Author: Thomas De Quincey

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2017-01-25

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 9781333348694

Excerpt from Masters of Literature, De Quincey The polygrapher is sometimes born and oftener made. Most commonly he is driven to the business, as Johnson, and Southey, and Gauthier were, by the urgent necessity of bringing his talents to the market. A man of letters, unless the imaginative impulse is supreme within him, and sometimes when it is, must live by producing in sufficient quantity such wares as the readers and the dealers want. If he is poor, and cannot wait till the world has discovered, and is prepared to reward him for, the exercise of his distinctive talent, or if he has the critical and analytic rather than the creative faculty, he must resort to 'those who do business in the literary mart, and he may esteem himself lucky if he does not become a day-labourer condemned to work for bread upon Athenian stalls. In the eighteenth century he went to the booksellers; in our day he goes to the newspapers; in the earlier half of the nineteenth century he wrote for the magazines. De Quincey's active life synchronized with the period when the English and Scottish literary periodicals were at the apogee of their influence and success. They sup plied the public with a great deal both of its serious, and its lighter, reading; they were powerful, wealthy, and important, and their circulation was, for their time, large; they were conducted by enterprising publishers or keen men of business who, in their ardent rivalry with one another, were eager to draw the ablest pens of Britain into their service. A monthly or quarterly press which had among its contributors such writers as Coleridge, Keats, Landor, Sir William Hamilton, Christopher North, Lockhart, Hood, Lamb, Hazlitt, Jeffrey, John Stuart Mill, Carlyle, and Macaulay, had some reason to think well of itself. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.