Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/124

 In Johnson's shop—for booksellers' shops were places of resort then with the literary—Blake was, at this date, in the habit of meeting a remarkable coterie. The bookseller gave, moreover, plain but hospitable weekly dinners at his house, No. 72, St. Paul's Churchyard, in a little quaintly-shaped upstairs-room, with walls not at right angles, where his guests must have been somewhat straitened for space. Hither came Drs. Price and Priestley, and occasionally Blake; hither friendly, irascible Fuseli; hither precise doctrinaire Godwin, whose Political Justice Johnson will, in 1793, publish, giving 700l. for the copyright. Him, the author of the Songs of Innocence got on ill with, and liked worse. Here, too, he met formal stoical Holcroft, playwright, novelist, translator, literary man-of-all-work, who had written verse 'to order' for our old friend The Wits' Magazine. Seven years hence he will be promoted to the Tower, and be tried for high treason with Hardy, Thelwall, and Horne Tooke, and one day will write the best fragment of autobiography in the language: a man of very varied fortunes. Here hard-headed Tom Paine, 'the rebellious needleman:' Mary Wollstonecraft also, who at Johnson's table commenced her ineffectual flirtation with already wedded, cynical Fuseli, their first meeting occurring here in the autumn of 1790. These and others of very 'advanced' political and religious opinions, theoretic republicans and revolutionists, were of the circle. The First Part of The Rights of Man had been launched on an applauding and indignant world, early in 1791; Johnson, whom the MS. had made the author's friend, having prudently declined to publish it though he was Priestley's publisher. A few years hence their host, despite his caution, will, for his liberal sympathies, receive the honour of prosecution from a good old habeas-corpus-suspending Government; and, in 1798, be fined and imprisoned in the King's Bench for selling a copy of Gilbert Wakefield's Reply to the Bishop of Llandaff's Address,—a pamphlet which every other bookseller in town sold, and continued to sell, with impunity. While in prison he still