not to be compared in a business way. As for the essayist, the
poet, the traveller, the popular scientist, they are nowhere in
the competition for the favor of readers. The reviewer, indeed,
has a pretty steady call for his work, but I fancy the reviewers
who get a hundred dollars a thousand words could all stand upon
the point of a needle without crowding one another; I should
rather like to see them doing it. Another gratifying fact of the
situation is that the best writers of fiction who are most in
demand with the magazines, probably get nearly as much money for
their work as the inferior novelists who outsell them by tens of
thousands, and who make their appeal to the innumerable multitude
of the less educated and less cultivated buyers of fiction in
book-form. I think they earn their money, but if I did not think
all of the higher class of novelists earned so much money as they
get, I should not be so invidious as to single out for reproach
those who did not.

The difficulty about payment, as I have hinted, is that
literature has no objective value really, but only a subjective
value, if I may so express it. A poem, an essay, a novel, even a
paper on political economy, may be worth gold untold to one
reader, and worth nothing whatever to another. It may be
precious to one mood of the reader, and worthless to another mood
of the same reader. How, then, is it to be priced, and how is it
to be fairly marketed? All people must be fed, and all people
must be clothed, and all people must be housed; and so meat,
raiment, and shelter are things of positive and obvious
necessity, which may fitly have a market price put upon them.
But there is no such positive and obvious necessity, I am sorry
to say, for fiction, or not for the higher sort of fiction. The