with immunity by any class of men not liking his opinions on the question of industrial slavery or antipaedobaptism.  Still the market for his wares is steadier than the market for any other kind of literary wares, and the prices are better.  The historian, who is a kind of inferior realist, has something like the same steadiness in the market, but the prices he can command are much lower, and the two branches of the novelist’s trade are not to be compared in a business way.  As for the essayist, the poet, the traveller, the popular scientist, they are nowhere in the competition for the favor of readers.  The reviewer, indeed, has a pretty steady call for his work, but I fancy the reviewers who get a hundred dollars a thousand words could all stand upon the point of a needle without crowding one another; I should rather like to see them doing it.  Another gratifying fact of the situation is that the best writers of fiction, who are most in demand with the magazines, probably get nearly as much money for their work as the inferior novelists who outsell them by tens of thousands, and who make their appeal to the innumerable multitude of the less educated and less cultivated buyers of fiction in book form.  I think they earn their money, but if I did not think all of the higher class of novelists earned so much money as they get, I should not be so invidious as to single out for reproach those who did not.

The difficulty about payment, as I have hinted, is that literature has no objective value really, but only a subjective value, if I may so express it.  A poem, an essay, a novel, even a paper on political economy, may be worth gold untold to one reader, and worth nothing whatever to another.  It may be precious to one mood of the reader, and worthless to another mood of the same reader.  How, then, is it to be priced, and how is it to be fairly marketed?  All people must be fed, and all people must be clothed, and all people must be housed; and so meat, raiment, and shelter are things of positive and obvious necessity, which may fitly have a market price put upon them.  But there is no such positive and obvious necessity, I am sorry to say, for fiction, or not for the higher sort of fiction.  The sort of fiction which corresponds in literature to the circus and the variety theatre in the show-business seems essential to the spiritual health of the masses, but the most cultivated of the classes can get on, from time to time, without an artistic novel.  This is a great pity, and I should be-very willing that readers might feel something like the pangs of hunger and cold, when deprived of their finer fiction; but apparently they never do.  Their dumb and passive need is apt only to manifest itself negatively, or in the form of weariness of this author or that.  The publisher of books can ascertain the fact through the declining sales of a writer; but the editor of a magazine, who is the best customer of the best writers, must feel the market with a much more delicate touch.