When he existed in all his shabby glory, he
was a great plague to the booksellers. We
have a record of him as early as about the
year 1685, when John Dunton (then just commencing
his career as. a publisher) was sorely
troubled by the tricks and evasions of the hack
writers who crowded about him. Before John
had finished his apprenticeship, he had come to
the conclusion that the "great concern" of
these gentlemen "lay more in how much a
sheet, than in any generous respect they bore to
the commonwealth of learning." He speaks of
their false pretences of profound scholarship,
and adds: "As for their honesty, it is very
remarkable: they will either persuade you to
go upon another man's copy, or steal his
thought, or to abridge his book, which should
have got him bread for his lifetime. When you
have engaged them upon some project or other,
they will write you off three or four sheets,
perhaps; take up three or four pounds upon an
urgent occasion; and you shall never hear of
them more." Dunton's sneer about the greater
love of his authors for what they earned by
their labours than for the abstract interests
of the commonwealth of letters, hardly comes
with a good grace from the mouth of a bookseller.
What was his main object in issuing
works to the public? Was he content to starve,
that the intellectual state might prosper? True,
he does not seem to have been a very successful
man; but it is hardly probable that he offered
himself a willing sacrifice to literature.

One does not read much of the "Poor Devil
Authoress." The quiet, homely manners of
women, their inexpensive habits, and their power
of making the most out of a little, are so many
guarantees, that, even when their earnings are
small, they will contrive to live with decency.
Many hard-working and ill-paid authoresses
have chequered our literary annals, and may
doubtless still be found patiently toiling in
humble lodgings, and winning their daily bread
bravely; but at no time has the literary woman,
speaking broadly and generally, fallen to the
level of the Grub-street pamphleteer or the
Drury-lane poet. To this rule, however, one
unhappy exception occurs to the memory. Mrs.
Charke, the truly unfortunate daughter of Colley
Cibber, was a sort of female Otway, without his
genius. Petted by her parents when she was a
child, and, after her marriage to a violin player
of dissolute habits, repudiated by her father for
levity of conduct which the memory of his own
imprudences should have made him especially
charitable in judging, she passed the remainder
of her life in miserable penury, sometimes writing
for the booksellers, sometimes appearing on
the stage. Mr. Whyte, an Irish gentleman, has
given an account of a visit which he paid to the
poor lady in company with a London bookseller,
who had been invited to hear the manuscript of
a novel read, and to make an offer for the purchase.
She was then a widow; but her father
was still living. Charlotte, who in her youth
had dwelt in luxury equal to that of many ladies
of title, was now domiciled in a wretched thatched
hovel in the purlieus of Clerkenwell Bridewell,
at that time a wild suburb, where the scavengers
used to throw the cleansings of the streets. The
house and its scanty furniture sufficiently indicated
the extreme poverty of the inmates. Mrs.
Charke sat on a broken chair by a little scrap
of fire, and the visitors were accommodated with
a rickety deal board. A half-starved dog lay at
the authoress's feet; a cat sat on one hob, and
a monkey on the other; while a magpie perched
on the back of its mistress's chair. A worn-out
pair of bellows served for a writing-desk, and a
broken cup for an inkstand: these were matched
by the pen, which was worn down to the stump,
and was the only one on the premises. The
lady asked thirty guineas for the copyright; the
bookseller offered five, but was at length induced
by his friend to give ten, on condition
that Mr. Whyte would pay a moiety, and take
half the risk. In addition, the authoress was
to receive fifty copies for herself, which was probably
equal to so much more money. It may
be questioned whether the poor Minerva Press
novelists of the next generation (who were
almost all women) made such good bargains as
this. Five guineas is said to have been the regulation
price of a three volume romance in
those days— and we must candidly admit that it
was seldom worth more.

The visit of the bookseller and his friend to
Mrs. Charke took place in the year 1755. Six
years previously, an obscure lodging near Shoe-lane
saw the last moments of a man who may be
taken as an exemplar of the needy profligate
author of past times. Samuel Boyse, the writer
of a poem called Deity, which made some noise
for a while, was an Irishman by birth, though of
English origin. His father was a Dissenting
minister; but young Boyse seems to have gone
astray very early. He idled away his time in
dissipation when at college, and married before
he was twenty. Had his wife been a woman of
good sense, and capable of exercising an influence
over him, he might have made a fresh start in
life; but she was thoughtless and extravagant,
and Boyse became so involved that his father
was obliged to sell all he had to pay the young
man's debts, and died soon after in poverty.
Boyse passed some time in Edinburgh, writing
poems, and seeking to make friends among the
nobility; though, whenever fortune presented
him with an opening, he contrived to miss it by
his habits of indolence. After a while, he came
up to London, and soon dropped to the lowest
abysses of literary vagabondage. He would
meet the necessities of the moment by begging-
letters; and, having thus obtained half a guinea
or so, would sit rioting in a tavern until the money
was all spent, while his wife and child starved at
home. Sometimes he wrote verses by the hundred
for the Gentleman's Magazine. These he
would compose in bed, to which he was obliged
to confine himself for whole days, his clothes
being frequently at the pawnbroker's. One of
his friends has given a painfully vivid picture of
his appearance while writing these fugitive
pieces for Mr. Sylvanus Urban. He sat up in