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THE £ S. D. OF LITERATURE.

You may count upon your fingers all the fortunes that have been made by literature since the days of Scott, and with the exception of Scott and Dickens, no professional man of our day has made an income by literature equal to Pope's. The highest sum that has been paid for a poem in our day if £3,000. This was the price of "Lalla Rookh," and one of Scott's. Pope made £5,320 by his translation of the " Iliad ;" and £5,000 in Pope's time was equal in purchasing power to £10,000 now. Swift refuBOd to let Pope put a lino of the "Iliad" in type till he secured subscriptions for him at Court amounting to 1,000 guineas ; and Pope tells us in his own prefaco that lie had found more patrons than ever Homer wanted, and that if Homer had all the wits of after ages for his defenders, his translation had all all the beauties of the present for his advocates — a pleasure, as Pope gallantly adds, too great to be changed for any fame in reversion, Even Gay made £3,000 by his " Boggar'a Opera," and Gay had at one time , a fortune of £20,000, all made by his pen. He died worth £3,000 in the Funds, the exact amount that Lord Russell raised for Tom Moore's widow by the sale of his memoir and yet during the greater part of his days Gay hadt lived the life of a fast man about town, and had squandered his money , like a Dumas. Swift gave away the copyright of most of- hi* works to Praxili? the bookseller, thinking^t inconsistent with 'his position in the church to make money by his writings, and refused to receive any acknowledgment for them except in books. "I never got a farthing for anything I wrote except once," he told Pulteney in *1735; and the exception was "Gulliver's Travels."' Swift sold the !iyLS. of thia to Motte for £300, the average price of a novel to-day, and set down the etum,in his diary as a mere bagatelle hardly Worth talking about, Ho might have made' £1,000 by it if he had chosen-to haggle about the 'amount, as Byron did with Murray. These sums, I take it, are fair samples of the price of literary .work in Tope's time. Yet even these sums repre-' sent only part of the emoluments of a man of letters then, and perhaps, after all, the smallest part. Pope { Addison, Swift, Prior and Gay were paid in' meal as well as nialt, and the meal was often three or four times the weight in'malt. Swift, for instance, but ' for his writings, might have ended his days as a domestic chaplain at Stowe, and thought himself "passing rich on £40 a year." His writings made him all but a bishop, and' it was his own fault he was not a bishop. , Montague marked his appreciation of one of Addison's first poems, a/boyish -trifle on the " Peace" of Jlyswick,"'by quartering him on ( the Civi} List for £300 a year. A single Hue, even that a parenthesis, in the poem upon " Marlborough's Victory at Blenheim," the line comparing Maryborough to the "Angel of-the Storm ; " brought him in the (patent "of - Commissioner of Appeals, an appointment worth £1,500 to £2,000 a year, •ana opened to him the path by which a year ,or. two afterwards he rose to the rank of \Privy Councillor a'nd Secretary of State. A son in Whitehall laid the foundation' of what was then thought a splendid fortune by a short satire under the title of the , " Town and Country Mouse," which, if publ^jlied now in a magazine, would be read and talked of for a day or two, and forgotton in a week, Had Prior been the contemporary of ''Moore, ho might have thought himself lucky if he had oeen able, after thirty years hard work on the press, and by publishing a squib like the "Town and Country Mouse" once a year, to lay claim' to a pension of £100 a year from the royal bounty. The contemporary of Pope, his lines feel in pleasanter places, and his "Town and Country Mouse" was hardly in its second edition when the author,' a tall, "thin, hollow-looked man," in velvet and lace, was strutting about the park arm-in-arm with the Dean of St. Patrick's, in his shovel hat and apron, with Horace in one pocket and Montague's note in the other offering- him one of the first diplomatic appointments in the service, and tho reversion of the appointment of ambassador at Paris.— Gentlemtm'u Magazine.

Somo Boston girls are about Jp_ establish a sock-darning factory forth© benefit of friendIos3 young bachelor*.

Permanent link to this item

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/DSC18750227.2.27

Bibliographic details

Daily Southern Cross, Volume XXXI, Issue 5465, 27 February 1875, Page 1 (Supplement)

Word Count
783

THE £ S. D. OF LITERATURE. Daily Southern Cross, Volume XXXI, Issue 5465, 27 February 1875, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE £ S. D. OF LITERATURE. Daily Southern Cross, Volume XXXI, Issue 5465, 27 February 1875, Page 1 (Supplement)

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