Macaulay has contrasted the misery of the Grub Street hack of Johnson's time, with the honours accorded to men like Prior and Addison at an earlier date, and the solid sums paid by booksellers to the authors of our own day.
But these brilliant passages hardly go lower than the surface of the great change.

Its significance lay quite apart from the prices paid for books.

The all-important fact about the men of letters in France was that they constituted a new order, that their rise signified the transfer of the spiritual power from ecclesiastical hands, and that, while they were the organs of a new function, they associated it with a new substitute for doctrine.

These men were not only the pupils of the Jesuits; they were also their immediate successors as the teachers, the guides, and the directors of society.

For two hundred years the followers of Ignatius had taken the intellectual and moral control of Catholic communities out of the failing hands of the Popes and the secular clergy.