CHAP, vii.] APPEAL FOE AUTHORS BY PROFESSION.
consciousness that he must himself stand at the same bar. 1759.
" This decay which criticism produces may he deplored, but Mt. 31.
" can scarcely be remedied, as the man who writes against
" the critics is obliged to add himself to the number." *
Nevertheless, it was with manly self-assertion of attainments
which raised him above the herd, that he afterwards scorn-
fully disclaimed that viler brotherhood. "I fire with
" indignation when I see persons wholly destitute of educa-
" tion and genius indent to the press, and thus turn book-
" makers, adding to the sin of criticism the sin of ignorance
" also; whose trade is a bad one, and who are bad workmen
" in the trade." So much was not to be said of his work-
manship, by even the deity of the Dunciad—the contriver
of books to be made, the master-employer in the miserable
craft, Griffiths himself.
And thus comes upon the scene that other arch-foe,
to whom, in modern days, the literary craftsman, is but
minister and servant. The critic or sophist might have
been contriver of all harms, while the field of mischief was
his own, and limited to a lecture-room, of Athens or
Alexandria; but he bowed to a more potent spirit of evil
when the man of Paternoster Row or the Poultry came up
in later days, took literature into charitable charge, and
assumed exclusive direction of laws of taste and men of
learning. Drawing on a hard experience, Goldsmith
depicted the " precarious subsistence" and daily fate of
the bookseller's workman: "coming down at stated intervals
" to rummage the bookseller's counter for materials to work
" upon : "f a fate which other neglects now made inevitable.
" The author," Goldsmith had previously said, " when
" impatronised by the great, has naturally recourse to the
* Chap. xi. t Chap., xi.