82 BRIDGES. [1760-1789 the most part removed, or in process of removal, but the injury to the originals is irreparable. We ought not, however, to quit this part of our subject without mentioning the names of two or three architects to whom we owe some bridges of great value and beauty, though unfortunately in the chief instances deficient in the essential quality of stability. Of these architects-for bridge-building was not then considered a branch of engineering-the earliest was Labelye, a Swiss, builder of Westminster bridge, opened in 1750, and now in process of replacement by a less picturesque but far more convenient and, we may hope, more lasting structure. Blackfriars bridge (opened in 1760), a more elegant but not more stable edifice than Labelye's, was the work of Richard Mylne. A competitor with Mylne for the erection of this bridge was John Gwyn, whose proposals for a Royal Academy we have mentioned. Gwyn had studied the subject of bridges and public ways closely, and was a man of remarkably clear insight. In his "London and Westminster Improved," (1766, to which Johnson wrote the "Noble Dedication," as Boswell terms it), Gwyn not only urged the necessity of replacing old London bridge by a new one, carrying another bridge across the Thames near the site where Waterloo bridge now stands, and removing Smithfield and Fleet markets but in maps, as well as in the text, clearly pointed out most of the new lines of thoroughfare and principal improvements which have been since effected in the metropolis, and others which yet remain unaccomplished. Gwyn was the builder of the well-known Magdalen bridge, Oxford, and of the handsome but inconveniently steep English bridge at Shrewsbury. Manners as depicted in the Literature of the period-Changes in the commerce of LiteratureSamuel Johnson the link between two periods-Literature of George the Second's time-The Novelists-Richardson-Fielding-Smollett-Sterne-Goldsmith-Literature of the first quarter of a century of the reign of George the Third-Manners-Stage CoachesHighwaymen - The Post-Inns-Public refreshment places of London-RanelaghVauxhall-The Pantheon-The Theatre-Garrick-Bath-Gaming Tables. ON a rainy day, somewhere about the year 1780, a man of advanced age stood bareheaded in the market of Uttoxeter, making strange contortions of visage whilst he remained for an hour in front of a particular stall. It was Dr. Samuel Johnson, who had gone from Lichfield to this small market town, to subject himself to the penance of rough weather and mocking by-standers, for expiation of an act of filial disobedience which he had committed fifty years before. His father was a bookseller at Lichfield, who died in 1731,-a man who knew something more of books than their titles; a proud man struggling to conceal his poverty. He had a shop with a good stock of the solid folios and quartos of the age of Anne and George I. "He propagates learning all over this diocese," said a chaplain in 1716. His manner of trade was nevertheless somewhat different from that of the bookseller of a cathedral town in the next century. He carried some of his most vendible stock to markets around Lichfield. "At that time booksellers' shops in the provincial towns of England were very rare, so that there was not one even in Birmingham, in which town old Mr. Johnson used to open a shop every 84 แ CHANGES IN THE COMMERCE OF LITERATURE. [1737-1783. market-day." The old man, being on a sick-bed, had requested his son Samuel to attend the book-stall at Uttoxeter. The young student had come home from Oxford too poor to complete his academical career. "My pride prevented me from doing my duty, and I gave my father a refusal," said the literary veteran, whose pride, during the fifty years that had elapsed between the committal of the fault and its singular atonement, had sustained many a grievous trial and sore indignity. As Johnson was enduring his hour of penance, we may well believe that thoughts of the great changes that he had witnessed in the commerce of literature would come into his mind. He had seen his father's book-stall at Birmingham succeeded by the Circulating Library which William Hutton established there in 1751. When he was a lad of sixteen, idling, as some thought, in the desultory reading offered to him in his father's shop, he might have learnt from a pamphlet of that time. that there were only twenty-eight" Printing-houses in all the Corporation towns of England," seven towns having two printers each, and fourteen towns only one each.† Half a century later the desire for News had called forth a Printing House in every considerable town, to provide its own "Postman," or Mercury," or Gazette," or Courant," or "Chronicle," or "Times," or "Advertiser." In 1782 there were in England fifty Provincial Journals. In the year that Johnson's father died, 1731, Cave issued his "Gentleman's Magazine." The "London Magazine" immediately followed. The rapid extension of a class of readers somewhat distinct from "the learned" produced "the Golden Age of Magazines, when their pages were filled with voluntary contributions from men who never aimed at dazzling the public, but came each with his scrap of information, or his humble question, or his hard problem, or his attempt at verse."§ Johnson was to nurse the infant into manhood, with food more substantial than this spoon-meat. If the Printer of St. John's Gate had no other claim to the respect of coming generations, it would have been praise enough that he was the first who gave the hard-earned bread of literature to Samuel Johnson, as a regular coadjutor in his Magazine, "by which," says Boswell, "he probably obtained a tolerable livelihood." That form of popular literature which Cave originated was followed up, some twenty years later, by the more ambitious "Review." The "Monthly Review" was the parent of "The Critical," " "The London," and other Reviews, that addressed a great mixed class of readers. "The History of the Works of the Learned" might have higher aims, but it was not calculated for a large and enduring success. The Monthly Magazines and Reviews called into existence a new race of authors. The division of large books into weekly or monthly numbers, so as to suit a more extended market, was another of the many indications of the growth of a different race of book buyers than the purchasers of costly works. Johnson came to London, a literary adventurer, in 1737. He was long destined to bear the poverty, and to encounter the supposed degradation, that surrounded the author who wrote for subsistence-the successor of the author who wrote for preferment. Coming at a period when the circle of readers. Boswell's "Life of Johnson," chap. i. + See Nicholls's "Literary Anecdotes," vol i. p. 288. § Southey "The Doctor," chap. cxii. 1737-1783.] JOHNSON THE LINK BETWEEN TWO PERIODS. 