By the
indiscreet exertion of his mind, in protracted and incessant literary
labours, poor Robert Heron destroyed his health, and after years of toil
spent in producing volumes so numerous and so varied as to stagger one to
contemplate, ended his days in Newgate. In his pathetic appeal for help to
the Literary Fund, wherein he enumerates the labours of his life, he
wrote, "I shudder at the thought of perishing in gaol." And yet that was
the fate of Heron, a man of amazing industry and vast learning and
ability, a martyr to literature.
He has unhappily many companions, whose names appear upon that mournful
roll of luckless authors. There is the unfortunate poet Collins, who was
driven insane by the disappointment attending his unremunerative toil, and
the want of public appreciation of his verses. William Cole, the writer of
fifty volumes in MS. of the _Athenae Cantabrigienses_, founded upon the
same principle as the _Athenae Oxonienses_ of Anthony Wood, lived to see
his hopes of fame die, and yet to feel that he could not abandon his self-
imposed task, as that would be death to him. Homer, too, has had some
victims; and if he has suffered from translation, he has revenged himself
on his translators. A learned writer, Joshua Barnes, Professor of Greek at
Cambridge, devoted his whole energy to the task, and ended his days in
abject poverty, disgusted with the scanty rewards his great industry and
scholarship had attained.
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