every votary of humanity, has long felt indignant at that sordid state and all those secret sorrows to which men of the finest genius, or of sublime industry, are reduced and degraded in society. Johnson himself, who rejected that perpetuity of literary property, which some enthusiasts seemed to claim at the time the subject was undergoing infringe on the privilege granted to the first claimant.-In Queen Anne's time, when the office of licensers was extinguished, a more liberal genius was rising in the nation, and literary property received a more definite and a more powerful protection. A limited term was granted to every author to reap the fruits of his labours; and Lord Hardwicke pronounced this statute "a universal the discussion of the judges, is however for extendpatent for authors." Yet subsequently, the sub-ing the copyright to a century. Could authors ject of literary property involved discussion; even at so late a period as in 1769, it was still to be litigated. It was then granted that originally an author had at common law a property in his work, but that the act of Anne took away all copyright after the expiration of the terms it permitted. As the matter now stands, let us address an arithmetical age-but my pen hesitates to bring down my subject to an argument fitted to "these coster-monger times." On the present principle of literary property, it results that an author disposes of a leasehold property of twenty-eight years, often for less than the price of one year's purchase! How many living authors are the sad witnesses of this fact, who, like so many Esaus, have sold their inheritance for a meal! I leave the whole school of Adam Smith to calm their calculating emotions concerning "that unprosperous race of men (sometimes this master-seer calls them " unproductive") "commonly called men of letters" who are pretty much in the situation which lawyers and physicians would be in, were these, as he tells us, in that state when "a scholar and a beggar seem to have been very nearly synonymous terms" -and this melancholy fact that man of genius discovered, without the feather of his pen brushing away a tear from his lid-without one spontaneous and indignant groan! Authors may exclaim, "we ask for justice, not charity." They would not need to require any favour, nor claim any other than that protection which an enlightened government, in its wisdom and its justice, must bestow. They would leave to the public disposition the sole appreciation of their works; their book must make its own fortune; a bad work may be cried up, and a good work may be cried down; but Faction will soon lose its voice, and Truth acquire one. The cause we are pleading is not the calamities of indifferent writers; but of those whose utility, or whose genius, long survives that limited term which has been so hardly wrenched from the penurious hand of verbal lawyers. Every lover of literature, and * A Coster-monger, or Costard-monger, is a dealer in apples, which are so called because they are shaped like a costard, i. e. a man's head. Steevens-Johnson explains the phrase eloquently: "In these times when the prevalence of trade has produced that meanness, that rates the merit of everything by money." secure this their natural right, literature would acquire a permanent and a nobler reward; for great authors would then be distinguished by the very profits they would receive, from that obscure multitude, whose common disgraces they frequently participate, notwithstanding the superiority of their own genius. Johnson himself will serve as a proof of the incompetent remuneration of literary property. He undertook and he performed an Herculean labour, which employed him so many years that the price he obtained was exhausted before the work was concluded:-the wages did not even last as long as the labour! Where then is the author to look forward, when such works are undertaken, for a provision for his family, or for his future existence? It would naturally arise from the work itself, were authors not the most ill-treated and oppressed class of the community. The daughter of MILTON need not have craved the alms of the admirers of her father, if the right of authors had been better protected; his own Paradise Lost had then been her better portion, and her most honourable inheritance. The children of BURNS would have required no subscriptions; that annual tribute which the public pay to the genius of their parent was their due, and would have been their fortune. Authors now submit to have a shorter life than their own celebrity. While the book markets of Europe are supplied with the writings of English authors, and they have a wider diffusion in America than at home, it seems a national ingratitude to limit the existence of works for their authors to a short number of years, and then to seize on their possession for