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 writing to make £70 a year, and, now and then, such men were helped by some sympathetic friend in power. But patronage, beyond an occasional bribe, or possibly a payment of hush-money, generally descended, if it descended at all, upon others than the true Grub Street author. The great men of the seventeenth century now and then acted as patrons; the two greatest English thinkers of the time, Hobbes and Locke, were supported by the Earls of Devonshire and Shaftesbury. Some patronage was bestowed upon Dryden and the poets, though they do not seem to have considered it over-liberal. Butler and Otway are the typical examples of their fate. Still, a nobleman often felt bound to send his twenty guineas in return for a dedication. Learned men, too, in the Church might of course hope for professional preferment. But all this was no comfort to the bookseller's drudge, and he got no benefits of this kind from the Revolution. What then happened was, I take it, very simple. The great man, thanks to the growth of parliamentary power, suddenly found himself enabled to be a patron at the public expense. Naturally he was suddenly seized with a fit of liberality. The famous writers of Queen Anne's Rh