themselves by purely literary work is small, although the growth of the
reading public and the establishment of great magazines, such as
_Harper's_, the _Century_, and the _Atlantic_, have made a market for
intellectual wares which forty years ago would have seemed a godsend to
poorly paid Bohemians like Poe or obscure men of genius like Hawthorne.
About 1840, two Philadelphia magazines--_Godey's Lady's Book_ and
_Graham's Monthly_--began to pay their contributors twelve dollars a
page, a price then thought wildly munificent. But the first magazine
of the modern type was _Harper's Monthly_, founded in 1850. American
books have always suffered, and still continue to suffer, from the want
of an international copyright, which has flooded the country with cheap
reprints and translations of foreign works, with which the domestic
product has been unable to contend on such uneven terms. With the
first ocean steamers there started up a class of large-paged weeklies
in New York and elsewhere, such as _Brother Jonathan_, the _New World_,
and the _Corsair_, which furnished their readers with the freshest
writings of Dickens and Bulwer and other British celebrities within a
fortnight after their appearance in London. This still further
restricted the profits of native authors and nearly drove them from the
field of periodical literature. By special arrangement the novels of
Thackeray and other English writers were printed in _Harper's_ in
installments simultaneously with their issue in English periodicals.
The _Atlantic_ was the first of our magazines which was founded
expressly for the encouragement of home talent, and which had a purely
Yankee flavor. Journalism was the profession which naturally attracted
men of letters, as having most in common with their chosen work and as
giving them a medium, under their own control, through which they could
address the public. A few favored scholars, like Prescott, were made
independent by the possession of private fortunes. Others, like
Holmes, Longfellow, and Lowell, gave to literature such leisure as they