CHAP, vii.] APPEAL FOB, AUTHOIiS BY PROFESSION.

" bookseller's shop, for materials to work upon, and the 1759.

" knowledge he displays of his minutest labours, give great M. 31.

" reason to suspect" (generous and forbearing Griffiths !)

" he may himself hare had concerns in the bad trade of

" bookmaking. Fronti nulla fides. We have heard of many

" a Writer, who, ' patronised only by his bookseller,' has

" nevertheless affected the Gentleman in print, and talked

" full as cavalierly as our Author himself. We have even

" known one hardy enough* publicly to stigmatise men of

" the first rank in literature, for their immoralities, while

" conscious himself of labouring under the infamy of having,

" by the vilest and meanest actions, forfeited all pretensions

" to honour and honesty. If such men as these, boasting

" a liberal education, and pretending to genius, practise at

" the same time those arts which bring the Sharper to the

" cart's-tail or the pillory, need our Author wonder that

" ' learning partakes the . contempt of its professors.' If

" characters of this stamp are to be found among the

" learned, need any one be surprised that the great prefer

" the society of Fiddlers, Gamesters, and Buffoons ? " t

* Kenrick has the mock decency here to subjoin in a note exactly that kind of
aifected disclaimer of any personal allusion to Goldsmith in this particular passage,
which fixes the offence charged more expressly upon him. " Even our author,"
he says, " seems to have wandered into calumny when he speaks of the Marquis
" d'Argens as attempting to add the character of a philosopher to the vices of a
" debauchee." That he was himself intended would require no clearer evidence to
Goldsmith's mind than the identity of the expression—sharper—with the
" sharper and villain" of Griffiths's letter, ante, p. 170.

t Monthly Review, xxi. 389, November 1759. Can any one doubt that these
painful passages in Goldsmith's history were vividly present with him two years
later, when his man in black, talking of genius and its rewards among the tombs
of Westminster Abbey, surprised the Chinese citizen by describing a class of men
who "have no other employment but to cry out Dunce, and Scribbler; to
" praise the dead and revile bhe living; to grant a man of confessed abilities
'' some small share of merit; to applaud twenty blockheads, in order to gain the
'' reputation of candour ; and to revile the moral character of the man whose
" writings they cannot injure. Such wretches are kept in pay by some mercenary
"bookseller, or more frequently the bookseller himself takes this dirty work off
" their hands, as all that is required is to be very abusive and very dull." Citizen
nfthe World, xiii. "j-Chap. xi.