nity, as well as
literary topics. By his account--

"The avarice of booksellers, and the stinginess of hard-hearted
patrons, had driven him into a cursed company of door-keeping herds,
to meet the irrational brutality of those uneducated mischievous
animals called footmen, house-porters, poetasters, mumpers,
apothecaries, attorneys, and such like beasts of prey," who were, like
himself, sometimes barred up for hours in the menagerie of a great
man's antechamber. In his addresses to Drs. Mead and Freind, he
declares--"My misfortunes drive me to publish my writings for a poor
livelihood; and nothing but the utmost necessity could make any man in
his senses to endeavour at it, in a method so burthensome to the
modesty and education of a scholar."

In French he dedicates to George I.; and in the Harleian MSS. I
discovered a long letter to the Earl of Oxford, by our author, in
French, with a Latin ode. Never was more innocent bribery proffered to
a minister! He composed what he calls _Stricturae Pindaricae_ on the
"Mughouses," then political clubs;[26] celebrates English authors in
the same odes, and inserts a political Latin drama, called "Pallas
Anglicana." Maevius and Bavius were never more indefatigable! The
author's intellect gradually discovers its confusion amidst the loud
cries of penury and despair.

To paint the distresses of an author soliciting alms for a book which
he presents--and which, whatever may be its value, comes at least as
an evidence that the suppliant is a learned man--is a case so
uncommon, that the invention of the novelist seems necessary to fill
up the picture. But Myles Davies is an artist in his own simple
narrative.

Our author has given the names of several of his unwilling customers:--

"Those squeeze-farthing and hoard-penny ignoramus doctors, with
several great personages who formed excuses for not accepting my
books; or they would receive them, but give nothing for them; or else
deny they had them, or remembered anything of them; and so gave me
nothing for my last present of books, though they kept them _gratis et
ingratiis_.

"But his Grace of the Dutch extraction in Holland (said to be akin to
Mynheer Vander B--nck) had a peculiar grace in receiving my present of
books and odes, which, being bundled up together with a letter and ode
upon his Graceship, and carried in by his porter, I was bid to call
for an answer five years hence. I asked the porter what he meant by
that? I sup