It must be confessed, that before "Authors by Profession" had
fallen into the hands of the booksellers, they endured peculiar
grievances. They were pitiable retainers of some great family.
The miseries of such an author, and the insolence and penuriousness of
his patrons, who would not return the poetry they liked and would not
pay for, may be traced in the eventful life of THOMAS CHURCHYARD, a
poet of the age of Elizabeth, one of those unfortunate men who have
written poetry all their days, and lived a long life to complete
the misfortune. His muse was so fertile, that his works pass all
enumeration. He courted numerous patrons, who valued the poetry,
while they left the poet to his own miserable contemplations. In a
long catalogue of his works, which this poet has himself given, he
adds a few memoranda, as he proceeds, a little ludicrous, but very
melancholy. He wrote a book which he could never afterwards
recover from one of his patrons, and adds, "all which book was in as
good verse as ever I made; an honourable knight dwelling in the
Black Friers can witness the same, because I read it unto him."
Another accorded him the same remuneration--on which he adds, "An
infinite number of other songs and sonnets given where they cannot
be recovered, nor purchase any favour when they are craved." Still,
however, he announces "Twelve long Tales for Christmas, dedicated to
twelve honourable lords." Well might Churchyard write his own sad
life, under the title of "The Tragicall Discourse of the Haplesse
Man's Life."[20]
It will not be easy to parallel this pathetic description of the
wretched age of a poor neglected poet mourning over a youth vainly
spent.
High time it is to haste my carcase hence:
Youth stole away and felt no kind of joy,
And age he left in travail ever since;
The wanton days that made me nice and coy
Were but a dream, a shadow, and a toy--
I look in glass, and find my cheeks so lean
That every hour I do but wish me dead;
Now back bends down, and forwards falls the head,
And hollow eyes in wrinkled brow doth shroud
As though two stars were creeping under cloud.
The lips wax cold, and look both pale and thin,
The teeth fall out as nutts forsook the shell,
The bare bald head but shows where hair hath been,
The lively joints wax weary, stiff, and still,
The ready tongue now falters in his tale;
The courage quails as strength decays and goes....
The thatcher hath a cottage poor you see:
The shepherd knows where he shall sleep at night;
The daily drudge from cares can quiet be:
Thus fortune sends some rest to every wight;
And I was born to house and land by right....
Well, ere my breath my body do forsake
My spirit I bequeath to God above;
My books, my scrawls, and songs that I did make,
I leave with friends that freely did me love....
Now, friends, shake hands, I must be gone, my boys!
Our mirth takes end, our triumph all is done;
Our tickling talk, our sports and merry toys
Do glide away like shadow of the sun.
Another comes when I my race have run,
Shall pass the time with you in better plight,
And find good cause of greater things to write.
Yet Churchyard was no contemptible bard; he composed a national poem,
"The Worthiness of Wales," which has been reprinted, and will be still
dear to his "Fatherland," as the Hollanders expressively denote their
natal spot. He wrote in the "Mirrour of Magistrates," the Life of
Wolsey, which has parts of great dignity; and the Life of Jane Shore,
which was much noticed in his day, for a severe critic of the times
writes:
Hath not Shore's wife, although a light-skirt she,
Given him a chaste, long, lasting memorie?
Churchyard, and the miseries of his poetical life, are alluded to by
Spenser. He is old Palemon in "Colin Clout's come Home again." Spenser
is supposed to describe this laborious writer for half a century,
whose melancholy pipe, in his old age, may make the reader "rew:"
Yet he himself may rewed be more right,
That sung so long untill quite hoarse he grew.
His epitaph, preserved by Camden, is extremely instructive to all
poets, could epitaphs instruct them:--
_Poverty_ and _poetry_ his tomb doth inclose;
Wherefore, good neighbours, be merry in _prose_.
