On your breakfast-table, good Paterfamilias, there lies, every morning, a newspaper, and on Saturday perhaps there are two or three.  When you go out in the street, you are pestered to buy half a score more of them.  In your club reading-room there are a hundred different journals.  When you travel by the railway you see at every station a provincial newspaper of more or less extensive circulation.  Has it never struck you that to supply these publications with their leading articles, there must be an immense staff of persons called journalists, professing every description of opinion, and advocating every conceivable policy?  And do you suppose these gentry only get L70 a year for their work, like a curate; or L60, like a sub-lieutenant; or that they have to pay three times those sums for the privilege of belonging to the press, as a barrister does for belonging to his inn?  Again, in London at least, there are as many magazines as newspapers, containing every kind of literature, the very contributors of which are so numerous, that they form a public of themselves.  That seems at the first blush to militate against my suggestion, but though contributors are so common, and upon the whole so good—­indeed, considering the conditions under which they labour, so wonderfully good—­they are not (I have heard editors say) so good as they might be, supposing (for example) they knew a little of science, history, politics, English literature, and especially of the art of composition, before they volunteered their services.  At present the ranks of journalistic and periodical literature are largely recruited from the failures in other professions.  The bright young barrister who can’t get a brief takes to literature as a calling, just as the man who has ‘gone a cropper’ in the army takes to the wine-trade.  And what aeons of time, and what millions of money, have been wasted in the meanwhile!

The announcement written on the gates of all the recognised professions in England is the same that would-be travellers read on the faces of the passengers on the underground railway after office hours:  ’Our number is complete, and our room is limited.’  In literature, on the contrary, though its vehicles may seem as tightly packed, substitution can be effected.  There may be persons travelling on that line in the first-class who ought to be in the third, and indeed have no reasonable pretext for being there at all.  And if clever Jack could show his ticket, he would turn them out of it.

Again, so far from the space being limited, it is continually enlarging, and that out of all proportion to those who have tickets.  We hear from its enemies that the Church is doomed, and from its friends that it is in danger; there is a small but energetic party who are bent on reducing the Army, and even on doing away with it; nay, so wicked and presumptuous has human nature grown, that mutterings are heard and menaces uttered against the delay and exactions of the Law itself; whereas Literature has no foes, and is enlarging its boundaries in all directions.  It is all ‘a-growing and a-blowing,’ as the peripatetic gardeners say of their plants; but, unlike their wares, it has its roots deep in the soil and is an evergreen.  Its promise is golden, and its prospects are boundless for every class of writer.