with your name, to the work, writes that he or she is at last undeceived in regard to the character of authors. "I thank you, Mr. Green, for the lesson! The remembrance of your former struggles is happily effaced in your present success. It is hard for a heart throbbing with warmth to be chilled, and a guileless confidence in human brotherhood to be crushed forever! I will strive to bury my disappointed hopes in my own darkened bosom; and that you may be saved from the experience which you have prepared for another, is the wish of, Sir, yours, ———."
For a day or two I went about with a horrible feeling of dread and remorse. I opened the morning paper with trembling hands, and only breathed freely when I found no item headed "Suicide" in the columns. A year afterwards, chance threw me in the way of my broken-hearted victim. I declare to you I never saw a better specimen of gross animal health. She—no, he (on second thoughts, I won't say which)—was at an evening party, laughing boisterously, with a plate of chicken-salad in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other.
One of my first admirers was a gentleman of sixty, who called upon me with a large roll of manuscript. He had retired from business two years before, so he informed me, and, having always been a great lover of poetry, he determined to fill up the tedium of his life of ease by writing some for himself. Now everybody knows that I am not a poet,—the few patriotic verses which I wrote during the war having simply been the result of excitement,—and why should he apply to me? O, there was a great deal of poetry in my prose, he said. My didactic paper called "Wait for the Wagon!" showed such a knowledge of metaphor! I looked over the innumerable leaves, here and there venturing the remark that "rain" and "shame" were not good rhymes, and that my friend's blank verse had now and then lines of four and six feet. "Poetic license, sir!" was the reply. "I thought you were aware that poets are bound to no rules!"
What could I do with such a man? What, indeed, but to return him the manuscript with that combined gentleness and grace which I have endeavored to cultivate in my demeanor, and to suggest, in the tenderest way, that he should be content to write, and not publish? He got up, stiffened his backbone, placed his conventional hat hard upon his head, gave a look of mingled mortification and wrath, and hurried away without saying a word. That man, I assure you, will be my secret enemy to the day of his death. He is no doubt a literary authority in a small circle of equal calibre. When my name is mentioned, he will sneer down my rising fame, and his sneer will control the sale of half a dozen copies of my last volume.
This is a business view of the subject, I grant; but then I have always followed literature with an eye to business. The position of a popular writer is much more independent than that of a teacher or a clergyman, for which reason I prefer it. The same amount of intellect, made available in a different way, will produce material results just as satisfactory. Compensation, however, is the law of the world; hence I must pay for my independence; and this adventure with the old gentleman is one of the many forms in which the payment is made.
When the applications for autographs first began to pour in upon me, I gladly took a sheet of Delarue's creamiest note-paper and wrote thereon an oracular sentence from one of my most popular papers. After a while my replies degenerated to "Sincerely, Your Friend, Dionysius Green," and finally, (daily blessings come at last to be disregarded,) no application was favored, which did not enclose a postage-stamp. When some school-boy requested an autograph, "accompanied with a sentiment," and forwarded slips of paper on behalf of "two other boys," I sometimes lost my patience, and left the letters unanswered for a month at
