unseemly for an author or two to be making half as much by their
pens as popular ministers often receive in salary; the public is
used to the pecuniary prosperity of some of the clergy, and at
least sees nothing droll in it; but the paragrapher can always
get a smile out of his readers at the gross disparity between the
ten thousand dollars Jones gets for his novel, and the five
pounds Milton got for his epic. I have always thought Milton was
paid too little, but I will own that he ought not to have been
paid at all, if it comes to that. Again, I say that no man ought
to live by any art; it is a shame to the art if not to the
artist; but as yet there is no means of the artist's living
otherwise, and continuing an artist.

The literary man has certainly no complaint to make of the
newspaper man, generally speaking. I have often thought with
amazement of the kindness shown by the press to our whole
unworthy craft, and of the help so lavishly and freely given to
rising and even risen authors. To put it coarsely, brutally, I
do not suppose that any other business receives so much
gratuitous advertising, except the theatre. It is enormous, the
space given in the newspapers to literary notes, literary
announcements, reviews, interviews, personal paragraphs,
biographies, and all the rest, not to mention the vigorous and
incisive attacks made from time to time upon different authors
for their opinions of romanticism, realism, capitalism,
socialism, Catholicism, and Sandemanianism. I have sometimes
doubted whether the public cared for so much of it all as the
editors gave them, but I have always said this under my breath,
and I have thankfully taken my share of the common bounty. A
curious fact, however, is that this vast newspaper publicity