CHAP. VII.} APPEAL FOR AUTHORS BY PROFESSION.
was passed to "protect" them, under cover of which their
most valuable private rights were confiscated to the public
use; and it is not twenty years since another act was
passed with a sort of kindly consideration on then* behalf,
by favour of which the poet and the teacher of writing,
the historian and the teacher of dancing, the philosopher
and the royal coachman, Sir Christopher Wren's great
grand-daughter and the descendant of Charles the Second's
French riding-master, are permitted to appear in the same
annual charitable list. But though statesmen have yet to
learn what the state loses by such unwise scorn of what
enlightens and refines it, they cannot much longer remain
ignorant \o what extent they are themselves enslaved
by the power they thus affect to despise, or of the special
functions of government and statesmanship which it is
gradually assuming to itself. Its progress has been unin-
terrupted since Johnson's and Goldsmith's time, and cannot
for as many more years continue unacknowledged. Pitt
sneered when the case of Burns was stated to him, and
talked of literature taldng care of itself;—which indeed it
can do, and in a different and larger sense from what the
minister intended: but whether society can take care of
itself, is also a material question.
Towards its solution, one sentence of Goldsmith's protest
is an offering from his sorrow in these times of authorship
by compulsion, not less worthy than his more cheerful
offerings in those days of authorship by choice, to which
the reader is now invited. " An author may be considered
" as a merciful substitute to the legislature. He acts not by
" punishing crimes, but by preventing them."
.END OF BOOK THE SECOND.