ever. THE SUFFERINGS OF AUTHORS. THE natural rights and properties of AUTHORS not having been sufficiently protected, they are defrauded, not indeed of their fame, though they may not always live to witness it, but of their uninterrupted profits, which might save them from their frequent degradation in society. That act of Anne which confers on them some right of property, acknowledges that works of learned men have been carried on "too often to the ruin of them and their families." Hence we trace a literary calamity which the public endure in those "Authors by Profession," who, finding often too late in life that it is the worst profession, are not scrupulous to live by some means or other. "I must live," cried one of the brotherhood, shrugging his shoulders in his misery, and almost blushing for a libel he had just printed-"I do not see the necessity," was the dignified reply. Trade was certainly not the origin of authorship. Most of our great authors have written from a more impetuous impulse than that of a mechanic; urged by a loftier motive than that of humouring the popular taste, they have not lowered themselves by writing down to the public, but have raised the public to them. Untasked, they composed at propitious intervals; and feeling, not labour, was in their last, as in their first page. When we became a reading people, books were to be suited to popular tastes, and then that trade was opened that leads to the workhouse. A new race sprang up, that, like Ascham, "spoke as the common people;" but would not, like Ascham, "think as wise men." The founders of "Authors by Profession" appear as far back as in the Elizabethan age. Then there were some roguish wits, who taking advantage of the public humour, and yielding their principle to their pen, lived to write, and wrote to live; loose livers and loose writers !-like Autolycus, they ran to the fair, with baskets of hasty manufactures, fit for clowns and maidens.* Even then flourished the craft of authorship, and the mysteries of book-selling. Robert GREENE, the master-wit, wrote "The Art of Coney-catch- | ing," or Cheatery, in which he was an adept; he died of a surfeit of rhenish and pickled herrings, at a fatal banquet of authors;-and left as his legacy among the Authors by Profession' "A groatsworth of wit, bought with a million of repentance." One died of another kind of surfeit. Another was assassinated in a brothel. But the list of the calamities of all these worthies have as great variety as those of the Seven Champions Nor were the stationers, or book-venders, as the publishers of books were first designated, at a fault in the mysteries of " coney-catching." Deceptive and vaunting title-pages were practised to such excess, that TOM NASH, an "Author by Profession," never fastidiously modest, blushed at the title of his " Pierce Pennilesse," which the publisher had flourished in the first edition, like * An abundance of these amusing tracts eagerly bought up in their day, but which came in the following generation to the ballad-stalls, are in the present enshrined in the cabinets of the curious. Such are the revolutions of literature! "a tedious mountebank." The booksellers forged great names to recommend their works, and passed off in currency their base metal stamped with a royal head. "It was an usual thing in those days," says honest Anthony Wood, "to set a great name to a book or books, by the sharking booksellers or snivelling writers, to get bread." Such authors as these are unfortunate, before they are criminal; they often tire out their youth before they discover that "Author by Profession" is a denomination ridiculously assumed, for it is none! The first efforts of men of genius are usually honourable ones; but too often they suffer that genius to be debased. Many who would have composed history have turned voluminous party-writers; many a noble satirist has become a hungry libeller. Men who are starved in society, hold to it but loosely. They are the children of Nemesis! they avenge themselves— and with the Satan of MILTON they exclaim, "Evil, be thou my good!" Never were their feelings more vehemently echoed than by this Nash-the creature of genius, of famine, and despair. He lived indeed in the age of Elizabeth, but writes as if he had lived in our own. He proclaimed himself to the world as Pierce Pennilesse, and on a retrospect of his literary life, observes that he had "sat up late and rose early, contended with the cold, and conversed with scarcitie;" he says, "all my labours turned to losse,-I was despised and neglected, my paines not regarded, or slightly rewarded, and I myself, in prime of my best wit, laid open to povertie. Whereupon I accused my fortune, railed on my patrons, bit my pen, rent my papers, and raged."