with their hands for a living--when they can get the work. Their
incomes are mainly from serial publication in the different
magazines; and the prosperity of the magazines has given a whole
class existence which, as a class, was wholly unknown among us
before the war. It is not only the famous or fully recognized
authors who live in this way, but the much larger number of
clever people who are as yet known chiefly to the editors, and
who may never make themselves a public, but who do well a kind of
acceptable work. These are the sort who do not get reprinted
from the periodicals; but the better recognized authors do get
reprinted, and then their serial work in its completed form
appeals to the readers who say they do not read serials. The
multitude of these is not great, and if an author rested his
hopes upon their favor he would be a much more embittered man
than he now generally is. But he understands perfectly well that
his reward is in the serial and not in the book; the return from
that he may count as so much money found in the road--a few
hundreds, a very few thousands, at the most.


V.

I doubt, indeed, whether the earnings of literary men are
absolutely as great as they were earlier in the century, in any
of the English-speaking countries; relatively they are nothing
like as great. Scott had forty thousand dollars for "Woodstock,"
which was not a very large novel, and was by no means one of his
best; and forty thousand dollars had at least the purchasing
powers of sixty thousand then. Moore had three thousand guineas
for "Lalla Rookh," but what publisher would be rash enough to pay