of the notice, spoken in the Enquiry of the Marquis d'Argens as attempting to add the character of a philosopher to the vices of a debauchee) publicly to 'stigmatise men of the first rank in literature for their 'immoralities, while conscious himself of labouring under 'the infamy of having by the vilest and meanest actions 'forfeited all pretensions to honour and honesty. If such men as these, boasting a liberal education and pretending to genius, practise at the same time those arts which 'bring the sharper to the cart's-tail or the pillory, need 'our author wonder that learning partakes the contempt ' of its professors.'

The time will come when Mr. Griffiths, with accompaniment such as that of his ancient countryman's friend when the leek was offered, will publicly withdraw these vulgar falsehoods; and meanwhile they are not deserving of remark. Indeed, the quarrel, or interchange of foul reproach, as between author and bookseller, may claim at all times the least possible part of attention. It is a third more serious influence to which appeal is made, and on whose right interference the righteous arrangement will at last depend. But at the close of the second epoch, so brief yet so sorrowful, in the life of this great and genuine man-of-letters, it becomes us at least to understand the appeal he would have entered against the existing controul and government of the destinies of Literature. It was manifestly premature, and some passages of his after life will seem to avow as much: but it had too sharp an

experience in it not to have also much truth, and it would better have become certain bystanders in that age to have gone in and parted the combatants, than, as they did, make a ring around them for enjoyment of the sport, or in philosophic weariness abandon the scene altogether.

'You know,' said Walpole to one of his correspondents, 'how I shun authors, and would never have been one 'myself, if it obliged me to keep such bad company. 'They are always in earnest, and think their profession 'serious, and dwell upon trifles, and reverence learning. 'I laugh at all these things, and divert myself.' 'It is 'probable,' said David Hume, 'that Paris will be long 'my home. I feel little inclination to the factious bar'barians of London. Learning and the learned are on a very different footing here, from what they are among 'the factious barbarians.'

Matter of diversion for one, of disgust and avoidance for others, the factious barbarian struggle was left to a man more single-hearted: who thought the business of life a thing to be serious about, and who, unlike the Humes and Walpoles, was solely dependant for his bread on the very booksellers, of the danger of whose absolute power he desired to give timely warning. This he might do, as it seems to me, without personal injustice, and without pettish spite to the honest craft of bookselling, or to any other respectable trade. He might believe that those trade-indentures would turn out ill for literature; that in enlarging its channels by vulgar means, might be mischief rather than good;

that facilities for appeal to a wide circle of uninformed readers, were but facilities for employment to a circle of writers nearly as wide and quite as uninformed; that, in raising up a brood of writers whom any other earthly employment had better fitted, lay the danger of bringing down the man of genius to their level; and, in short, that Literature, properly understood and rightly cherished, had altogether a higher duty and significance than the profit or the loss of a tradesman's counter. In this I hold him to have taken fair ground. The reputations we have lived to see raised on these false foundations, the good clerks and accountants whom magazines have turned into bad literary men, the readers whose tastes have been pandered to and yet further lowered, the writers whose better talents have been disregarded and wasted, the venal puffery and pretence which have more depressed the modern man-of-letters than ever shameless flattery and beggary reduced his predecessors; are good evidence on that point.

still a certain reWith the after

But when Goldsmith wrote, there was cognised work for the bookseller to do. course of this narrative it will more fully appear, even in that modified assent and adhesion of Goldsmith himself which he certainly did not directly contemplate, perhaps wholly overlooked, when the Enquiry was planned, and a protest against booksellers entered into it. To complete that protest now (a most essential part of this chapter in his fortunes), I will add proof, from other parts of the

Enquiry, of the manly tendency, and freedom from personal spleen, apparent in the structure of the appeal which was built upon it.

"No nation gives greater encouragements to learning than we do; yet none are so injudicious in the application . . All our magnificent endowments of colleges are erroneous; and at best, more frequently enrich the prudent than reward the ingenious. . Every encouragement given to stupidity, when known to be such, is a negative insult to genius. This appears in nothing more evident than the undistinguished success of those who solicit subscriptions. We see the latter made a resource of indigence, and requested, not as rewards of merit, but as a relief of distress. If tradesmen happen to want skill in conducting their own business, yet they are able to write a book: if mechanics want money, or ladies shame, they write books and solicit subscriptions. Scarcely a morning passes, that proposals of this nature are not thrust into the half opening doors of the rich; with perhaps a paltry petition, showing the author's wants but not his merits... What then are the proper encouragements of genius? I answer, subsistence and respect."

This is not the language of one who would have had Literature again subsist, as of old, on servile adulation and vulgar charity. Goldsmith, indeed, seems rather to have thought with an earnest man of genius in our own day, that grants of money are by no means the chief things wanted for proper organisation of the literary class. 'To give our men of letters,' says Mr. Carlyle, 'stipends, endowments, and all furtherance of cash, will 'do little toward the business. On the whole, one is

weary of hearing about the omnipotence of money. I 'will say rather, that, for a genuine man, it is no evil to 'be poor. Money, in truth, can do much, but it cannot 'do all. We must know the province of it, and confine it 'there; and even spurn it back, when it wishes to get 'farther.' One of the lively illustrations of the Enquiry is not very opposite to this. The beneficed divine,' says Goldsmith, 'whose wants are only imaginary, expostulates as bitterly as the poorest author that ever snuffed his 'candle with finger and thumb. Should interest or good 'fortune advance the divine to a bishopric, or the poor son ' of Parnassus into that place which the other has resigned, 'both are authors no longer. The one goes to prayers 'once a day, kneels upon cushions of velvet, and thanks ' gracious heaven for having made the circumstances of all 'mankind so extremely happy; the other battens on all 'the delicacies of life, enjoys his wife and his easy chair, ' and sometimes, for the sake of conversation, deplores the 'luxury of these degenerate days. All encouragements 'to merit are misapplied, which make the author too 'rich to continue his profession.'

But he would not therefore starve him, or to the mercies of blind chance altogether surrender him. He recals a time he would wish to see revived; when, with little of wealth or worldly luxury, the writer could yet command esteem for himself and reverence for the claims of his calling; and he dwells upon the contrast of existing times, in language which will hereafter connect