-And then comes the after-reflection, which so frequently provokes the anger of genius: "How many base men that wanted those parts I had, enjoyed content at will, and had wealth at command! I called to mind a cobbler that was worth five hundred pounds; an hostler that had built a goodly inn; a carman in a leather pilche that had whipt a thousand pound out of his horses tail-and have I more than these? thought I to myself; am I better born? am I better brought up? yea, and better favoured! and yet am I a beggar? How am I crost, or whence is this curse? Even from hence, the men that should employ such as I am, are enamoured of their own wits, though they be never so scurvie; that a scrivener is better paid than a scholar; and men of art must seek to live among cormorants, or be kept under by dunces, who count it policy to keep them bare to follow their books the better." And then, Nash thus utters the cries of A DESPAIRING AUTHOR! "Why is't damnation to despair and die When life is my true happiness' disease? The faulty means that might my pain appease; Ah worthless wit, to train me to this woe! And ban the air wherein I breathe a wretch! And Midas' ears relent not at my moan! In some far land will I my griefs rehearse, 'Mongst them that will be moved when I shall groan! England, adieu ! the soil that brought me forth! Adieu, unkinde! where skill is nothing worth!" Such was the miserable cry of an "Author by Profession" in the reign of Elizabeth. Nash not only renounces his country in his despair-and hesitates on "the faulty means" which have appeased the pangs of many of his unhappy brothers, but he proves also the weakness of the moral principle among these men of genius; for he promises, if any Maecenas will bind him by his bounty, he will do him "as much honour as any poet of my beardless years in England-but," he adds, "if he be sent away with a flea in his ear, let him look that I will rail on him soundly; not for an hour or a day, while the injury is fresh in my memory, but in some elaborate polished poem, which I will leave to the world when I am dead, to be a living image to times to come of his beggarly parsimony." Poets might imagine that CHATTERTON had written all this, about the time he struck a balance of his profit and loss by the death of Beckford the Lord Mayor, in which he concludes with " am glad he is dead by 37. 13s. 6d. *" A MENDICANT AUTHOR, AND THE PATRONS OF FORMER TIMES. Ir must be confessed, that before "Authors by Profession" had fallen into the hands of the booksellers, they endured peculiar grievances. They were pitiable retainers of some great family. The miseries of such an author, and the insolence and penuriousness of his patrons, who would not return the poetry they liked and would not pay for, may be traced in the eventful life of THOMAS CHURCHYARD, a poet of the age of Elizabeth, one of those unfortunate men who have written poetry all their days, and lived a long life, to complete the misfortune. His muse was so fertile, that his works pass all enumeration. He courted numerous patrons, who valued the poetry, while they left the poet to his own miserable contemplations. In a long catalogue of his works, which this poet has himself given, he adds a few memoranda, as he proceeds, a little ludicrous, but very melancholy. He wrote a book which he could never afterwards recover from one of his patrons, and adds, "all which book was in as good verse as ever I made; an honourable knight dwelling in the Black Friers can witness the same, because I read it unto him." Another accorded him the same remuneration-on which he adds, "An infinite number of other songs and sonnets given where they cannot be recovered, nor purchase any favour when they are craved." Still, however, he announces "twelve long tales for Christmas, dedicated to twelve honourable Lords." Well might Churchyard write his own sad life, under the title of "The tragicall Discourse of the haplesse Man's Life." It will not be easy to parallel this pathetic description of the wretched age of a poor neglected poet mourning over a youth vainly spent. "High time it is to haste my carcase hence: I look in glass, and find my cheeks so lean And I was born to house and land by right. Well, ere my breath my body do forsake My books, my scrawls, and songs that I did make, Now, friends, shake hands, I must be gone, my boys! Do glide away like shadow of the sun. Yet Churchyard was no contemptible bard; he composed a national poem, "The Worthiness of Wales," which has been reprinted, and will be still dear to his "Father-land," as the Hollanders expressively denote their natal spot. He wrote, in " The Mirrour of Magistrates," the life of Wolsey, which has parts of great dignity; and the life of Jane Shore, which was much noticed in his day, for a severe critic of the times writes: "Hath not Shore's wife, although a light-skirt she, Given him a chaste, long, lasting memorie?" Churchyard and the miseries