Yet it is unjust and unworthy in Marsh to disfigure his fine work on the
English language by traducing all who now write that tongue. "None seek
the audience, fit, though few, which contented the ambition of Milton,
and all writers for the press now measure their glory by their gains,"
and so indefinitely onward,--which is simply cant. Does Sylvanus Cobb,
Jr., who honestly earns his annual five thousand dollars from the "New
York Ledger," take rank as head of American literature by virtue of his
salary? Because the profits of true literature are rising,--trivial as
they still are beside those of commerce or the professions,--its merits
do not necessarily decrease, but the contrary is more likely to happen;
for in this pursuit, as in all others, cheap work is usually poor work.
None but gentlemen of fortune can enjoy the bliss of writing for nothing
and paying their own printer. Nor does the practice of compensation by
the page work the injury that has often been ignorantly predicted. No
contributor need hope to cover two pages of a periodical with what might
be adequately said in one, unless he assumes his editor to be as foolish
as himself. The Spartans exiled Ctesiphon for bragging that he could
speak the whole day on any subject selected; and a modern magazine is of
little value, unless it has a Spartan at its head.

Strive always to remember--though it does not seem intended that we
should quite bring it home to ourselves--that "To-Day is a king in
disguise," and that this American literature of ours will be just as
classic a thing, if we do our part, as any which the past has treasured.
There is a mirage over all literary associations. Keats and Lamb seem to
our young people to be existences as remote and legendary as Homer, yet
it is not an old man's life since Keats was an awkward boy at the
door of Hazlitt's lecture-room, and Lamb was introducing Talfourd to
Wordsworth as his own only admirer. In reading Spence's "Anecdotes,"