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EARLY WRITERS, THEIR DREAD OF THE PRESS; THE TRANSITION TO AUTHORS BY PROFESSION.

Ar the close of the reign of Elizabeth, the public, awakening at the first dawn of knowledge, with their stirring passions and their eager curiosity, found their wants supplied by a new race of "ready writers," who now teased the groaning press a diversified race of miscellaneous writers, who had discovered the wants of the people for books which excited their sympathies and reflected their experience, and who caught on their fugitive pages the manners and the passions of their contemporaries. No subject was too mean to be treated; and had domestic encyclopedias been then invented, these would have been precisely the library the people required: but now, every book was to be separately worked. The indiscriminate curiosity of an uneducated people was gratified by immature knowledge; but it was essential to amuse as well as to inform hence that multitude of fugitive subjects. The mart of literature, opened, and with the book-manufactory, in the language of that primeval critic, Webbe, of innumerable sorts of English books, and infinite fardles of printed pamphlets, "all shops were stuffed."

It has been attempted to fix on the name of that great patriarch, the Abraham of our Israel, who first invented our own book-craft; but it would be indiscreet to assign the honor to any particular person, or even to inquire whether the cupidity of the book-vender first set to work the ingenuity of the book-weaver. Who first dipped his silver pen into his golden ink, and who first conceived the notion of this literary alchymy, which transmutes paper into gold or lead? It was, I

believe, no solitary invention; the rush of "authors by profession" was simultaneous.

Former writers had fearfully courted fame, they were the children of the pleasures of the pen: these were a hardier race, who at once seized on popularity; and a new trade was opened by the arts of authorship. In the primitive age of publication, before there existed "a reading public," literary productions were often anonymous, or, which answered the same purpose, they wore the mask of a fictitious name, and were pseudonymous, or they hid themselves under naked initials, by which means the owners have sometimes lost their own property. It seems a paradox that writers should take such great pains to defraud themselves of their claims.

This coyness of publication was prevalent among our earliest writers, when writing and publishing were not yet almost synonymous terms. Before we had "authors by profession," we had authors who wrote, and seemed to avoid every sort of publicity. To the secluded writers of that day, the press was arrayed with terrors which have ceased to haunt those who are familiar with its daily labors, and our primeval writers trembled before that halo of immortality, which seemed to hang over that ponderous machinery. Writers eagerly affixed their names to polemical tracts, or to devotional effusions, during the melancholy reigns of Edward the Sixth, and Mary, as a record of their zeal, and sometimes as an evidence of their voluntary martyrdom; but the productions of imagination and genius were yet rare and private. The noble-minded hardly ventured out of the halcyon state of manuscript to be tossed about in open sea; it would have been compromising their dignity, or disturbing their repose, to submit themselves to the cavils of the cynics, for even at this early period of printed books we find that the ancient family of the Malevoli, whom Terence has noticed, had survived the fall of Rome, and here did not find their

"occupation gone." With many scholars too, it was still doubtful whether the vernacular muses in verse and prose were not trivial and homely. In the inchoate state of our literature, some who were imbued with classical studies might have felt their misgivings, in looking over their "gorgeous inventions," or their "pretty devices," as betraying undisciplined strength, bewildering fancies, and unformed tastes. They were not aware, even at that more advanced period, when a series of "poetical collections" appeared, of what they had already done; and it has been recently discovered, that when the printer of "England's Helicon" had innocently affixed the names of some writers to their pieces, to quiet their alarms, he was driven to the clumsy expedient of pasting slips of paper over their names. This was a spell which time only dissolved, that great revealer of secrets more deeply concealed.

When publication appeared thus terrible, an art which was not yet valued even the artists themselves would slight. We have a striking instance of this feeling in the circumstance of a sonnet of our Maiden Queen, on the conspiracies then hatching by the party of her royal sister of Scotland. One of the ladies of her bedchamber had surreptitiously transcribed the poem from her majesty's tablet; and the innocent criminal had thereby cast herself into extreme peril. The queen affected, or at least expressed, her royal anger lest the people should imagine that she was busied in "such toys," and her majesty was fearful of being considered too lightly of, for so doing. The grave sonnet might, however, have been accepted as a state-paper. The solemn theme, the grandeur of the queenly personages, and the fortunes of two great nations at issue, communicated to these verses the profound emotions of contemplative royalty, more exquisite than the poetry. Yet Elizabeth could be checked by "the fear to be held too lightly by such toys."

The same motive had influenced some of the great personages in our literature, who, by the suppression of their names, anxiously eluded public observation, at the very moment they were in reality courting it! Ignoto and Immerito, or bare initials, were the concealing signatures of Rawleigh, of Sidney, and of Spenser. The works of the Earl of Surrey, then the finest poems in the language, were posthumous. "The Arcadia" of Sidney possibly was never intended for the press. The noble Sackville, who planned the grand poem of “The Mirror of Magistrates," willingly left his lofty "Induc tion" anonymous among the crowd. In the first poetical miscellany in our language collected by the printer Tottell are "The poems of uncertain authors ;" so careless were the writers themselves to preserve their names, and so little aware of having any claims on posterity. Some years after, when those other poetical collections, "The Paradise of Dainty Devices" and "England's Helicon," were projected by their publishers, they were borrowed or stolen from manuscripts which lay neglected with their authors, and who for the most part conceal themselves under quaint signatures.

The metropolis, in the days of Elizabeth and James bore a pretty close resemblance to those ancient cities now existing before us on the Continent, famous in their day, but which, from causes not here necessary to specify, have not grown with the growth of time. Cologne, Coblentz, and Mayence, are such cities; and the city of Rouen, in its more ancient site, exhibits a picture of the streets of London in the days of Shakespeare. Stationary in their limits and their population, the classes of society are more distinctly marked out, but the individual lives more constantly under the survey of his neighbors. Their art of living is to live in the public eye; to keep up appearances, however this pride may prove inconvenient. No one would seem to have an established household, or always care to indi

cate its locality; their meals are at a public table, and their familiar acquaintance are found in the same public resorts; their social life becomes contracted as their own ancient narrow streets.

Such was London, when the Strand was a suburb, with only a few scattered mansions; the present streets still retain the family names, thus separating London from its regal sister. The glory of the gold-smiths and the mercers blazed in Cheapside, "the beauty of London ;" and Fleet street was the Bond street of fashionable loungers. In this contracted sphere, where all moved, and the observers had microscopical eyes, any trivial novelty was strangely magnified, and the great personage was an object for their scrutiny as well as the least considerable. Thus we find that the Lord Chancellor Bacon is censured by one of the gossiping pens of that day for his inordinate pride and pomp on the most ordinary occasions. He went in his state robes "to cheapen and buy silks and velvets at Sir Baptist Hicker's and Burner's shops." James the First, I think, once in Parliament alluded to the "goldsmiths at Cheap, who showed not the bravery of former days," as a mark of the decline of national prosperity. One of the popular alarms at that day was "the rising of the apprentices," whenever the City's clumsy "watch and ward" were put to the rout; the apprentices usually made an attempt on their abhorrence, Bridewell, or pulled down two or three houses on Shrove Tuesday. Once, on the trying of some ordnance in Moorfields, the court was seized by a panic of "a rising in the city." From all this we may form some notion of the size of the metropolis, and its imbecile police. In a vast and flourishing metropolis the individual liberty and security passes among the countless waves of this ocean of men.

A metropolis thus rising from its contracted infancy, extending in growth and diversified by new classes of VOL. II.--31