e
inevitable fate of the material and the manufacturer. An eleemosynary fund
can provide no permanent relief for the age and sorrows of the unhappy men
of science and literature; and an author may even have composed a work
which shall be read by the next generation as well as the present, and
still be left in a state even of pauperism. These victims perish in
silence! No one has attempted to suggest even a palliative for this great
evil; and when I asked the greatest genius of our age to propose some
relief for this general suffering, a sad and convulsive nod, a shrug that
sympathised with the misery of so many brothers, and an avowal that even
he could not invent one, was all that genius had to alleviate the forlorn
state of the literary character.[A]

[Footnote A: It was the late Sir WALTER SCOTT--if I could assign the
_date_ of this conversation, it would throw some light on what might be
then passing in his own mind.]

The only man of genius who has thrown out a hint for improving the
situation of the literary man is ADAM SMITH. In that passage in his
"Wealth of Nations" to which I have already referred, he says, that
"Before the invention of the art of printing, the only employment by which
a man of letters could make anything by his talents was that of a _public
or a private teacher_, or by communicating to other people the various and
useful knowledge which he had acquired himself; and this surely is a more
honourable, a more useful, and in general even a more profitable
employment than that other _of writing for a bookseller_, to which the art
of printing has given occasion." We see the political economist, alike
insensible to the dignity of the literary character, incapable of taking a
just view of its glorious avocation. To obviate the personal wants
attached to the occupations of an author, he would, more effectually than
skilfully, get rid of authorship itself. This is not to restore the limb,
but to amputate it. It is not the preservation of existence, but its
annihilation. His friends Hume and Robertson must have turned from this
page humiliated and indignant. They could have supplied Adam Smith with a
truer conception of the literary character, of its independence, its
influence, and its glory.

I have projected a plan for the alleviation of the state of these authors
who are not blessed with a patrimony. The _trade_ connected with
literature is carried on by men who are usually not literate, and the
g