IS LITERATURE ILL-PAID?

ES! will be the prompt and indignant reply of

Y nineteen out of twenty of those who, as Lamb says,

suck their sustenance, like sick people, through a quill: -and they will be astonished that any one should ask the question. Did not Scott long ago say that literature does well enough as a staff, but not as a crutch,as a dilettante pursuit, but not as a means of getting one's bread and butter? Have you forgotten the fate of Chatterton, Otway, and Savage?-how the "impransus" Johnson struggled through his fifty years of poverty?—and what an amount of hack-work Goldsmith did to keep the wolf from his door while he was producing those exquisite poems, essays, and fictions, which, though they have made his name immortal, could not keep him from dying £3,000 in debt? Is it not notorious that Shelley's writings brought him no profit, having hardly a hundred buyers? Did not Schiller translate at a shilling a page? Has not Goethe told us that his works were 66 'an expense to him," though all Europe rang with his name? Did not Godwin, while startling England with his extraordinary works, earn his crust by bookselling? Would M. Jasmin have been able long to delight France with his songs, had he abandoned his humble calling of a hair-dresser? Have you never heard how the spirituelle Maginn lived and died, how Hogg's last moments were passed, and that

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he who sang the “ "Song of the Shirt" with a pathos that thrilled all Europe, died with the sad plaint that, though his friends might be able to urn a lively Hood" after his death, he could not do it while living? Is not Sheridan Knowles's hand-to-hand struggle with want yet fresh in the public memory, and do we not remember the three Caudle Letters of Laman Blanchard, penned in his wife's dying hours to keep the Sheriff from his house?

Again, if literature is well paid in this nineteenth century, why can it boast no profound, encyclopedic scholars, no great poets, like those of past ages? We have swarms of essayists and feuilletonists, magazine scribblers, who manufacture fiction by the hundredweight, and more thoughtful writers who exhaust their mental wealth on reviews; but where are our great epic and tragic poets? Where are our great linguists? Where is our Scaliger, our Jones, our Porson, or our Parr? Would the exquisite and myriad-volumed learning of the second keep him, in these iron, utilitarian times, from starvation; or would his command of all the treasures of Greek lore insure to the third any place or station commensurate with his merits? Have we not seen the greatest scholars of the age starving in England in miserable curacies, and in other countries in miserable professorships, while iawyers of less ability have clad themselves "in purple and fine linen," ridden in coaches drawn by long-tailed, silky-coated steeds, and fared sumptuously every day?

In replying to these questions, and affirming that literature, on the whole, is well paid, we shall leave out of consideration the amateurs who "write for glory, and print for fun," and speak only of the toilers, those who devote themselves to literature as a regular calling,

a means of subsistence and of self-advancement. We maintain that Paternoster Row is not a misnomer, for which, on account of its step-motherly heartlessness, Noverca Row might be aptly substituted; that, whatever provocation Campbell might have had for saying that he forgave Napoleon his crimes because he once shot a bookseller, it is not true that publishers drink their sherry out of authors' skulls; that literature, far from being necessarily associated with vexation and penury, is, when pursued steadfastly and conscientiously, as sure a means of support and of advancement as law, medicine, or trade.

In considering the profitableness of the literary calling, it should be remembered that there is hardly any other which requires so little capital for its pursuit. The lawyer must have an office, and at least an apology for a library, to say nothing of furniture, signs, and advertisements. The physician must have all these, and, in addition, a horse and carriage, besides being well dressed, for nobody will trust in his skill till, by an air of prosperity, he indicates that he is trusted by others. Even the artist must have his studio and a steady supply of canvas and paint. But all the capital the writer needs is a few quires of paper, a steel pen, and five cents worth of ink. If he lives in a city, the public libraries will furnish him with books; he may travel in horse-cars, live in the fourth story of a cheap boarding-house, and dress, if he pleases, like a scarecrow, yet, if he have real ability, meet with brilliant success. But, setting aside these compensations, let us see whether literary labor during the last two or three hundred years has been well requited. To begin with the "Father of English Poetry," Dan Chaucer, though his last days were clouded by embarrassment, yet,

during most of his life, he held profitable offices, and was even employed in diplomatic negotiations. Shakspeare we do not cite as a proof of our position, because, though born a wool-stapler's son, he retired with a large fortune. He never published his works, except on the stage, and made all his money by acting and shrewd investments. Spenser received from Queen Elizabeth a grant of three thousand acres of land in Ireland,― which, it is true, was very much like giving him a domain in Florida, inhabited by rattlesnakes and prowling Indians; but then he also received a pension of fifty pounds, equal to three hundred pounds or more now, for burning incense to the "Maiden Queen," and transforming, by the magic of genius, her red wig into "yellow locks, crisped like golden wire;" and though he was driven by Tyrone's Rebellion to die in sorrow and distress in London, yet he provoked his fate by his injustice to a proud and savage people, as Clerk of the Council and Sheriff of Cork, and by his recommendation of coercive measures against them in his "View of the State of Ireland." How much money 'rare Ben Jonson" received we do not know; but it is probable that only his continual guzzling of canary wine, and other intemperate habits, kept him from becoming rich.

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In the next century we find Milton receiving but £13 for his grand epic; but we must remember that he held an important State office, and enjoyed a degree of consideration not estimable in money. Moreover, he was eminently unpractical, and had a boundless scorn for those "drossy spirits" that are forever seeking to turn a penny,- that "need the lure and whistle of earthly preferment, like those animals that fetch and carry for a morsel." Dryden, who received £1,200 for

his translation of Virgil, and who, as poet-laureate and stockholder in a theatre, had a fixed income of £1,000 a year, was not ill-paid. With a brain of such fecundity that he could dash off the "Ode on St. Cecilia's Day" at a single jet, he must have won riches as well as honors but for the shrew who called him husband. The hunch-backed, spider-legged dwarf of Twickenham, who would have starved in almost any other calling, got £8,000,- an almost fabulous sum in those times,- for his translation of the Iliad only. Swift attained to ecclesiastical preferment, and might have had the object of his heart's desire, a bishopric, had he not shocked Archbishop Sharp by his profanity and indecency, and learned furens quid femina possit by lampooning the Duchess of Somerset. Addison rose to be Secretary of State, and Prior, from a pot-house boy, became like our Irving, Motley, Cushing, and Bancroft, an ambassador.

Johnson, it is true, had a long, up-hill fight against adversity. It was not the golden age of authors when he ate his dinners behind the screen in Cave's parlor, back of the shop, because he was too much out at the elbows to be presented at a tradesman's table; and when Savage, as if to show by contrast the inferiority of civilized life to the days when

"

"Wild through the woods the noble savage ran,”

roamed about the streets of London all night, for want of a shilling to pay for a lodging. But Johnson conquered success at last, and his position, when he had scaled the literary Alps, and could scornfully reject the tardily proffered aid of Chesterfield,-not to speak of a later period when he was the seven-tailed bashaw of the literary realm,—was an enviable one. Hume, from