CHAP, vi.l PECKHAM SCHOOL AND GRUB STREET.
" don't think," said Burke, in one of his first London 1757-
letters to his Irish friends, written seven years before this ^*-29-
date, " there is as much respect paid to a man of letters
" on this side the water as you imagine. I don't find that
"Genius, the
' rathe primrose, which, forsaken dies,'
" is patronised by any of the nobility . . . writers of the first
" talents are left to the capricious patronage of the public.
" After all, a man will make more by the figures of arithmetic
" than the figures of rhetoric, unless he can get into the
" trade wind, and then he may sail secure over Pactolean
" sands." *
It was, in truth, one of those times of transition which
press hardly on all whose lot is cast in them. The patron
was gone, and the public had not come; the seller of books
had as yet exclusive command over the destiny of those
who wrote them, and he was difficult of access—without
certain prospect of the trade wind, hard to move. " The
" shepherd in Virgil," wrote Johnson to Lord Chesterfield,-]-
" grew acquainted with love, and found him a native
" of the rocks." Nor had adverse circumstances been
without their effect upon the literary character itself.!
Covered with the blanket of Boyse, and sheltered by the
night-cellar of Savage, it had forfeited less honour and
self-respect than as the paid client of the ministries of
Walpole and Henry Pelharn. As long as its political
services were acknowledged by offices in the state; as long
* Letter to his school-fellow, Matthew Smith. Life, i. 38.
t Works (Ed. 1825), i. xli.
J If any one would see a sketch, by the hand of a master, of what the career
of the man generally was who lived by literature in this wretched interval, let
him turn to Macaulay's Essays, i. 379-81. Ed. 1853 (3 vola, 12mo.)