By all accounts, S-- is not
without weakness and caprice; but he is certainly good-humoured
and civilized; nor do I find that there is any thing overbearing,
cruel, or implacable in his disposition.
I have dwelt so long upon authors, that you will perhaps suspect
I intend to enroll myself among the fraternity; but, if I were
actually qualified for the profession, it is at best but a
desperate resource against starving, as it affords no provision
for old age and infirmity. Salmon, at the age of fourscore, is
now in a garret, compiling matter, at a guinea a sheet, for a
modern historian, who, in point of age, might be his grandchild;
and Psalmonazar, after having drudged half a century in the
literary mill, in all the simplicity and abstinence of an
Asiatic, subsists upon the charity of a few booksellers, just
sufficient to keep him from the parish, I think Guy, who was
himself a bookseller, ought to have appropriated one wing or ward
of his hospital to the use of decayed authors; though indeed,
there is neither hospital, college, nor workhouse, within the
bills of mortality, large enough to contain the poor of this
society, composed, as it is, from the refuse of every other
profession.
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