Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/80

58 58 THE BOOKSELLERS OF OLDEN TIMES. an affecting one from Dr. Johnson : " I am obliged to entreat your assistance, I am under arrest for five pounds eighteen shillings." As round Pope and Dryden formerly, so it is now round Johnson that the booksellers of the next decade cluster ; and from the moment when first he rolled into a London book- seller's shop, his huge unwieldy body clad in coarse country garments, worn and travel-stained, his face scarred and seamed with small-pox to ask for lite- rary employment, and to be told he had better rather purchase a porter's knot, the future of the trade was very much wrapt up in his own. Forced by hunger to work for the most niggardly pay, he was yet not to be insulted with impunity. " Lie there, thou lump of lead," he exclaims as he knocked down Osborne of Grey's Inn Gate, with a folio. " Sir," he explains to Boswell afterwards, " he was impertinent to me, and I beat him." Among the earliest of Johnson's employers was Edward Cave. The son of a shoemaker at Rugby, he contrived, in spite of the contumely excited by his low estate, to pick up much learning at the Grammar School, and after narrowly escaping an university training, and for a while obtaining his livelihood as clerk to a collector of excise and apprentice to a timber merchant, he found more congenial employ- ment in a printing office, and conducted a weekly newspaper at Norwich. Returning to London, he contrived by multifarious work correcting for the press, contributing to Mist's Journal, writing news letters, and filling a situation in the Post Office simul- taneously to save a small sum of money sufficient to start a petty printing office at St. John's Gate. He was now able to realize a project he had before offered