beginning, and that the kindness they almost always show to young authors is an effect of the self-pity they feel for their own thwarted wish to be authors.  When an author is once warm in the saddle, and is riding his winged horse to glory, the case is different:  they have then often no sentiment about him; he is no longer the image of their own young aspiration, and they would willingly see Pegasus buck under him, or have him otherwise brought to grief and shame.  They are apt to gird at him for his unhallowed gains, and they would be quite right in this if they proposed any way for him to live without them; as I have allowed at the outset, the gains are unhallowed.  Apparently it is unseemly for two or three authors 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 seems to have very little to do with an author’s popularity, though ever so much with his notoriety.  Some of those strange subterranean fellows who never come to the surface in the newspapers, except for a contemptuous paragraph at long intervals, outsell the famousest of the celebrities, and secretly have their horses and yachts and country seats, while immodest merit is left to get about on foot and look up summer-board at the cheaper hotels.  That is probably right, or it would not happen; it seems to be in the general scheme, like millionairism and pauperism;