85 was rapidly and steadily enlarging, he was rescued from the slavery of waiting in a lord's antechamber for five guineas for a dedication, to pass through the scarcely less painful dependence upon the capricious or mercenary publisher for a guinea for an article. But from this second stage of the author's misery relief was sure to come in time. Johnson swallowing the scraps from Cave's table, hidden behind a screen to conceal his ragged clothes,-Johnson wandering about the streets, hungry and houseless, with Savage; or collecting a few shillings, when his acquaintances were few and as poor as himself, to redeem the clothes of Boyse from the pawnbroker, and Johnson the acknowledged head of the Literary Club of which Burke and Reynolds were members,—are indications of social changes that were of more importance than the vicissitudes in the life of the individual. In many respects Johnson may be regarded as the Representative Man of the Literature of half a century -the Magazine-writer, the Essayist, the Critic, the Poet, the Philologist— the chapman, with many articles of use or ornament in a crowded market. But, in a point of view not altogether fanciful, Johnson was something higher than a Representative—he was a King. Of his death, in 1784, it has been said, "it was not only the end of a reign, but the end of kingship altogether, in our literary system. For king Samuel has had no successor; nobody since his day, and that of his contemporary Voltaire, has sat on a throne of Literature, either in England or in France." More fortunate than most sovereigns, king Samuel from the time when he began really to reign instead of fighting his way to the royal chair, had an annalist who has not damaged the character of the potentate by a minute record of the frailties and prejudices of the man. Johnson has indeed an interest apart from that of being the hero of the most amusing book in any language, from his position as the chief connecting link between the Literature of two periods which appear, at the first glance, to be very widely separated. In 1738, Johnson published anonymously his poem of "London"; and Pope is reported to have said, "the author, whoever he is, will not be long concealed." In 1783, Johnson "read with great delight" Crabbe's poem of "The Village," and suggested alterations in some of the lines. The association with Pope carries us back to the time of Anne. The association with Crabbe leads us onward to the time of William IV. But Johnson, isolated from the literature that preceded him and the literature that followed him, is the faithful mirror of the literature of his own age. In social intercourse with him, we see a large number of the most distinguished of his brethren. In his estimates of their value, and of others his contemporaries-estimates often prejudiced to the extent of absurdity, but even in their prejudices reflecting the opinions of his day-we obtain a broader general view of the literature of a very remarkable period of transition than from any other source. Johnson, as preserved to us by Boswell, is the universal commentator. In his admiration or in his contempt, we collect who were the writers filling the largest space in the estimation of the public they addressed. We may trace them, like himself, obtaining almost an absolute command over the national thought, by lighting up the obscure places of knowledge, and by bringing the remote places into easy communication. * G. L. Craik "Literature and Learning in England." 86 LITERATURE OF GEORGE THE SECOND'S TIME. [1737-1783. The precise period at which Johnson launched his little bark upon the wide ocean of literature, would appear, in many respects, as one offering small encouragement to a man possessing high genius, even if combined with the rarer faculty of turning his learning and abilities to account. The government of sir Robert Walpole would bestow wages upon needy hacks, without much regard to the quality of the work that was to be done for the hire. To shower lucrative places upon Walpole's scribbling eulogists and defenders, would have been to take the bread out of the mouths of the other hungry tribe who required sinecures as the payment for their votes. When Johnson came to London he found the authors up in arms against that partial interference with "the precarious dependence" of the wits which Walpole had accomplished by placing the stage under the control of a licenser. Yet if, by the effect of this law, the Lord Chamberlain was to be the chief supervisor, who would not suffer one species of wit to be retailed without a permit, the restrictions upon the theatre had no influence upon the speedy and luxuriant growth of many other forms of intellectual production, adapted, like that of the stage, for a general diffusion amongst all classes of society. The It is not uncommon to hear the reign of George II. spoken of as an age of dullness. Except by looking accurately at bibliographical dates, we can scarcely form a notion of the literary vigour that was displayed in the last twenty years of that reign. The greatest of the productions of Pope was the fourth book of "The Dunciad," published in 1742. He died in 1744. mighty intellect of Swift had been long shut up in hopeless imbecility, when he died in 1745. Young, who had made his reputation and his fortune by his Satires in the latter years of George I., achieved what the world was inclined to consider a far higher distinction by the publication of his "Night + Ante, vol. vi. p. 89. |