Filius_; a witty Saturnalian effusion on the manners and Toryism of
Oxford, where the portraits have an extravagant kind of likeness, and
are so false and so true that they were universally relished and
individually understood. Amhurst, having lost his character, hastened
to reform the morals and politics of the nation. For near twenty years
he toiled at "The Craftsman," of which ten thousand are said to have
been sold in one day. Admire this patriot! an expelled collegian
becomes an outrageous zealot for popular reform, and an intrepid Whig
can bend to be yoked to all the drudgery of a faction! Amhurst
succeeded in writing out the minister, and writing in Bolingbroke and
Pulteney. Now came the hour of gratitude and generosity. His patrons
mounted into power--but--they silently dropped the instrument of their
ascension. The political prostitute stood shivering at the gate of
preferment, which his masters had for ever flung against him. He died
broken-hearted, and owed the charity of a grave to his bookseller.

I must add one more striking example of a political author in the case
of Dr. JAMES DRAKE, a man of genius, and an excellent writer. He
resigned an honourable profession, that of medicine, to adopt a very
contrary one, that of becoming an author by profession for a party. As
a Tory writer, he dared every extremity of the law, while he evaded
it by every subtlety of artifice; he sent a masked lady with his MS.
to the printer, who was never discovered, and was once saved by a flaw
in the indictment from the simple change of an _r_ for a _t_, or _nor_
for _not_;--one of those shameful evasions by which the law, to its
perpetual disgrace, so often protects the criminal from punishment.
Dr. Drake had the honour of hearing himself censured from the throne;
of being imprisoned; of seeing his "Memorials of the Church of
England" burned at London, and his "Historia Anglo-Scotica" at
Edinburgh. Having enlisted himself in the pay of the booksellers,
among other works, I suspect, he condescended to practise some
literary impositions. For he has reprinted Father Parson's famous
libel against the Earl of Leicester in Elizabeth's reign, under the
title of "Secret Memoirs of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, 1706,"
8vo, with a preface pretending it was printed from an old MS.

Drake was a lover of literature; he left behind him a version of
Herodotus, and a "System of Anatomy," once the most popular and
curious of its kind. Aft