inders, to remunerate them was heightening
the fever and feeding the disease. They were all fighting for present
pay, with a view of the promised land before them; but they at length
became so numerous, and so crowded on one another, that the minister
could neither satisfy promised claims nor actual dues. He had not at
last the humblest office to bestow, not a commissionership of wine
licences, as Tacitus Gordon had: not even a collectorship of the
customs in some obscure town, as was the wretched worn-out Oldmixon's
pittance;[7] not a crumb for a mouse!

The captain of this banditti in the administration of Walpole was
Arnall, a young attorney, whose mature genius for scurrilous
party-papers broke forth in his tender nonage. This hireling was "The
Free Briton," and in "The Gazetteer" _Francis Walsingham, Esq._,
abusing the name of a profound statesman. It is said that he received
above ten thousand pounds for his obscure labours; and this patriot
was suffered to retire with all the dignity which a pension could
confer. He not only wrote for hire, but valued himself on it; proud of
the pliancy of his pen and of his principles, he wrote without remorse
what his patron was forced to pay for, but to disavow. It was from a
knowledge of these "Authors by Profession," writers of a faction in
the name of the community, as they have been well described, that our
great statesman Pitt fell into an error which he lived to regret. He
did not distinguish between authors; he confounded the mercenary with
the men of talent and character; and with this contracted view of the
political influence of genius, he must have viewed with awe, perhaps
with surprise, its mighty labour in the volumes of Burke.

But these "Authors by Profession" sometimes found a retribution of
their crimes even from their masters. When the ardent patron was
changed into a cold minister, their pen seemed wonderfully to have
lost its point, and the feather could not any more tickle. They were
flung off, as Shakspeare's striking imagery expresses it, like

An unregarded bulrush on the stream,
To rot itself with motion.

Look on the fate and fortune of AMHURST. The life of this "Author by
Profession" points a moral. He flourished about the year 1730. He
passed through a youth of iniquity, and was expelled from his college
for his irregularities: he had exhibited no marks of regeneration when
he assailed the university with the periodical paper of the _Terrae