CHAP, vii.] APPEAL FOR AUTHOBS BY PROFESSION.
" neither decayed nor depraved here, as with the barbarians 1759.
" who inhabit the banks of the Thames . . Learning and the jEt. 31.
" 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 Me a
thing to be serious about, and who, unlike the Humes and
"Walpoles, was solely dependent 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 would have 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 Jiave been
pandered to and yet further lowered, the writers whose
better talents have been disregarded and wasted, the venal
* See various letters, Burton's Life, ii. 196, 268, 278, 290, 292, &c.