talent. Ability by itself, even literary ability of a high order,
is not sufficient; it is necessary to have a vogue, to create or
satisfy a special demand, to hit the taste of the age. But the
writer of belles-lettres, the literary writer pure and simple, can
hardly hope to earn a living wage, unless he is content to do, and
indeed fortunate enough to obtain, a good deal of hackwork as well.
He must be ready to write reviews and introductions; to pour out
occasional articles, to compile, to edit, to select; and the
chances are that if his livelihood depends upon his labour, he will
have little of the tranquillity, the serenity, the leisure, upon
the enjoyment of which the quality of the best work depends. John
Addington Symonds makes a calculation, in one of his published
letters, to the effect that his entire earnings for the years in
which he had been employed in writing his history of the Italian
Renaissance, had been at the rate of about L100 a year, from which
probably nearly half had to be subtracted for inevitable incidental
expenses, such as books and travelling. The conclusion is that
unless a man has private resources, or a sufficiently robust
constitution to be able to carry on his literary work side by side
with his professional work, he can hardly afford to turn his
attention to belles-lettres.

Nowadays literature has become a rather fashionable pursuit than
otherwise. Times have changed since Gray refused to accept money
for his publications, and gave it to be understood that he was an
eccentric gentleman who wrote solely for his own amusement; since
the inheritor of Rokeby found among the family portraits of the
magnates that adorned his walls a picture of the novelist
Richardson, and was at the pains of adding a ribbon and a star, in
order to turn it into a portrait of Sir Robert Walpole, that he