The salary in any business
under heaven is not the only, nor indeed the first, question. That
you should continue to exist is a matter for your own
consideration; but that your business should be first honest, and
second useful, are points in which honour and morality are
concerned. If the writer to whom I refer succeeds in persuading a
number of young persons to adopt this way of life with an eye set
singly on the livelihood, we must expect them in their works to
follow profit only, and we must expect in consequence, if he will
pardon me the epithets, a slovenly, base, untrue, and empty
literature. Of that writer himself I am not speaking: he is
diligent, clean, and pleasing; we all owe him periods of
entertainment, and he has achieved an amiable popularity which he
has adequately deserved. But the truth is, he does not, or did not
when he first embraced it, regard his profession from this purely
mercenary side. He went into it, I shall venture to say, if not
with any noble design, at least in the ardour of a first love; and
he enjoyed its practice long before he paused to calculate the
wage. The other day an author was complimented on a piece of work,
good in itself and exceptionally good for him, and replied, in
terms unworthy of a commercial traveller that as the book was not
briskly selling he did not give a copper farthing for its merit.
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