he complains that it is "poverty which alone maketh me so unconstant
to my determined studies, trudging from place to place to and fro, and
prosecuting the means to keep me from idlenesse." An author was then
much like a vagrant.

Even at a later period, in the reign of the literary James, great
authors were reduced to a state of mendicity, and lived on alms,
although their lives and their fortunes had been consumed in
forming national labours. The antiquary STOWE exhibits a striking
example of the rewards conferred on such valued authors. Stowe had
devoted his life, and exhausted his patrimony, in the study of
English antiquities; he had travelled on foot throughout the kingdom,
inspecting all monuments of antiquity, and rescuing what he could
from the dispersed libraries of the monasteries. His stupendous
collections, in his own handwriting, still exist, to provoke the
feeble industry of literary loiterers. He felt through life the
enthusiasm of study; and seated in his monkish library, living with
the dead more than with the living, he was still a student of taste:
for Spenser the poet visited the library of Stowe; and the first
good edition of Chaucer was made so chiefly by the labours of our
author. Late in life, worn-out with study and the cares of poverty,
neglected by that proud metropolis of which he had been the historian,
his good-humour did not desert him; for being afflicted with sharp
pains in his aged feet, he observed that "his affliction lay in that
part which formerly he had made so much use of." Many a mile had he
wandered and much had he expended, for those treasures of antiquities
which had exhausted his fortune, and with which he had formed works
of great public utility. It was in his eightieth year that Stowe at
length received a public acknowledgment of his services, which will
appear to us of a very extraordinary nature. He was so reduced in his
circumstances that he petitioned James I. for a _licence to collect
alms_ for himself! "as a recompense for his labours and travel of
_forty-five years_, in setting forth the _Chronicles of England_,
and _eight years_ taken up in the _Survey of the Cities of London
and Westminster_, towards his relief now in his old age; having left
his former means of living, and only employing himself for the
service and good of his country." Letters-patent under the great
seal were granted. After no penurious commendations of Stowe's
labours, he is permitted "to gat