CHAP. VII.] APPEAL FOE AUTHORS BY PROFESSION.
"more serious, new fashions, follies, and vices, make new monitors
" necessary in every age. An author may be considered as a merciful
" substitute to the legislature ; he acts not by punishing crimes but
" preventing them ; however virtuous the present age, there may be
" still growing employment for ridicule or reproof, for persuasion or
" satire. If the author be therefore still so necessary among us, let us
" treat him with proper consideration as a child of the public, not a
" rent-charge on the community. And indeed a child of the public he
" is in all respects ; for while so well able to direct others, how incapable
"is he frequently found of guiding himself \_ His simplicity exposes
" him to all the insidious approaches of cimning; his sensibility, to the
"slightest invasions of contempt. Though possessed of fortitude to
" stand unmoved the expected bursts of an earthquake, yet of feelings
" so exquisitely poignant as to agonise under the slightest disappoint-
" ment.* Broken rest, tasteless meals, and causeless anxiety, shorten
" his life, or render it unfit for active employment; prolonged vigils
" and intense application still farther contract his span, and make his
" time glide insensibly away. Let us not then aggravate those natural
" inconveniences by neglect; we have had sufficient instances of this
" kind already. Sale and Moore will suffice for one age at least. But
"they are dead, and their sorrows are over.( The neglected author of
" the Persian 'Eclogues [Collins] which, however inaccurate, excel any
" in our language, is still alive. Happy, if insensible of our neglect, not
" raging at our ingratitude. It is enough that the age has already
" produced instances of men pressing foremost in the lists of fame, and
" worthy of better times, schooled by continued adversity into an hatred
" of their kind, flying from thought to drunkenness, yielding to the
"united pressure of labour, penury and sorrow, sinking unheeded,
" without one friend to drop a tear on their unattended obsequies, and
" indebted to charity for a grave." t
These words had been written but a very few years, when
the hand that traced them was itself cold ; and, yielding to
that united pressure of labour, penury, and sorrow, with a
* He improved upon this description in the 84th Letter of the Citizen of the
World. .'' I fancy the character of a poet is in every country the same : fond of
" enjoying the present, careless of the future ; his conversation that of a man of
'' sense, his actions those of a fool; of fortitude able to stand unmoved at the
'' bursting of an earthquake, yet of sensibility to be affected by the breaking of a
'' tea-cup; such is his character.. .the very opposite of that which leads to riches."
f Chap. x.