especially Wills', in Russell-street, Convent Garden, where Dryden had long occupied the critics' throne, and swayed the sceptre over the kingdom of letters. Thither went the aspirant after fame, to obtain subscribers for his forthcoming publication, or to secure the approving nod of some literary Jupiter; and there many an offspring of the muse was strangled in the birth, or if suffered to live, treated with merciless severity. In the same street lived Davies, the bookseller, at whose house Boswell, the biographer of Johnson, became acquainted with his hero. "The very place," he says, "where I was fortunate enough to be introduced to the illustrious subject of this work, deserves to be particularly marked. It was No. 8. I never pass by without feeling reverence and regret." Pope was the most successful author of his time, and realized £5,320 by his Iliad. The keenness of his satire in the Dunciad threw literary London into convulsions. On the day the book was first vended, a crowd of authors besieged the shop, threatening to prosecute the publisher, while hawkers crushed in to buy it up, with the hope of reaping a good harvest from the retailing of so caustic an article. The dunces held weekly meetings to project hostilities against the satirical critic, whose keen weapon had cut them to the quick. One wrote to the prime minister to inform him that Mr. Pope was an enemy to the government; another bought his image in clay to execute him in effigy. A surreptitious edition was published, with an owl in the frontispiece, the genuine one exhibiting an ass laden with authors. Hence arose a contest among the booksellers, some recommending the edition of the owl, and others the edition of the ass, by which names the two used to be distinguished. In 1737, Dr. Johnson came up to the metropolis with two-pence halfpenny in his pocket--David Garrick, his companion, having one halfpenny more. Toiling in the service of Cave, and writing for the Gentleman's Magazine, then a few years old, the former could but obtain a bare subsistence, which forced from him the well-known lines in his poem on London:-- "This mournful truth is everywhere confessed, Slow rises worth by poverty depressed." He lodged at a stay-maker's, in Exeter-street, and dined at the Pine Apple, just by, for eight-pence. An odd example of the intercourse between bookmakers and bookvenders, is preserved in the anecdote of Johnson beating Osborne, his publisher, for alleged impertinence. Of the genial habits of literary men in London, we have an illustration in the clubs which he formed, or to which he belonged. That which still continues to hold its meetings at the Thatched House, is the continuation of the famous one established at a later period than is embraced in this chapter, at the Turk's Head, where Johnson used to meet Reynolds, Burke, and Goldsmith.