REVIEWS AMERICAN REPRINTS. 139 



life of the literary man, dependent on his pen, is still as hard a one to 

 many a gifted aspirant for fame as ever it was. Borrow, in more than 

 one of his autobiographic passages, hints not obscurely at his early 

 struggles. One of the most popular works of another living author, 

 namedabove, is believed to derive some of the pungent force of its sardonic 

 humor from having been written on a sick-bed for bread. What a 

 priceless boon to these, at such a time, wovild have been even the few 

 cents per copy, which the niggard policy of American Statesmanship 

 witholds, as an acknowledgment of the author possessing some frac- 

 tional right to the productions of his genius. With what a just pride 

 might the American lay claim to a common blood, and common tongue, 

 and a common freedom, with England's ennobled historian, if when 

 he is laid in his honored grave, the American reader of Macaulay could 

 tell his sons, with pardonable boast, that the literary British peer did 

 not contribute, unrequited, to his intellectual culture and enjoyment. 

 But till such scant and tardy justice is done the English author, let no 

 American critic presume to discuss, with cheap liberality, the stinted 

 honors which British Statesmanship awards to literature and science. 

 Let no windy rhetorician dare to allude to Milton's ill-requited " Para- 

 dise Lost," to Dryden's unwritten "Arthur," or to Scotland's Burns, 

 doomed, for its paltry pittance, to exchange his pen for the guager's 

 rod that kept his children from want. 



There is a grim humor in the coolness with which the American 

 publishers quote a Texas able editor's comments on the cost of the 

 English Review articles as enhancing the marketable value of the 

 transatlantic theft. " These publications," says the candid editor of 

 the Gonzales Inquirer, " afford the cheapest and best reading that can 

 be procured in the English language ;" and then he proceeds to furnish 

 to his readers the following apt and forcible comments on cheap litera- 

 ture so acquired, aparently without the remotest idea that any one 

 could dream of asking an equivalent for the appropriation of literary 

 productions the value of which he so frankly owns : 



" It may seem strange, though it is true notwithstanding, that tlie articles which 

 appear in them cost the concern by which they are originally published, about 

 twenty-five dollars per page. The four Reviews for the year contain over 2,500 

 pages, and Blackwood alone, more than half that number, making in all about four 

 thousand pages, the aggregate of which amounts to near one hundred thousand 

 dollars. So wonderful is the operation of the press, and its advantages so great, 

 that all this accumulated mass of learning can now be afforded to any one situated 

 even in this remote region of Texas for an amount but little more than we pay for 

 a hat, or pair of boots, and much less than the price of a ' greea tissue' for our 

 daughter, or a chip bonnet for our better half." 



