CHAP.V.] FELLOWSHIP WITH JOHNSON.

" Farewell," says Miltou, at tlie close of one of Ms early
letters to Ms friend Gill, " and on Tuesday next expect me JEt. 33.
" in London among the booksellers."* The booksellers were
of little mark in Milton's days; but the presence of such
men among them began a social change important to both,
and not ill expressed in an incident of the days I am
describing, when Horace "Walpole met the wealthy represen-
tative of the profits of Paradise Lost at a great party at the
Speaker's, while Johnson was appealing to public charity
for the last destitute descendant of Milton. But from the
now existing compact between trade and letters, the popular
element could not wholly be excluded; and, to even the
weariest drudge, hope was a part of it. From the loopholes
of Paternoster Row, he could catch glimpses of the world.
Churchill had emerged, and Sterne, for a few brief years;
and but that Johnson had sunk into idleness, he might have
been reaping a harvest more continuous than theirs, and yet
less dependent on the trade. Drudgery is not good, but
flattery and falsehood are worse ; and it had become plain to
Goldsmith, even since the days of the Enquiry, how much
better it was for men of letters to live by the labour of their
hands till more original labour became popular with trading
patrons, than to wait with their hands across, as Johnson
contemptuously described it, till great men came to feed
them.t Whatever the call that Newbery or any other

* Todd's Milton, vii. 176-7. And see Aubrey's Letters and Lives, ii. 285, 440.
Gill is the " infamous Gill" whose " railing rhymes " against himself Ben Jonson
with so much reason bitterly abuses. See them in Wood's Athene Ownienses
(ed. 1813) ii, 597-8 ; but incorrectly attributed to Gill's father, whom he succeeded
as master of St. Paul's.

- >f* Occasions for observing with what cheerful acquiescence Goldsmith hereafter
accepted these relations of author and bookseller, will frequently occur. According
to his friend Cooke, indeed, it seems to have been a favourite topic with him to
" tell pleasant stories of Mr. Newbery, who, he said, was the patron of more
" distressed authors than any man of his time." Europ. Mag. xxiv. 92.the bursting of an earthquake, yet of sensibility to be affected by the breaking