142 REVIEWS AMERICAN REPRINTS. 



As courtly ladies <lie fine tricks of trains, 



And swept it grand' y through the open doors - 



As if one could not pass through doors at all 



Save so encumbpred. I wrote tales beside, 



To suit light readers. But .... what you do 



For bread, will taste of common grain, not grapes, 



Although you have a vineyard in Champagne." 



And if it be so with the poet, it is even more so with those who 

 instruct ns in the hghter pages of Fiction. Sir Walter Scott contri- 

 buted many a vigorous article to the " Quarterly " mainly because of 

 its liberal exchequer ; and it may perhaps be doubted if we should ever 

 have had a "Nicholas Nickleby," or a "Vanity Fair," had not 

 Dickens and Thackeray been first tempted to join these guerilla ranks 

 of the light skirmishers of literature for a share of the pay. 



""We ourselves," writes a Scottish member of the corps, " receive from Cham- 

 ber's Journal twenty-one shillings per page, and for the continuous tales in the 

 serial, a guinea and a-half per page is paid. In a page of Chambers there are 

 abont 1370 words — in a page of the Leisure Hour there are usually 1120 words, 

 and for that number the Religious Tract Society pays fifteen shillings. Eliza 

 Cook used to pay us a guinea for a page containing about 1250 words, and Charles 

 Dickens still pays that sum for a page including only 1050 words. For the much 

 smaller pages of Tait's, Sharpe's, Bentley's, and the New Monthly, half-a-guinea each 

 is paid, while for pages of about the same size, Blackwood and the Dublin University 

 pay double that price. For reviews, the Athenaeum pays half-a-guinea, and the 

 Critic and Literary Gazette, seven shillings per column, while the Quarterlies pay 

 their contributors at rates varying from eight to sixteen guineas per sheet of six- 

 teen pages." And this writer is no selected exceptional case, such as we could 

 refer to, but one receiving the ordinary rate of pay. 



By means of this liberal and widely recognised tariff, literature has 

 become a regular profession in England, into which many of the ablest 

 of those who were destined for the church and the law, for medicine 

 and the arts, and even for commerce and trade, are drafted off from 

 time to time, until the periodical press has become a power of recog- 

 nised weight and commanding influence in the British Empire. But 

 with all the improvements in the fare of the literary adventurer since 

 the days when Collins and Goldsmith, and Fielding, and Thomson, 

 could each diversify, from personal experience, the incidents of arrest 

 for debt, we can point to few instances of fortunes won by literature. 

 The successor of Samuel Johnson no longer devours a hungry meal 

 behind the screen at St. John's Gate, which served to hide his ragged 

 attire ; but the literary guild might still accept of the motto suggested 

 by the witty chaplain of the young Edinburgh reviewers in their de- 

 rated seclusion among the eighth and ninth flats of Buccleugh street. 



