The man of genius wrestling with oppressive fortune, who follows the avocations of an author as a precarious source of existence, should take as the model of the authorial life, that of Dr. JOHNSON.  The dignity of the literary character was as deeply associated with his feelings, and the “reverence thyself” as present to his mind, when doomed to be one of the Helots of literature, by Osborn, Cave, and Miller, as when, in the honest triumph of Genius, he repelled a tardy adulation of the lordly Chesterfield.  Destitute of this ennobling principle, the author sinks into the tribe of those rabid adventurers of the pen who have masked the degraded form of the literary character under the assumed title of “authors by profession"[A]—­the GUTHRIES, the RALPHS, and the AMHURSTS[B].  “There are worse evils for the literary man,” says a living author, who himself is the true model of the great literary character, “than neglect, poverty, imprisonment, and death.  There are even more pitiable objects than Chatterton himself with the poison at his lips.”  “I should die with hunger were I at peace with the world!” exclaimed a corsair of literature —­and dashed his pen into the black flood before him of soot and gall.

[Footnote A:  From an original letter which I have published from GUTHRIE to a minister of state, this modern phrase appears to have been his own invention.  The principle unblushingly avowed, required the sanction of a respectable designation.  I have preserved it in “Calamities of Authors.”]

[Footnote B:  For some account of these men, see “Calamities of Authors.”]

In substituting fortune for the object of his designs, the man of genius deprives himself of those heats of inspiration reserved for him who lives for himself; the mollia tempora fandi of Art.  If he be subservient to the public taste, without daring to raise it to his own, the creature of his times has not the choice of his subjects, which choice is itself a sort of invention.  A task-worker ceases to think his own thoughts.  The stipulated price and time are weighing on his pen or his pencil, while the hour-glass is dropping its hasty sands.  If the man of genius would be wealthy and even luxurious, another fever besides the thirst of glory torments him.  Such insatiable desires create many fears, and a mind in fear is a mind in slavery.  In one of SHAKSPEARE’S sonnets he pathetically laments this compulsion of his necessities which forced him to the trade of pleasing the public; and he illustrates this degradation by a novel image.  “Chide Fortune,” cries the bard,—­

The guilty goddess of my harmless deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than public means which public manners breeds; Thence comes it that my name receives a brand; And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, LIKE THE DYER’S HAND.

Such is the fate of that author, who, in his variety of task-works, blue, yellow, and red, lives without