office with a fixed income and the occupation of trimming other people's works instead of painfully straining matter from your own brain. Good service to a political patron, or very rarely some other merit, might be paid by a pension; but, without one, even Johnson, the acknowledged dictator of letters in his time, would apparently have never escaped from the writer's treadmill. He was never, it would seem, more than a month or two ahead of the friends who have become types of the Grub Street author: Smart, who let himself for ninety-nine years to a bookseller, or Boyse, whose only clothing was a blanket with holes in it through which his hands protruded to manufacture verses. Perhaps the Secretary of the Literary Fund could produce parallels even at the present day, and the increase in the prizes has certainly not diminished the number of blanks. Meanwhile, political journalism was coming to fresh life with the agitation of the early days of George III. The North Briton, in which Wilkes began his warfare, was a weekly periodical pamphlet after The Craftsman fashion, started at a week's notice to meet Smollett's Briton, and written chiefly by Wilkes with help from Churchill. It had a short and stormy life, and