It appears also by a confession of Tom Nash, that an author would
then, pressed by the _res angusta domi_, when "the bottom of his purse
was turned upward," submit to compose pieces for gentlemen who aspired
to authorship. He tells us on some occasion, that he was then in the
country composing poetry for some country squire;--and says, "I am
faine to let my plow stand still in the midst of a furrow, to follow
these Senior Fantasticos, to whose amorous _villanellas_[21] I
prostitute my pen," and this, too, "twice or thrice in a month;" and
he complains that it is "poverty which alone maketh me so unconstant
to my determined studies, trudging from place to place to and fro, and
prosecuting the means to keep me from idlenesse." An author was then
much like a vagrant.
Even at a later period, in the reign of the literary James, great
authors were reduced to a state of mendicity, and lived on alms,
although their lives and their fortunes had been consumed in
forming national labours. The antiquary STOWE exhibits a striking
example of the rewards conferred on such valued authors. Stowe had
devoted his life, and exhausted his patrimony, in the study of
English antiquities; he had travelled on foot throughout the kingdom,
inspecting all monuments of antiquity, and rescuing what he could
from the dispersed libraries of the monasteries. His stupendous
collections, in his own handwriting, still exist, to provoke the
feeble industry of literary loiterers. He felt through life the
enthusiasm of study; and seated in his monkish library, living with
the dead more than with the living, he was still a student of taste:
for Spenser the poet visited the library of Stowe; and the first
good edition of Chaucer was made so chiefly by the labours of our
author. Late in life, worn-out with study and the cares of poverty,
neglected by that proud metropolis of which he had been the historian,
his good-humour did not desert him; for being afflicted with sharp
pains in his aged feet, he observed that "his affliction lay in that
part which formerly he had made so much use of." Many a mile had he
wandered and much had he expended, for those treasures of antiquities
which had exhausted his fortune, and with which he had formed works
of great public utility. It was in his eightieth year that Stowe at
length received a public acknowledgment of his services, which will
appear to us of a very extraordinary nature. He was so reduced in his
circumstances that he petitioned James I. for a _licence to collect
alms_ for himself! "as a recompense for his labours and travel of
_forty-five years_, in setting forth the _Chronicles of England_,
and _eight years_ taken up in the _Survey of the Cities of London
and Westminster_, towards his relief now in his old age; having left
his former means of living, and only employing himself for the
service and good of his country." Letters-patent under the great
seal were granted. After no penurious commendations of Stowe's
labours, he is permitted "to gather the benevolence of well-disposed
people within this realm of England; to ask, gather, and take the
alms of all our loving subjects." These letters-patent were to be
published by the clergy from their pulpits; they produced so
little, that they were renewed for another twelvemonth: one entire
parish in the city contributed seven shillings and sixpence! Such,
then, was the patronage received by Stowe, to be a licensed beggar
throughout the kingdom for one twelvemonth! Such was the public
remuneration of a man who had been useful to his nation, but not to
himself!
Such was the first age of _Patronage_, which branched out in the last
century into an age of _Subscriptions_, when an author levied
contributions before his work appeared; a mode which inundated our
literature with a great portion of its worthless volumes: of these the
most remarkable are the splendid publications of Richard Blome; they
may be called fictitious works; for they are only mutilated
transcripts from Camden and Speed, but richly ornamented, and
pompously printed, which this literary adventurer, said to have been a
gentleman, loaded the world with, by the aid of his subscribers.
Another age was that of _Dedications_,[22] when the author was to
lift his tiny patron to the skies, in an inverse ratio as he lowered
himself, in this public exhibition. Sometimes the party haggled about
the price;[23] or the statue, while stepping into his niche, would
turn round on the author to assist his invention. A patron of Peter
Motteux, dissatisfied with Peter's colder temperament, composed the
superlative dedication to himself, and completed the misery of the
author by subscribing it with Motteux's name![24] Worse fared it when
authors were the unlucky hawkers of their own works; of which I shall
give a remarkable instance in MYLES DAVIES, a learned man maddened by
want and indignation.
