Tim had
made shift to live many years by writing novels, at the rate of
five pounds a volume; but that branch of business is now
engrossed by female authors, who publish merely for the
propagation of virtue, with so much ease and spirit, and
delicacy, and knowledge of the human heart, and all in the serene
tranquillity of high life, that the reader is not only inchanted
by their genius, but reformed by their morality.
After dinner, we adjourned into the garden, where, I observed, Mr
S-- gave a short separate audience to every individual in a small
remote filbert walk, from whence most of them dropt off one after
another, without further ceremony; but they were replaced by
fresh recruits of the same clan, who came to make an afternoon's
visit; and, among others, a spruce bookseller, called Birkin, who
rode his own gelding, and made his appearance in a pair of new
jemmy boots, with massy spurs of plate. It was not without
reason, that this midwife of the Muses used exercise a-horseback,
for he was too fat to walk a-foot, and he underwent some sarcasms
from Tim Cropdale, on his unwieldy size and inaptitude for
motion. Birkin, who took umbrage at this poor author's petulance
in presuming to joke upon a man so much richer than himself, told
him, he was not so unwieldy but that he could move the Marshalsea
court for a writ, and even overtake him with it, if he did not
very speedily come and settle accounts with him, respecting the
expence of publishing his last ode to the king of Prussia, of
which he had sold but three, and one of them was to Whitfield the
methodist.
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