The pay was not inadequate; for the first he was to have 250
guineas, for the second 800 guineas, and for the last 500 pounds. But as
employment for the author of a unique novel, an excellent comedy, and a
deservedly successful poem, it was surely--in his own words--'to cut
blocks with a razor.'
And yet, apart from the anxieties of growing money troubles, his life
could not have been wholly unhappy. There are records of pleasant
occasional junketings--'shoe-maker's holidays' he called them--in the
still countrified suburbs of Hampstead and Edgware; there was the
gathering at the Turk's Head, with its literary magnates, for his
severer hours; and for his more pliant moments, the genial
'free-and-easy' or shilling whist-club of a less pretentious kind, where
the student of mixed character might shine with something of the old
supremacy of George Conway's inn at Ballymahon. And there must have been
quieter and more chastened resting-places of memory, when, softening
towards the home of his youth, with a sadness made more poignant by the
death of his brother Henry in May, 1768, he planned and perfected his
new poem of 'The Deserted Village'.
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