CHAP. 11.3 MAKING SHIFT TO EXIST,

separate which most often has made separation impossible.
Nor, apart from this, is there ground for the feeling of
surprise, or the charge of vacillating purpose. His daily
bread, provided here, literature again presented itself to
his thoughts as in his foreign wanderings; and to have left
better record of himself than the garbled page of Griffiths's
Review, would be a comfort in his exile. Some part of his
late experience, so dearly bought, should be freefy told;
with it could be arranged and combined, what store of
literary fruit he had gathered in Ms travel; and no longer
commanded by a bookseller, or overawed by an old woman,
he might frankly deliver to the world some wholesome
truths of the decay of letters and the rewards of genius. In
this spirit he conceived the Enquiry into the Present State of
Polite Learning in Europe. And if he had reason bitterly
to feel, in his own case, that he had failed to break down
the barriers which encircled the profession of literature,
here might a helping hand be stretched forth to the relief
of others, still struggling for a better fate in its difficult
environments.

With this design another expectation arose,—that the
publication, properly managed, might give him means for
the outfit his appointment would render necessary. And he
bethought him of his Irish friends. The zeal so lately pro-
fessed might now be exerted with effect, and without greatly
plaguing either their pockets or his own pride. In those
days, and indeed until the Act of Union was passed, the
English writer had no copyright in Ireland: it being a part
of the independence of Irish booksellers to steal from
English authors, and of the Irish parliament to protect the
theft; just as, not twenty years before this date, that
excellent native parliament had, on the attempt of a Catholicit is the strong resolve to