her the benevolence of well-disposed
people within this realm of England; to ask, gather, and take the
alms of all our loving subjects." These letters-patent were to be
published by the clergy from their pulpits; they produced so
little, that they were renewed for another twelvemonth: one entire
parish in the city contributed seven shillings and sixpence! Such,
then, was the patronage received by Stowe, to be a licensed beggar
throughout the kingdom for one twelvemonth! Such was the public
remuneration of a man who had been useful to his nation, but not to
himself!

Such was the first age of _Patronage_, which branched out in the last
century into an age of _Subscriptions_, when an author levied
contributions before his work appeared; a mode which inundated our
literature with a great portion of its worthless volumes: of these the
most remarkable are the splendid publications of Richard Blome; they
may be called fictitious works; for they are only mutilated
transcripts from Camden and Speed, but richly ornamented, and
pompously printed, which this literary adventurer, said to have been a
gentleman, loaded the world with, by the aid of his subscribers.
Another age was that of _Dedications_,[22] when the author was to
lift his tiny patron to the skies, in an inverse ratio as he lowered
himself, in this public exhibition. Sometimes the party haggled about
the price;[23] or the statue, while stepping into his niche, would
turn round on the author to assist his invention. A patron of Peter
Motteux, dissatisfied with Peter's colder temperament, composed the
superlative dedication to himself, and completed the misery of the
author by subscribing it with Motteux's name![24] Worse fared it when
authors were the unlucky hawkers of their own works; of which I shall
give a remarkable instance in MYLES DAVIES, a learned man maddened by
want and indignation.

The subject before us exhibits one of the most singular spectacles in
these volumes; that of a scholar of extensive erudition, whose life
seems to have passed in the study of languages and the sciences, while
his faculties appear to have been disordered from the simplicity of
his nature, and driven to madness by indigence and insult. He formed
the wild resolution of becoming a mendicant author, the hawker of his
own works; and by this mode endured all the aggravated sufferings, the
great and the petty insults of all ranks of society, and even
sometimes from men of learning th