REVIEWS AMERICAN REPRINTS. 143 



' Temii musam meditamur avena : — We cultivate literature on a little 

 oatmeal," — a motto which it will be remembered was exchanged 

 for a sententious scrap of philosophy from Publius Syrus, because the 

 former was ibund a little too near the literal truth to be quite agreeable 

 to those literary adventurers. 



The reasoning of many a young and inexperienced literary adven- 

 turer, when first launched fairly into the middle-stream, — a recognised 

 contributor to sundry of the standard Weeklies, Monthlies, and 

 Quarterlies, — has been very much in this Alnascar fashion: "I get 

 eight guineas per sheet for an article, such as that which I have 

 just finished within the week. There are fifty-two weeks in the year, 

 and authors who receive, not eight but sixteen, and even thirty guineas 

 per sheet ; what may not a young hopeful like me anticipate." And 

 it is well accordingly, if our hopeful young visionary do not marry on 

 the faith of it, and start a domestic establishment in modest emulation 

 of Abbotsford or Strawberry Hill. But long before he gains admit- 

 tance to the rank of veterans — if ever he get there — he has learned 

 that head-work cannot be carried on like hand-work, systematically on 

 day -wages ; that there are not fifty-two, nor even twenty- six weeks in 

 his year ; and that in truth sixteen guineas per sheet for the concentra- 

 ted essence of the study and thought of years, is after all no such high- 

 road to fortune as he had fancied when he reaped the first harvest 

 from his fallow brain. 



If therefore it be true that the wretched traditional race of Grub 

 street literary hacks be no more ; and Pope's satire would no longer 

 furnish a sufficient directory for finding Curll's authors — " the historian 

 at the tallow-chandler's under the blind arch in Petty France, the two 

 translators in bed together, or the poet in the cock-loft in Budge row, 

 whose landlady keeps the ladder ;"— and though a pre-Raphaelite 

 Hogarth of the present day would no longer find his Tragi-Comedy 

 in the pale young wife of the sans-cullotte author, dunned, in his 

 garret, for the milk-maid's tally-stick, while she plies her needle to 

 repair the threadbare but indispensable nether garment,— though all 

 this, we say, be no more, nevertheless, no one possessed of the slightest 

 knowledge of the subject will say that the English literary man of the 

 nineteenth century is overpaid. Nor would it have been an act of 

 supererogation for the appreciative American editor, who " most 

 earnestly advises all parochial literary clubs and Lyceums to take these 

 valuable publications, as they cannot realise anything like the same 

 amount of literary and intellectual wealth for a similar outlay;" if he 

 had added, — and when you have realized the amount of literary and 