The subject before us exhibits one of the most singular spectacles in
these volumes; that of a scholar of extensive erudition, whose life
seems to have passed in the study of languages and the sciences, while
his faculties appear to have been disordered from the simplicity of
his nature, and driven to madness by indigence and insult. He formed
the wild resolution of becoming a mendicant author, the hawker of his
own works; and by this mode endured all the aggravated sufferings, the
great and the petty insults of all ranks of society, and even
sometimes from men of learning themselves, who denied a mendicant
author the sympathy of a brother.
MYLES DAVIES and his works are imperfectly known to the most curious
of our literary collectors. His name has scarcely reached a few; the
author and his works are equally extraordinary, and claim a right to
be preserved in this treatise on the "Calamities of Authors."
Our author commenced printing a work, difficult, from its miscellaneous
character, to describe; of which the volumes appeared at different
periods. The early and the most valuable volumes were the first and
second; they are a kind of bibliographical, biographical, and critical
work, on English Authors. They all bear a general title of "Athenae
Britannicae."[25]
Collectors have sometimes met with a very curious volume, entitled
"Icon Libellorum," and sometimes the same book, under another
title--"A Critical History of Pamphlets." This rare book forms the
first volume of the "Athenae Britannicae." The author was Myles Davies,
whose biography is quite unknown: he may now be his own biographer. He
was a Welsh clergyman, a vehement foe to Popery, Arianism, and
Socinianism, of the most fervent loyalty to George I. and the
Hanoverian succession; a scholar, skilled in Greek and Latin, and in
all the modern languages. Quitting his native spot with political
disgust, he changed his character in the metropolis, for he subscribes
himself "Counsellor-at-Law." In an evil hour he commenced author, not
only surrounded by his books, but with the more urgent companions of a
wife and family; and with that childlike simplicity which sometimes
marks the mind of a retired scholar, we perceive him imagining that
his immense reading would prove a source, not easily exhausted, for
their subsistence.
From the first volumes of his series much curious literary history may
be extracted, amidst the loose and wandering elements of this literary
chaos. In his dedication to the Prince he professes "to represent
writers and writings in a catoptrick view."
The preface to the second volume opens his plan; and nothing as yet
indicates those rambling humours which his subsequent labours
exhibit.
As he proceeded in forming these volumes, I suspect, either that his
mind became a little disordered, or that he discovered that mere
literature found but penurious patrons in "the Few;" for, attempting
to gain over all classes of society, he varied his investigations, and
courted attention, by writing on law, physic, divinity, as well as
literary topics. By his account--
"The avarice of booksellers, and the stinginess of hard-hearted
patrons, had driven him into a cursed company of door-keeping herds,
to meet the irrational brutality of those uneducated mischievous
animals called footmen, house-porters, poetasters, mumpers,
apothecaries, attorneys, and such like beasts of prey," who were, like
himself, sometimes barred up for hours in the menagerie of a great
man's antechamber. In his addresses to Drs. Mead and Freind, he
declares--"My misfortunes drive me to publish my writings for a poor
livelihood; and nothing but the utmost necessity could make any man in
his senses to endeavour at it, in a method so burthensome to the
modesty and education of a scholar."
In French he dedicates to George I.; and in the Harleian MSS. I
discovered a long letter to the Earl of Oxford, by our author, in
French, with a Latin ode. Never was more innocent bribery proffered to
a minister! He composed what he calls _Stricturae Pindaricae_ on the
"Mughouses," then political clubs;[26] celebrates English authors in
the same odes, and inserts a political Latin drama, called "Pallas
Anglicana." Maevius and Bavius were never more indefatigable! The
author's intellect gradually discovers its confusion amidst the loud
cries of penury and despair.
To paint the distresses of an author soliciting alms for a book which
he presents--and which, whatever may be its value, comes at least as
an evidence that the suppliant is a learned man--is a case so
uncommon, that the invention of the novelist seems necessary to fill
up the picture. But Myles Davies is an artist in his own simple
narrative.