What is it that has so drugged and glutted the literary market? Many persons imagine, I suppose, that this is an easy way of gaining money, and many others that it is an easy road to fame. For my part, I would rather be a successful pork-butcher than the most famous literary starveling alive. For what does the fame amount to, after all? Of all our literary men of the present day, how many will ever be mentioned, think you, a hundred years hence? Not one in fifty. And what is a hundred years to a race whose history is now counted by the ten thousand? "What fools," indeed, "these mortals be!"
By the way, Mr. Editor, wouldn't it be a good idea for these unsuccessful men of letters to club together and get up a magazine or a book composed entirely of "Rejected Contributions"? Suppose fifty such articles in a book with the title "Rejected Articles offered to Harper's, Scribner's, Lippincott's, and other Magazines." I should just like to see what stuff these articles are made of,—what those things are that you unfeeling editors have so unceremoniously rejected. The venture might pay, like the Smith Brothers' "Rejected Addresses." I know these were all written by two men, and were all in imitation of the style of various living authors; but might not these contributions be couched in a similar way? No doubt there are many pearls in the ocean of rejected literature. May not some of them have been "cast before swine"? Pray trot out some of these blue-pencilled articles, verbatim et literatim, that we may see what they are like, and whether the judgment of you editors, the Judicious, will be supported or confirmed by that of the multitude, the Vulgar. Robert Waters.
In the above three articles the Editor has given a selection from several communications received in answer to certain remarks made in our July number,—deeming it unfair that the other side should not have the opportunity to be heard. He has always sympathized with Miss Baylor's "Aunt Sukie" who joined the Methodist church because it gave her a chance to jaw back at the preacher. Neither preacher nor editor sums up in himself all, nor indeed any considerable proportion of, the wisdom in the world; but when these gentlemen occupy their respective pulpits they too often have all the jaw to themselves.
However, it is to be feared that St. Inier's amiable desire to pierce the editorial pachyderm has not been gratified. Nature is a kind mother. When a man first takes up an unfamiliar tool she sends him blisters to warn him that he should stop and think before he persists in its use. If she finds that he is in earnest, that he intends to persevere, she gathers up her energies and furnishes calluses that protect and strengthen his hand. The Editor of Lippincott's has gone through his blister period, and is now caparisoned with a defensive armor of calluses which the criticisms of his most esteemed contemporaries, the well-deserved rebukes of his correspondents, and even the stings of conscience, are powerless to pierce.
There is one point made by St. Inier which is well taken, though he has misinterpreted a sentence which the Editor acknowledges lends itself to misinterpretation. In speaking of authors of established reputation as compared with tyros, the Editor was right in classifying them as opposites, as the two great divisions of writers who submit articles to the magazines, but he might have paused to explain that there is an intermediate class, who are not yet "authors of established reputation," but who cannot either be called tyros or amateurs. Miss Rives was no tyro when she produced "A Brother to Dragons," nor Page when he produced "Marse Chan," nor Mrs. Burnett when she produced "A
