Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/85

61 THE BOOKSELLERS OF OLDEN TIMES. 61 Among the chief early contributors was Goldsmith, who escaped the miseries of ushership, and the weari- ness of a diplomaless doctor, waiting for patients who never came, or, at all events, never paid, to live as a hack writer in Griffiths' house. Here, induced by want, or kindliness to a fellow-starver, he got into trouble by borrowing money from his master to pay for clothes, and appropriating it to other purposes, Termed villain and sharper, and threatened with the Roundhouse, he writes : " No, sir ; had I been a sharper, had I been possessed of less good nature and native generosity, I might surely now have been in better circumstances ; I am guilty I own of mean- ness, which poverty unavoidably brings with it." As to the payment for periodical writing in that day, we are told by an author who recollected the Monthly Review for fifty years, that in its most palmy days only four guineas a sheet were given to the most distinguished writers, and as late as 1783, when it was reported that Doctor Shebbeare received as much as six guineas, Johnson replied, " Sir, he might get six guineas for a particular sheet, but not cemmunibus sJieetibus " and yet he afterwards explains the fact of so much good writing appearing anonymously, with- out hope of personal fame, " those who write in them write well in order to be paid well." Of all the booksellers of the Johnsonian era, Robert Dodsley, however, was facile princeps. Born in the year 1703, he commenced life as a footman, but a poem entitled The Muse in Livery, so interested his mistress, the Hon. Mrs. Lowther, that she procured its publication by subscription. After this he entered the service of Dartineuf, a celebrated voluptuary, the reputed son of Charles II., and one of the most inti-