How hard the path still up and down to tread,
A stranger’s stairs.”
Copernicus and Galileo found science no more profitable than Dante found poetry. Shakspeare had a home, but too poorly endowed to stand long in his name after he left it; the income upon which he retired was barely two or three hundred pounds a year, and so little did his contemporaries know or think of him that the critics hunt in vain for the details of his private life. The mighty span of his large honors shrinks to an obscure myth of life in theatres in London or on the banks of the Avon.
A LITERARY SCREW.
An English paper says that Sharon Turner, author of the History of the Anglo-Saxons, who received three hundred pounds a year from Government as a literary pension, wrote his third volume of his Sacred History of the World upon paper which did not cost him a farthing. The copy consisted of torn and angular fragments of letters and notes, of covers of periodicals, gray, drab, or green, written in thick round hand over a small print; of shreds of curling-paper, unctuous with pomatum of bear’s grease, and of white wrappers in which his proofs had been sent from the printers. The paper, sometimes as thin as a bank-note, was written on both sides, and was so sodden with ink, plastered on with a pen worn to a stump, that hours were frequently wasted in discovering on which side of it certain sentences were written. Men condemned to work on it saw their dinner vanish in illimitable perspective, and first-rate hands groaned over it a whole day for tenpence. One poor fellow assured the writer of that paper that he could not earn enough upon it to pay his rent, and that he had seven mouths to fill besides his own. In the hope of mending matters in some degree, slips of stout white paper were sent frequently with the proofs; but the good gentleman could not afford to use them, and they never came back as copy. What an inveterate miser this old scribbler must have been, notwithstanding his pension and his copyrights!
DRYDEN AND HIS PUBLISHER.
When Dryden had finished his translation of Virgil, after some self-deliberation, he sent the MS. to Jacob Tonson, requiring for it a certain sum, which he mentioned in a note. Tonson was desirous of possessing the work, but meanly wished to avail himself of Dryden’s necessities, which at that time were particularly urgent. He therefore informed the poet that he could not afford to give the sum demanded. Dryden, in reply, sent the following lines descriptive of Tonson:—
With leering look, bull-faced, and freckled fair,
With two left legs, with Judas-colored hair,
And frowsy pores that taint the ambient air.