CHAPTER XCIII.

Peregrine commits himself to the Public, and is admitted Member of a College of Authors.

The bitterness of this explanation being passed, our young gentleman began to revolve within himself schemes for making up the deficiencies of his yearly income, which was now so grievously reduced; and determined to profit, in some shape or other, by those talents which he owed to nature and education. He had, in his affluence, heard of several authors, who, without any pretensions to genius or human literature, earned a very genteel subsistence by undertaking work for booksellers, in which reputation was not at all concerned. One, for example, professed all manner of translation, at so much per sheet, and actually kept five or six amanuenses continually employed, like so many clerks in a counting-house, by which means he was enabled to live at his ease, and enjoy his friend and his bottle, ambitious of no other character than that of an honest man and a good neighbour. Another projected a variety of plans for new dictionaries, which were executed under his eye by day-labourers; and the province of a third was history and voyages, collected or abridged by understrappers of the same class.