I passed forward then into a little dark alley, where it made me start to hear one call me by my name, and with much ado I perceived a fellow there all wrapt up in smoke and flame. “Alas! sir,” says he; “have you forgotten your old bookseller in Popes-Head Alley?” “I cry thee mercy, good Livowell,” quoth I, “what? art thou here?” “Yes, sir,” says he, “’tis e’en too true. I never dreamt it would have come to this.” He thought I must needs pity him, when I knew him: but truly I reflected rather upon the justice of his punishment. For in a word, his shop was the very mint of heresy, schism, and sedition. I put on a face of compassion however, to give him a little ease, which he took hold of, and vented his complaint. “Well sir,” says he, “I would my father had made me a hangman, when he made me a stationer; for we are called to account for other men’s works, as well as for our own. And one thing that’s cast in our dish, is the selling of translations, so dog cheap, that every sot knows now as much as would formerly have made a passable doctor, and every nasty groom and roguey lackey is grown as familiar with Homer, Virgil, Ovid, as if ’twere _Robin the Devil_, _The Seven Champions_, or a piece of George Withers.” He would have talked on, if a devil had not stopped his mouth with a whiff from a roll of his own papers, and choked him with the smoke on’t. The pestilent fume would have dispatched me too, if I had not got presently out of the reach on’t. But I went my way, saying this to myself, If the bookseller be thus criminal, what will become of the author!