Page:Studies of a Biographer 1.djvu/59

 Germains. The author had always to keep one eye upon the Attorney-General, and Grub Street was a Cave of Adullam for broken men, ruined in trade or political troubles, who could just keep body and soul together by these productions. They were 'authors,' not 'editors' of their papers, and The Review, or Observator, or Rehearsal were simply the personal utterances of Defoe, Tutchin, and Leslie. Whether Defoe, like Tutchin, was paid by his printer, or whether, as seems more probable in so keen a man of business, he employed the printer, is more than I know. In the later years of his troublesome life, he was at one time in a position of respectability, with a comfortable house and garden, and able to provide a portion for his daughter. But Defoe was exceptional. Meanwhile the plan had been adopted in a higher sphere. Steele is distinguished in one of the lists of authors as a 'gentleman born.' The official Gazette had been intrusted to him with a liberal salary of £300 a year, and, as we all know, in 1709 he started The Tatler, which became the lineal ancestor of The Spectator and the long series of British Essayists. All the best-known authors of the eighteenth century tried their hands at this form of composition, as our grandmothers and