Jacksons giving untried boys £10--or, according to some accounts, £20--for
_Poems by Two Brothers_.

To open the case for the bookseller or the publisher. The poet, to start
with, bases his familiar complaints on a wilful disregard of the relation
which poetry bears to average humanity. You often hear him express
indignant surprise that the sale of butcher's meat should be a more
lucrative business than the sale of poetry. But, surely, to argue thus is
to manifest a most absurd misapprehension of the facts of life. Wordsworth
says that 'we live by admiration, joy, and love.' So doubtless we do: but
we live far more by butcher's meat and Burton ale. Poetry is but a
preparation of opium distilled by a minority for a minority. The poet may
test the case by the relative amounts he pays his butcher and his
bookseller. So far as I know, he pays as little for his poetry as
possible, and never buys a volume by a brother-singer till he has vainly
tried six different ways to get a presentation copy. The poet seems
incapable of mastering the rudimentary truth that ethereals must be based
on materials. 'No song, no supper' is the old saw. It is equally true
reversed--no supper, no song. The empty-stomach theory of creation is a
cruel fallacy, though undoubtedly hunger has sometimes been the spur which
the clear soul doth raise.

The conditions of existence compel the publisher to be a tradesman on the
same material basis as any other. Ideally, a poem, like any other
beautiful thing, is beyond price; but, practically, its value depends on
the number of individuals who can be prevailed upon to purchase it. In its
ethereal--otherwise its unprinted--state, it is only subject to the laws
of the celestial ether, one of which is that it yields no money; properly
speaking, money is there an irrelevant condition. Byron, you remember,
would not for a long time accept any money from Murray for his poems,