CHAP. VI.] INTRODUCTIONS AT TOM DAYIES's.
biin now. There is little doubt, from allusions which would 1752.
most naturally nave arisen at the close of the present year, ms4
that, in moments snatched from his thankless and ill-rewarded
toil for Newbery, he was at last secretly indulging in a labour,
which, whatever its effect might be upon his fortunes, was
its own thanks and its own reward. He had begun the
Vicar of Wakefield. Without encouragement or favour in
its progress, and with little hope of welcome at the close of
it; earning meanwhile, apart from it, his bread for the day
by a full day's labour at the desk;—it is his " shame in
" crowds, his solitary pride " to seize and give shape to its
fancies of happiness and home, before they pass for ever.
Most affecting, yet also most cheering! With everything
before him in his hard life that the poet has placed at the
Gates of Hell,* he is content, for himself, to undergo the
chances of them all, that for others he may open the neigh-
bouring Elysian Gate. Nor could the effort fail to bring
strength of its own, and self-sustained resource. In all else
he might be weak and helpless, dependant on others' judg-
ment and doubtful of his own; but, there, it was not so.
He took his own course in that. It was not for Mr. Newbery
he was writing then. Even the poetical fragments which
" that great and hardy genius ! He it is who allows of secrets yet unknown;
" who, undaunted by the seeming difficulties that oppose, prompts human
" curiosity to examine every part of nature, and even exhorts man to try whether
" he cannot subject the tempest, the thunder, and even earthquakes to human
" control. 0, did a man of his daring spirit, of his genius, penetration, and
"learning, travel to those countries which have been visited only by the super-
" stitious and the mercenary, what might not mankind expect! . . what a variety
" of knowledge and useful improvement would he not bring back in exchange !"
dt. of the World. Letter cviii.
* Johnson told Boswell that, in his opinion, Virgil's description of the entrance
into hell applied equally to an author's entrance into literature. "All these," he
said, gloomily repeating the terrible phrases of the poet, "are the concomitants of
" a printing-house." Life, v. 43. I have since found that Burton had made the
same comparison, and quoted those very lines before him. Anatomie of Melancholy,
(ed. xvi. 1838), 203.