historians.]

DeQuincey was then just coming on the stage. Crabbe, Shelley, Keats,
Croly, Hazlitt, Lockhart, Lamb, Hunt, Galt, Lady Morgan, Miss Mitford,
Horace Smith, Hook, Milman, Miss Austen, and a host of others, were
already on it. Many of these appear to have received rewards far greater
than fall now to the lot of some of the most distinguished literary men.
Crabbe is said to have received 3,000 guineas, or $15,000, for his "Tales
of the Hall," and Theodore Hook 2,000 guineas for "Sayings and Doings,"
and, if the facts were so, they prove that poets and novelists were far
more valued then than now. At that time, Croker, Barrow, and numerous
other men of literary reputation co-operated with Southey and Gifford in
providing for the pages of the "Quarterly." All these, men and women, were
the product of the last century, when the small landholders of England yet
counted by hundreds of thousands.

Since then, centralization has made great progress. The landholders now
amount, as we are informed, to only 30,000, and the gulf which separates
the great proprietor from the cultivator has gradually widened, as the one
has become more an absentee and the other more a day laborer. The greater
the tendency towards the absorption of land by the wealthy banker and
merchant, or the wealthy cotton-spinner like Sir Robert Peel, the greater
is the tendency towards its abandonment by the small proprietor, who has
an interest in local self government, and the greater the tendency towards
the centralization of power in London and in the great seats of
manufacture. In all those places, it is thought that the prosperity of
England is dependent upon "a cheap and abundant supply of labor."[1] The
"Times" assures its readers that it is "to the cheap labor of Ireland that
England is indebted for all her great works;" and that note is repeated by
a large portion of the literary men of England who now ask for protection