bed with the blanket wrapped about him (the
sheets had disappeared), and, thrusting his right
arm through a hole he had cut, scribbled
as best he could on the paper resting on his
knee. Whenever he was obliged to go abroad,
he had an ingenious method of supplying the
absence of a shirt. He cut some white paper into
strips, which he fastened round his wrists and
neck, in the manner of ruffles and bands; and
in this plight would sally forth, "with the additional
inconvenience," as his friend modestly
expresses it, "of want of breeches." The
wearers of paper collars in the present day have
a precedent from the heights of Parnassus and
the depths of poverty. Readers of George
Colman the Younger's Broad Grins will be reminded
by this device of the story of the
poor country clergyman, who, being invited to
dine with the squire on the day when his only
shirt was in the wash, furnished himself with
the similitude of linen in the same manner.
Colman probably borrowed the idea from the
actual records of Boyse's life; and indeed there
is something in the notion which seems as if it
could only have occurred to an Irishman—a
mingling of wretchedness and drollery characteristic
of the land where the peasants are said to
sit on the roofs of their hovels in windy weather,
to prevent the thatch being blown away. Poor
Boyse's contrivance is of a piece with that of
Brian O'Lyn, commemorated in the immortal
ballad which records the adventures of that
worthy:

Brian O'Lyn had no shoe to his fut,
So he cover'd it over with beautiful sut;
He stepp'd in a puddle right up to the shin:
"No need of shoe leather," said Brian O'Lyn.

Boyse's misfortunes were in a great measure
his own fault. He was a man of some ability
and of considerable scholastic acquirements;
and, had he chosen to live respectably, might
have earned a decent livelihood. Dr. Johnson
said that he could translate well from the
French; but, if any bookseller employed him
on this species of work, he would pawn the
original as soon as he had done a sheet or two,
and repeat the process as often as the book was
redeemed for him. A subscription in sixpences
was once got up for him by Johnson, with a
view to redeeming his clothes; but two days
afterwards they were pawned again. So he
went on, getting deeper and deeper into the
mire of distress and dishonesty, until in 1742
he was locked up in a spunging-house, from
which he addressed a piteous appeal to Cave.
"I am every moment," he wrote, " threatened
to be turned out here, because I have not
money to pay for my bed two nights past, which
is usually paid beforehand; and I am loth to
go into the Compter, till I can see if my affairs
can possibly be made up. I hope, therefore,
you will have the humanity to send me half a
guinea for support, till I finish your papers in
my hands. I humbly entreat your answer,
having not tasted anything since Tuesday evening
I came here; and my coat will be taken off
my back for the charge of the bed; so that I
must go into prison naked, which is too shocking
for me to think of." By some means or
other, Boyse got out of jail; but he was not reformed.
He had a habit of drinking hot beer
to excess, so that his intellectual powers were
confused and rendered inoperative. On the
death of his wife, his necessities were such that
the only mourning he could afford was a penny-worth
of black ribbon, which he tied round the
neck of his dog. During the last few months
of his own life, he seems to have lived with
rather more decency, and he was at no time
wanting in religious protestations; but it is
very doubtful whether he was ever really reclaimed.
Of his death, various accounts are
given. One states that he was found dead in
his bed, with a pen in his hand, with which he
was at work on a translation of Fenelon's Demonstration
of the Being of a God; another,
that he never recovered from a barbarous attack
made on him in Westminster by some soldiers;
a third, that he was run over by a coach when
intoxicated. At any rate, he finished his miserable
existence at the age of forty-one—as perfect
a specimen of the Poor Devil Author and
disreputable hanger-on of letters as even his
own era, rich as it was in such productions, can
afford to the student of scholastic mendicancy.

We might trace up the history of literary
sorrows and vice to an earlier age. Spenser
died in King-street, Westminster, "for lack of
bread," as Ben Jonson records. Ben himself
was often pushed for the means of life. Marlowe
was killed in a drunken brawl with a tavern
drawer, after a brief life of reckless profligacy.
His fellow dramatist, Greene, lived with equal
licentiousness, and died repentant in the house
of a poor shoemaker who took care of him in
his last moments, when he was reduced to the
extreme of penury. But that was a time in
which literature, apart from the stage, was hardly
followed as a profession; and it consequently
presents us with fewer instances of vagabond
authorship than the period extending from the
reign of William the Third to that of George
the Third. The epoch thus limited was a transition
period, and it abounded in all the evils of
an unsettled state. There was a sufficiently
large class of readers to induce a great many
men of ability and scholarship to depend on
letters for their support; but not sufficiently
large, as we have already remarked, to maintain,
them in decency and comfort. Education had
not advanced far enough to create a vast public
expecting to be supplied with mental food as
regularly as with bread and meat. For the first
fifty years or so after the Revolution, authors
looked for their reward mainly to the patronage
of noblemen—a mode of life at once precarious
and degrading; and, though this ceased in the
reign of George the Third, it was long ere the
working man of letters was placed in a better
position by the public. It was long also before
he himself acquired a just idea of his duties as
a member of the industrial world. Too often
he laid the foundation of his own failure by