of his poetical life are alluded to by Spenser. He is old Palemon in "Colin Clout's come home again." Spenser is supposed to describe this laborious writer for half a century, whose melancholy pipe, in his old age, may make the reader "rew :" "Yet he himself may rewed be more right, That sung so long untill quite hoarse he grew." His epitaph, preserved by Camden, is extremely instructive to all poets, could epitaphs instruct them : "Poverty and poetry his tomb doth inclose; of mendicity, and lived on alms, although their lives and their fortunes had been consumed in forming national labours. The antiquary STOWE exhibits a striking example of the rewards conferred on such valued authors. Stowe had devoted his life, and exhausted his patrimony, in the study of English antiquities; he had travelled on foot throughout the kingdom, inspecting all monuments of antiquity, and rescuing what he could from the dispersed libraries of the monasteries. His stupendous collections, in his own hand-writing, still exist, to provoke the feeble industry of literary loiterers. He felt through life the enthusiasm of study; and seated in his monkish library, living with the dead more than with the living, he was still a student of taste for Spenser the poet visited the library of Stowe; and the first good edition of Chaucer was made so chiefly by the labours of our author. Late in life, worn out with study and the cares of poverty, neglected by that proud metropolis of which he had been the historian, his good-humour did not desert him; for being afflicted with sharp pains in his aged feet, he observed that "his affliction lay in that part which formerly he had made so much use of." Many a mile had he wandered and much had he expended, for those treasures of antiquities which had exhausted his fortune, and with which he had formed works of great public utility. It was in his eightieth year that Stowe at length received a public acknowledgment of his services, which will appear to us of a very extraordinary nature. He was so reduced in his circumstances that he petitioned James I. for a licence to collect alms for himself! "as a recompense for his labour and travel of forty-five years, in setting forth the Chronicles of England, and eight years taken up in the Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, towards his relief now in his old age; having left his former means of living, and only employing himself for the service and good of his country." Letters patent under the great seal were granted. After no penurious commendation of Stowe's labours, he is permitted "to gather the benevolence of well-disposed people within this realm of England: to ask, gather, and take the alms of all our loving subjects." These letters-patent were to be published by the clergy from their pulpit; they produced so little that they were renewed for another twelvemonth: one entire parish in the city contributed seven shillings and sixpence! Such then was the patronage received by Stowe, to be a licensed beggar throughEven at a later period, in the reign of the lite-out the kingdom for one twelvemonth! Such was rary James, great authors were reduced to a state Wherefore, good neighbours, be merry in prose." It appears also by a confession of Tom Nash, that an author would then, pressed by the res angusta domi, when "the bottom of his purse was turned upward," submit to compose pieces for gentlemen who aspired to authorship. He tells us on some occasion, that he was then in the country composing poetry for some country squire; --and says, "I am faine to let my plow stand still in the midst of a furrow, to follow these Senior Fantasticos, to whose amorous villanellas* I prostitute my pen," and this, too, "twice or thrice in a month;" and he complains that it is "poverty which alone maketh me so unconstant to my determined studies, trudging from place to place to and fro, and prosecuting the means to keep me from idlenesse." An author was then much like a vagrant. * Villanellas, or rather "Villanescas, are properly country rustic songs, but commonly taken for ingenious ones made in imitation of them."-PINEDA. the public remuneration of a man who had been useful to his nation, but not to himself! Such was the first age of Patronage, which branched out in the last century into an age of The subject before us exhibits one of the most singular spectacles in these volumes; that of a scholar of extensive erudition, whose life seems to have passed in the study of languages and the sciences, while his faculties appear to have been disordered from the simplicity of his nature, and driven to madness by indigence and insult. He formed the wild resolution of becoming a mendicant author, the hawker of his own works; and by this mode endured all the aggravated sufferings, the great and the petty insults of all ranks of society, and even