takes occasion to ask what they killed each other for? and what good came of it in the end? These few quaint verses contain the very essence of a primary Quaker doctrine; yet lacking the tangible sign-a drab coat or a broad-brimmed hat-no member of the sect ever yet discovered that, in all but the garb, the peace-loving author was a Friend, moved by the spirit, and holding forth in verse in a strain worthy of the great Fox himself! Is such poetry, then, a vanity, or something worthy of all quakerly patronage? Verily, if the copyright had been valued at a thousand pounds the Society ought to have purchased itprinted the poem as a tract—and distributed it by tens of thousands, yea, hundreds of thousands, till every fighting man in the army and navy had a copy, including the marines. The Society, however, has done nothing of the kind; and it has only acted like society in general towards literature, by regarding it as a vanity or a luxury rather than as a grand moral engine, capable of advancing the spiritual as well as the temporal interests of mankind. It has looked upon poets and their kind as com. mon men, and not as spirits that, like the ascending and descending angels in Jacob's vision, hold commerce with the sky itself, and help to maintain the intercourse between earth and heaven. I have yet a few comments to offer on the charges usually preferred against literary men, but shall reserve them for another and concluding letter.

LETTER III.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE ATHENÆUM :

My dear Sir,-Now to the sins which have been laid at the doors, or tied to the knockers, of literary men: those offences which are to palliate or excuse such public slights and neglects as I have set forth; or may be, such private ones as selling a presentation copy, perhaps a dedicatory one, as a bookseller would sell the Keepsake, with the author's autograph letterswithout the delicacy of waiting for his death, or the policy; for,

as Crabbe says, one's writings then fetch a better price, because there can be no more of them—at a sale of Evans's. Literary men, then, have been charged with being eccentric—and so are comets. They were not created to belong to that mob of undistinguishable-call them not stars, but sparks-constituting the Milky Way. It is a taunt, as old as Chesterfield's Letters, that they are not polished-no more was that Chesterfield's son. They do not dress fashionably, for, if they could afford it, they know better, in a race for immortal fame, than to be outsiders Some, it has been alleged, have run through their estates, which might have been easily traversed at a walk; and one and all have neglected to save half-a-crown out of sixpence a day. Their disinterestedness has been called imprudence, and their generosity extravagance, by parties who bestow their charity like miser Mould.* The only charge,—not a blank charge,—that has been discharged against them, their poverty, has been made a crime, and, what is worse, a crime of their own seeking. They have not, it is true, been notorious for hoarding or funding-the last would, in fact, require the creation of a stock on purpose for them-the Short Annuities. They have never any weight in the city, or anywhere else; in cash temperature their pockets are always at Zero. They are not the "warm with,” but the "cold without;" but it is to their credit,-if they have any credit, that they have not worshipped Plutus. The Muse and Mammon never were in partnership; and it would be a desperate speculation indeed to take to literature as the means of amassing money. He would be a simple Dick Whittington indeed who expected to find its ways paved with philosopher's stones; he must have Dantzic water, with its gold leaf in his head, who thinks to find Castaly a Pactolus; ass indeed must he be who dreams of browsing on Parnassus, like those asses which feed on an herb-(a sort of mint!)—that turns their very teeth to gold. A line-maker, gifted with brains the gods have made

* An illiterate personage, who always volunteered to go round with the hat, but was suspected of sparing his own pocket. Overhearing, one day, a hint to that effect, he made the following speech :--" Other gentlemen puts down what they thinks proper, and so do I. Charity's a private con. cern, and what I gives is nothing to nobody."

poetical, has no chance of making an independence-like Cogia Hassan Alhabbal, the rope-maker, gifted only with a lump of lead. Look into any palm, and if it contain the lines of poetry, the owner's fortune may be foretold at once-viz., a hill very hard to climb, and no prospect in life from the top. It is not always even a Mutton Hill, Garlic Hill, or Cornhill (remember Otway), for meat, vegetable, or bread. Let the would-be Crosus then take up a Bank pen, and address himself to the Old Lady in Threadneedle Street, but not to the Muse: she may give him some "pinch-back," and pinch-front too, but little of the precious metals. Authorship has been pronounced, by a judge on the bench, as but a hand-to-mouth business; and I believe few have ever set up in it as anything else: in fact, did not Crabbe, though a reverend, throw a series of summersets, at least mentally, on the receipt of a liberal sum from a liberal publisher, as if he had just won the capital prize in the grand lottery? Need it be wondered at, then, if men who embrace literature more for love than for lucre, should grasp the adventitious coins somewhat loosely; nay, purposely scatter abroad, like Boaz, a liberal portion of their harvest for those gleaners, with whom they have, perhaps, had a hand-and-glove acquaintance-Poverty and Want? If there be the lively sympathy of the brain with the stomach that physiologists have averred, it is more than likely that there is a similar responsive sensibility between the head and the heart; it would be inconsistent, therefore it would be unnatural, if the same fingers that help to trace the woes of human life were but as so many feelers of the polypus Avarice, grasping everything within reach, and retaining it when got. We, know, on the contrary, that the hand of the author of the " Village Poor House was open as day to melting charity;" so was the house of Johnson munificent in proportion to his means; and as for Goldsmith, he gave more like a rich citizen of the world than one who had not always his own freedom.

