The notorious fact, that whilst the middling and lower classes were generally indifferent to literature, the gay and the great mingled some attentions to it with all their daily frivolities and nightly revelries, may be accounted for, in the beginning of the last century, by the distinctions of Cavalier and Roundhead being not as yet wholly obsolete: the spirit, though not the form, of these distinctions remained. Before the civil wars, and as long as the Stuarts ruled, taste, fancy, wit, the culture of letters, and the patronage of the arts, were cherished by the highly-horn and the well-bred, the more that they were avoided by the Puritans, as temptations to forget the grand business of life. The young nobleman who had not some small amount of poetical fame, amplified into extraordinary fecundity of genius by the gratitude of poorer and wittier men, seemed to the world scarcely to have fulfilled his destiny, as a man born to all the luxuries of praise and fame. The commotions of the second James’s reign, and the indifference of his grave successor to the interests of learning, checked, but did not annihilate the notion, that to nobility some exhibition of literary taste, and an extensive appreciation of it in others, were essential attributes. The effect of this prevailing fashion of patronage on the one side, and of dependence on the other, was not to destroy our literature, assuredly, for never were its shoots so abundant, nor its blossoms so fair, as in the famed Augustan age; but whilst it called forth imaginative minds, and rendered the pursuit of letters a profession worthy of the name, in so far as emoluments might be procured, it debased the moral character of men in proportion as it rendered their intellectual powers marketable to the rich and the powerful. Adulation became a trade; and when such base commodity was found to be in request, slander was soon perceived to be no less profitable to him who sped the arrow of calumny which flieth by night, or the pestilence of destruction by day.