther than to allude to the class of works which issues from the
bazaars of _fashionable_ publishers, and to ask, when such are alone in
request, what would have been the fate, had they lived in our own times,
of Johnson, Pope, Dryden, Addison, and the other ornaments of the golden
age of literature? But if even in that age the Odes of Collins were too
abstracted from mundane feelings, too rich in imagery, and too strongly
marked by the fervour of inspiration to be generally appreciated, his
chance of being so, by the public generally, is at this moment less; and
the only hope of his obtaining that popularity to which he is
unquestionably entitled, is by placing his works within the reach of
all, and, more especially, by acquainting the multitude with the opinion
entertained of him, by those whose judgments they have the sense to
venerate, since they are sometimes willing to receive, on the credit of
another, that which they ha