en of
letters_," who are pretty much in the situation which lawyers and
physicians would be in, were these, as he tells us, in that state when
"_a scholar_ and _a beggar_ seem to have been very nearly _synonymous
terms_"--and this melancholy fact that man of genius discovered,
without the feather of his pen brushing away a tear from his
lid--without one spontaneous and indignant groan!

Authors may exclaim, "we ask for justice, not charity." They would
not need to require any favour, nor claim any other than that
protection which an enlightened government, in its wisdom and its
justice, must bestow. They would leave to the public disposition the
sole appreciation of their works; their book must make its own
fortune; a bad work may be cried up, and a good work may be cried
down; but Faction will soon lose its voice, and Truth acquire one.
The cause we are pleading is not the calamities of indifferent
writers, but of those whose utility or whose genius long survives
that limited term which has been so hardly wrenched from the
penurious hand of verbal lawyers. Every lover of literature, and
every votary of humanity has long felt indignant at that sordid
state and all those secret sorrows to which men of the finest
genius, or of sublime industry, are reduced and degraded in
society. Johnson himself, who rejected that perpetuity of literary
property which some enthusiasts seemed to claim at the time the
subject was undergoing the discussion of the judges, is, however,
for extending the copyright to a _century_. Could authors secure
this, their natural right, literature would acquire a permanent
and a nobler reward; for great authors would then be distinguished
by the very profits they would receive from that obscure multitude
whose common disgraces they frequently participate, notwithstanding
the superiority of their own genius. Johnson himself will serve as
a proof of the incompetent remuneration of literary property. He
undertook and he performed an Herculean labour, which employed him
so many years that the price he obtained was exhausted before the
work was concluded--the wages did not even last as long as the
labour! Where, then, is the author to look forward, when such works
are undertaken, for a provision for his family, or for his future
existence? It would naturally arise from the work itself, were
authors not the most ill-treated and oppressed class of the
community. The daughter of MILTON need not have craved th