But graver charges than improvidence have been brought against the literary character-want of principle, and offences against morality and religion. It might be answered, pleading guilty, that in that case authors have only topped the parts

allotted to thein in the great drama of life-that they have simply acted like vagabonds by law, and scamps by repute, "who have no character to lose, or property to protect;" but I prefer asserting, which I do fearlessly, that literary men, as a body, will bear comparison in point of conduct with any other class. It must not be forgotten that they are subjected to an ordeal quite peculiar, and scarcely milder than the Inquisition. The lives of literary men are proverbially barren of incident, and consequently, the most trivial particulars, the most private affairs, are unceremoniously worked up, to furnish matter for their bald biographies. Accordingly, as soon as an author is defunct, his character is submitted to a sort of Egyptian postmortem trial; or rather, a moral inquest, with Paul Pry for the coroner, and a Judge of Assize, a Commissioner of Bankrupts, a Jew broker, a Methodist parson, a dramatic licenser, a dancingmaster, a master of the ceremonies, a rat-catcher, a bone collector, a parish clerk, a schoolmaster, and a reviewer, for a jury. It is the province of these personages to rummage, ransack, scrape together, rake up, ferret out, sniff, detect, analyze, and appraise, all particulars of the birth, parentage, and education, life, character and behavior, breeding, accomplishments, opinions, and literary performances, of the departed. Secret drawers are searched, private and confidential letters published, manuscripts, intended for the fire, are set up in type, tavern bills and washing bills are compared with their receipts, copies of writs re-copied, inventories taken of effects, wardrobe ticked off by the tailor's account, by-gone toys of youth-billets-doux, snuff-boxes, canes-exhibited, discarded hobby-horses are trotted out,-perhaps even a dissecting surgeon is called in to draw up a minute report of the state of the corpse and its viscera : in short, nothing is spared that can make an item for the clerk to insert in his memoir. Outrageous as it may seem, this is scarcely an exaggeration-for example: who will dare to say that we do not know, at this very hour, more of Goldsmith's affairs than he ever did himself? It is rather wonderful, than otherwise, that the literary character should shine out as it does after such a severe scrutiny. Moreover, it remains yet to be proved that the follies and failings attributed to men of learning and genius are

any more their private property than their copyrights after they have expired. There are certain well-educated ignorant people who contend that a little learning is a dangerous thing-for the poor; and as authors are poor, as a class, these horn-book monopolists may feel bound, in consistency, to see that the common errors of humanity are set down in the bill to letters. It is, of course, the black and white schoolmaster's dogs in a manger that bark and growl at the slips and backslidings of literary men ; but to decant such cant, and see through it clearly, it is only necessary to remember that a fellow will commit half the sins in the Decalogue, and all the crimes in the Calendar-forgery excepted without ever having composed even a valentine in verse, or the description of a lost gelding in prose. Finally, if the misdeeds of authors are to be pleaded in excuse of the neglect of literature and literary men, it would be natural to expect to see these practical slights and snubbings falling heaviest on those who have made themselves most obnoxious to rebuke. But the contrary is the case. I will not invidiously point out examples, but let the reader search the record, and he will find, that the lines which have fallen in pleasant places have belonged to men distinguished for anything rather than morality or piety. The idea, then, of merit having anything to do with the medals, must be abandoned, or we must be prepared to admit a very extraordinary result. It is notorious, that a foreign bird, for a night's warbling, will obtain as much as a native bard-not a second-rate one either-can realize in a whole year: an actor will be paid a sum per night equal to the annual stipend of many a curate; and the twelvemonth's income of an opera-dancer will exceed the revenue of a dignitary of the church. But will any one be bold enough to say, except satirically, that these disproportionate emoluments are due to the superior morality and piety of the concert-room, the opera, and the theatre? They are, in a great measure, the acknowledgments of physical gifts--a well tuned larynx-a well-turned figure, or light fantastic toes, not at all discountenanced in their vocation for being associated with light fantastic behavior. Saving, then, an imputed infirmity of temper and has it not peculiar trials?—the only well-grounded failing the world has to resent, as a characteristic of literary