me. I was hooped and bowed around the corner. I
am no real scholar, but I study on a spurt. For a whole week together I may
read old plays until their jigging style infects my own. I have set myself
against the lofty histories, although I tire upon their lower slopes and
have not yet persisted to their upper and windier ridges. I have, also, a
pretty knowledge of the Queen Anne wits and feel that I must have dogged
and spied upon them while they were yet alive. But in general, although
I am curious in the earlier chapters of learning, I lag in the inner
windings. However, for a fortnight I have sat piled about with old reviews,
whose leather rots and smells, in order that I might study the fading
criticisms of the past.

Until rather near the end of the eighteenth century, those who made their
living in England by writing were chiefly publishers' hacks, fellows of
the Dunciad sucking their quills in garrets and selling their labor for a
crust, for the reading public was too small to support them. Or they
found a patron and gave him a sugared sonnet for a pittance, or strained
themselves to the length of an Ode for a berth in his household. Or
frequently they supported a political party and received a place in the
Red Tape Office. But even in politics, on account of the smallness of the
reading public and the politicians' indifference to its approval, their
services were of slight account. Too often a political office was granted
from a pocket borough in which a restricted electorate could be bought at a
trifling expense. To gain support inside the House of Commons was enough.
The greater public outside could be ignored. This attitude changed with
the coming of the French Revolution. Here was a new force unrealized
before--that of a crowd which, being unrepresented and with a real
grievance, could, when it liked, take a club and go after what it wanted.
For the first time in many years in England--such were the whiffs of
liberty across the Channel--the power of an unrepresented public came to be
known. It was not that the English crowd had as yet taken the club in its
hands, but there were new thoughts abroad in the world, and there was the
possibility to be regarded. To influence this larger public, therefore, men
who could write came little by little into a larger demand. And as
writers were comparatively scarce, all kinds--whether they wrote poems or
prose--were pressed into service. It is significant, too, that it was