Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, Vol. 1 (of 2)Howitt, William
History
Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, Vol. 1 (of 2)
Howitt, William
Literary landmarks -- Great Britain; Poets, English -- Homes and haunts
has been said by part of the family, three years; and this connection
led to the one which brought him into the direct field of authorship.
Mr., afterward Dr. Griffiths, a bookseller of Paternoster Row, had
started the Monthly Review, and was beating up for contributors.
Goldsmith, whom he had become acquainted with at Dr. Milner's, was one
invited. The engagement is calculated to make both proprietors and
authors of the present day smile. Goldsmith was regularly boarded and
lodged in the bibliopole's house--the hired servant of literature. How
satisfactory this odd arrangement of keeping a tame author turned out,
may be guessed by the fact that the engagement for a year ended in five
months. The great fact at which Goldsmith kicked was, that not only
Griffiths, but _his wife_, was in the regular habit of acting as the
censor, and altering the articles written for the Review.
From this time to the day of his death Goldsmith was regularly lanched
into the drudgery of literature; the most wearing, feverish, uncertain,
and worst remunerating life under the sun. To live in one long anxiety,
and to die poor, was his lot, as it has been that of thousands of
others. There are innocent minds, who are filled with gladness at the
sight of a goodly library; who feast on a well-bound row of books, as
the lover of nature does on a poetical landscape or on a bank of
violets. For my part, I never see such a collection of books without an
inward pang. They remind me of a catacomb; every volume is in my eyes
but a bone in the great gathering of the remains of literary martyrs.
When I call to mind the pleasure with which many of these books were
written, followed by the agonies of disappointment they brought; the
repulses and contempt of booksellers, to whom the authors had carried
them in all the flush of their inexperience and of high hope; the cruel
malice of the critics which assailed them,
"Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame;
Bloody dissectors, worse than ten Monros:
He hacks to teach, they mangle to expose;"--_Burns._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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