the professional for the amateur. Johnson despised gentlemen who dabbled
in his craft, as a man whose life is devoted to music or painting
despises the ladies and gentlemen who treat those arts as fashionable
accomplishments. An author was, according to him, a man who turned out
books as a bricklayer turns out houses or a tailor coats. So long as he
supplied a good article and got a fair price, he was a fool to grumble,
and a humbug to affect loftier motives.

Johnson was not the first professional author, in this sense, but
perhaps the first man who made the profession respectable. The principal
habitat of authors, in his age, was Grub Street--a region which, in
later years, has ceased to be ashamed of itself, and has adopted the
more pretentious name Bohemia. The original Grub Street, it is said,
first became associated with authorship during the increase of pamphlet
literature, produced by the civil wars. Fox, the martyrologist, was one
of its original inhabitants. Another of its heroes was a certain Mr.
Welby, of whom the sole record is, that he "lived there forty years
without being seen of any." In fact, it was a region of holes and
corners, calculated to illustrate that great advantage of London life,
which a friend of Boswell's described by saying, that a man could there
be always "close to his burrow." The "burrow" which received the
luckless wight, was indeed no pleasant refuge. Since poor Green, in the
earliest generation of dramatists, bought his "groat'sworth of wit with
a million of repentance," too many of his brethren had trodden the path
which led to hopeless misery or death in a tavern brawl. The history of
men who had to support themselves by their pens, is a record of almost
universal gloom. The names of Spenser, of Butler, and of Otway, are
enough to remind us that even warm contemporary recognition was not
enough to raise an author above the fear of dying in want of
necessaries. The two great dictators of literature, Ben Jonson in the