sometimes from men of learning themselves, who denied a mendicant author the sympathy of a brother. Subscriptions, when an author levied contributions were the unlucky hawkers of their own works; of before his work appeared; a mode which inun- which I shall give a remarkable instance in dated our literature with a great portion of its MYLES DAVIES, a learned man maddened by worthless volumes of these the most remarkable want and indignation. are the splendid publications of Richard Blome; they may be called fictitious works; for they are only mutilated transcripts from Camden and Speed, but richly ornamented, and pompously printed, which this literary adventurer, said to have been a gentleman, loaded the world with, by the aid of his subscribers. Another age was that of Dedications, when the author was to lift his tiny patron to the skies, in an inverse ratio as he lowered himself, in this public exhibition. Sometimes the party haggled about the pricet; or the statue, while stepping into his niche, would turn round on the author to assist his invention. A patron of Peter Motteux, dissatisfied with Peter's colder temperament, composed the superlative dedication to himself, and completed the misery of the author by subscribing it with Mot-tors. teux's name! Worse fared it when authors This practice of dedications had indeed flourished before; for authors had even prefixed numerous dedica tions to the same work, or dedicated to different patrons, the separate divisions. Fuller's "Church History" is disgraced by the introduction of twelve title-pages, besides the general one; with as many particular dedications, and no less than fifty or sixty inscriptions, addressed to benefactors; for which he is severely censured by Heylin. It was an expedient to procure dedication fees; for publishing books by subscription was an art not then discovered. The price of the dedication of a play was even fixed, from five to ten guineas, from the Revolution to the time of George L.; when it rose to twenty-but sometimes a bargain was to be struck-when the author and the play were alike indifferent. Even on these terms could vanity be gratified with the coarse luxury of panegyric, of which every one knew the price. This circumstance was so notorious at the time, that it occasioned a poetical satire in a dialogue between Motteux and his patron Henningham-preserved in that vast flower bed or dunghill, for it is both, of "Poems on Affairs of State," vol. ii. 251. The patron, in his zeal to omit no possible distinction that could attach to him, had given one circumstance which no one but himself could have known, and which he thus regrets: "PATRON. I must confess I was to blame That one particular to name; The rest could never have been known, POET. I beg your pardon, Sir, for that! PATRON. Why de what would you be at? MYLES DAVIES and his works are imperfectly known to the most curious of our literary collecHis name has scarcely reached a few; the author and his works are equally extraordinary, and claim a right to be preserved in this treatise on the Calamities of Authors. cult, from its miscellaneous character, to describe; Our author commenced printing a work, diffiof which the volumes appeared at different periods. The early and the most valuable volumes were the first and second; they are a kind of bibliographical, biographical, and critical work, on English Authors. They all bear a general title of "Athenæ Britannica §." Collectors have sometimes met with a very curious volume, entitled "Icon Libellorum," and sometimes the same book, under another title,— §"Athena Britannica, or a Critical History of the Oxford and Cambridge Writers and Writings, with those of the Dissenters and Romanists as well as other Authors and Worthies, both Domestic and Foreign, both Ancient and Modern. Together with an occasional freedom of thought, in criticising and comparing the parallel qualifications of the most eminent authors and their performances, both in MS. and print, both at home and abroad. By M. D. London, 1716." On the first volume of this series Dr. Farmer, a bloodhound of unfailing scent in curious and obscure English books, has written on the leaf"This is the only copy I have met with." Even the great bibliographer, Baker, of Cambridge, never met but with three volumes (the edition at the British Museum is in seven) sent him as a great curiosity by the Earl of Oxford, and now deposited in his collection at St. John's College. Baker has written this memorandum in the first volume: "Few copies were printed, so the work is become scarce, and for that reason will be valued. The book in the greatest part is borrowed from modern historians, but yet contains some things more uncommon, and not easily to be met with." How superlatively rare must be the English volumes which the eyes of Farmer and Baker never lighted on! |