seem to have forgotten this in the case of our infant literary
industry. So long as this remains the case, we cannot expect the
best business talent to go into literature, and the man of
letters must keep his present low grade among business men.

As I have hinted, it is but a little while that he has had any
standing at all. I may say that it is only since the was that
literature has become a business with us. Before that time we
had authors, and very good ones; it is astonishing how good they
were; but I do not remember any of them who lived by literature
except Edgar A. Poe, perhaps; and we all know how he lived; it
was largely upon loans. They were either men of fortune, or they
were editors, or professors, with salaries or incomes apart from
the small gains of their pens; or they were helped out with
public offices; one need not go over their names, or classify
them. Some of them must have made money by their books, but I
question whether any one could have lived, even very simply, upon
the money his books brought him. No one could do that now,
unless he wrote a book that we could not recognize as a work of
literature. But many authors live now, and live prettily enough,
by the sale of the serial publication of their writings to the
magazines. They do not live so nicely as successful
tradespeople, of course, or as men in the other professions when
they begin to make themselves names; the high state of brokers,
bankers, railroad operators, and the like is, in the nature of
the case, beyond their fondest dreams of pecuniary affluence and
social splendor. Perhaps they do not want the chief seats in the
synagogue; it is certain they do not get them. Still, they do
very fairly well, as things go; and several have incomes that
would seem riches to the great mass of worthy Americans who work