failure. A plan generally approved of is to sell your entire copyright
in your book for a very small sum. You want the ready money, and perhaps
you are not very hopeful. But, when your book is in all men's hands,
when you are daily reviled by the small fry of paragraphers, when the
publisher is clearing a thousand a year by it, while you only got a
hundred down, then you will thank me, and will acknowledge that, in spite
of apparent success, you are a failure after all. There are publishers,
however, so inconsiderate that they will not leave you even this
consolation. Finding that the book they bought cheap is really valuable,
they will insist on sharing the profits with the author, or on making him
great presents of money to which he has no legal claim. Some persons,
some authors, cannot fail if they would, so wayward is fortune, and such
a Quixotic idea of honesty have some middlemen of literature. But, of
course, you _may_ light on a publisher who will not give you _more_ than
you covenanted for, and then you can go about denouncing the whole
profession as a congregation of robbers and clerks of St. Nicholas.

The ways of failure are infinite, and of course are not nearly exhausted.
One good plan is never to be yourself when you write, to put in nothing
of your own temperament, manner, character--or to have none, which does
as well. Another favourite method is to offer the wrong kind of article,
to send to the _Cornhill_ an essay on the evolution of the Hittite
syllabary, (for only one author could make _that_ popular;) or a sketch
of cock fighting among the ancients to the _Monthly Record_; or an essay
on _Ayahs in India_ to an American magazine; or a biography of Washington
or Lincoln to any English magazine whatever. We have them every month in
some American periodicals, and our poor insular serials can get on
without them: "have no use for them."

It is a minor, though valuable scheme, to send poems on Christmas to