plan of support,
beyond what the chance employ of Booksellers would afford you"!!!

Throw yourself rather, my dear Sir, from the steep Tarpeian rock,
slap-dash headlong upon iron spikes. If you had but five consolatory
minutes between the desk and the bed, make much of them, and live a
century in them, rather than turn slave to the Booksellers. They are
Turks and Tartars, when they have poor Authors at their beck. Hitherto
you have been at arm's length from them. Come not within their grasp. I
have known many authors for bread, some repining, others envying the
blessed security of a Counting House, all agreeing they had rather have
been Taylors, Weavers, what not? rather than the things they were. I
have known some starved, some to go mad, one clear friend literally
dying in a workhouse. You know not what a rapacious, dishonest set those
booksellers are. Ask even Southey, who (a single case almost) has made a
fortune by book drudgery, what he has found them. O you know not, may
you never know! the miseries of subsisting by authorship. 'Tis a pretty
appendage to a situation like yours or mine, but a slavery worse than
all slavery to be a book-seller's dependent, to drudge your brains for
pots of ale and breasts of mutton, to change your free thoughts and
voluntary numbers for ungracious TASK-WORK. Those fellows hate _us_. The
reason I take to be, that, contrary to other trades, in which the Master
gets all the credit (a Jeweller or Silversmith for instance), and the
Journeyman, who really does the fine work, is in the background, in
_our_ work the world gives all the credit to Us, whom _they_ consider
as
_their_ Journeymen, and therefore do they hate us, and cheat us, and
oppress us, and would wring the blood of us out, to put another sixpence
in their mechanic pouches. I contend, that a Bookseller has a _relative
honesty_ towards Authors, not like his honesty to the rest of the world.
B[aldwin], who first engag'd me as Elia, has not paid me up yet (nor any
of us without repeated mortifying applials), yet how the Knave fawned
while I was of service to him! Yet I dare say the fellow is punctual in
settling his milk-score, &c. Keep to your Bank, and the Bank will keep
you. Trust not to the Public, you may hang, starve, drown yourself, for
anything that worthy _Personage_ cares. I bless every star that
Providence, not seeing good to make me independent, has seen it next
good to settle me upon the stable foundation of Leade