Volume 1

Studies of a biographer / by Leslie Stephen.

  • Stephen, Leslie, 1832-1904.
Date:
[1910]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Studies of a biographer / by Leslie Stephen. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    60/284 (page 48)
    Afterwards they frequently appeared as a series of articles in one of the magazines, and had less of an independent existence. For the main origin of the editor we must, then, go_back to Grub Street. One point must be noticed. Between Grub Street and these higher circles of elegant authorship there was little communication, and certainly no love lost. The modern author has sometimes looked fondly back to the period of Queen Anne as a golden epoch when literature received its proper reward. Macaulay speaks of the next years as a time when the author fell, as it were, between two stools—when he had lost the patron and not been taken up by the public. This, I think, suggests an inaccurate view. Grub Street had never basked in the sunshine of patronage. Its denizens had few interviews with great men, unless they were such as Boyer had with Swift or Twyn with Lestrange. The ‘ hackney author,’ as Dunton already calls him, was simply a nuisance to be suppressed unless he could be used as a spy. A few men of education drifted into the miserable street ; royalist divines (like Fuller) under the Commonwealth, and ejected ministers such as Baxter under Charles n. Baxter tells us that he managed by ceaseless