guineas a week' from The Post. The high-water mark of a journalist's earnings at the end of the last century is probably marked by the achievement of Mackintosh, who earned ten guineas in a week. 'No paper could stand it!' exclaimed the proprietor, and the bargain had to be revised. A few years later, however, we are told that Sterling, the father of Carlyle's friend, was receiving the sum which Coleridge supposed himself to have refused, namely, £2000 a year for writing leading articles in The Times. Stuart, it would seem, in the earlier period was paying the fair value of their wares to Coleridge, Southey, and their like; but in the days of Scott and Byron the price of popular writing was going up by leaps and bounds.
The normal process of the evolution of editors was what I have tried to sketch, simply, that is, the gradual delegation of powers by the printer or bookseller who had first employed some inhabitant of Grub Street as a drudge, and when the work became too complex and delicate, had handed over the duties to men of special literary training. Two very important periodicals, however, of this period show a certain reversion to the older type. The Edinburgh Review owed part of its success to
