All honest, jog-trot
men, who go on smoothly and dully, and write history and politics, and are
praised: men, sir, who, had they been bred cobblers, would all their lives
only have mended shoes, but never made them." "Finding" (says George) "that
there is no great degree of gentility affixed to the character of an usher,
I resolved to accept his proposal; and having the highest respect for
literature, hailed the _antiqua mater_ of Grub Street with reverence.
I thought it my glory to pursue a track which Dryden and Otway trod before
me. Alas, Dryden struggled with indigence all his days; and Otway, it is
said, fell a victim to famine in his thirty-fifth year, being strangled by
a roll of bread, which he devoured with the voracity of a starving man."
In Goldsmith's experience the track soon proved a thorny one. Griffiths was
a hard business man, of shrewd, worldly good sense, but little refinement
or cultivation. He meddled, or rather muddled with literature, too, in a
business way, altering and modifying occasionally the writings of his
contributors, and in this he was aided by his wife, who, according to
Smollett, was "an antiquated female critic and a dabbler in the 'Review.'"
Such was the literary vassalage to which Goldsmith had unwarily subjected
himself.
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