Lend these to paper-sparing Pope,
And when he sits to write,
No letter with an envelope
Could give him more delight.
When Pope has filled the margin round,
Why then recall your loan;
Sell them to Curll for 50 pound,
And swear they are your own!
Let us commemorate some of the Grub Street poets and a few others of the same obscure kind. The names of those selected justify my assertion that the miseries of poets fell only on those who were profligate, indolent, or incapable.
Samuel Boyse, a colonist, so to speak, of Grub Street, since he evidently belonged to that and no other quarter, was not a native of London, but of Dublin, where his father was a dissenting minister of great name and fame. The young man was sent to Glasgow University, where he brought his university career to a close by marrying a wife at the age of nineteen. As he had no means of his own, he was obliged to take his wife, with her sister, to Dublin, where his father supported them, selling an estate he had in Yorkshire to defray his son’s debts. On his father’s death Samuel Boyse removed to Edinburgh, where he published a volume of poems and wrote an elegy on the death of Lady Stormont.