Some of them belonged to the class who understood the great truth that
the scissors are a very superior implement to the pen considered as a
tool of literary trade. Such, for example, was that respectable Dr. John
Campbell, whose parties Johnson ceased to frequent lest Scotchmen should
say of any good bits of work, "Ay, ay, he has learnt this of Cawmell."
Campbell, he said quaintly, was a good man, a pious man. "I am afraid he
has not been in the inside of a church for many years; but he never
passes a church without pulling off his hat. This shows he has good
principles,"--of which in fact there seems to be some less questionable
evidence. Campbell supported himself by writings chiefly of the
Encyclopedia or Gazetteer kind; and became, still in Johnson's phrase,
"the richest author that ever grazed the common of literature." A more
singular and less reputable character was that impudent quack, Sir John
Hill, who, with his insolent attacks upon the Royal Society, pretentious
botanical and medical compilations, plays, novels, and magazine
articles, has long sunk into utter oblivion. It is said of him that he
pursued every branch of literary quackery with greater contempt of
character than any man of his time, and that he made as much as £1500 in
a year;--three times as much, it is added, as any one writer ever made
in the same period.

The political scribblers--the Arnalls, Gordons, Trenchards, Guthries,
Ralphs, and Amhersts, whose names meet us in the notes to the _Dunciad_
and in contemporary pamphlets and newspapers--form another variety of
the class. Their general character may be estimated from Johnson's
classification of the "Scribbler for a Party" with the "Commissioner of
Excise," as the "two lowest of all human beings." "Ralph," says one of
the notes to the _Dunciad_, "ended in the common sink of all such
writers, a political newspaper." The prejudice against such employment
has scarcely died out in our own day, and may be still traced in the