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[page 2, column 2, continued:]
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PAY OF AMERICAN
AUTHORS — THE MAGAZINES. — The impossibility, in general, of getting
pay from the booksellers for
the copyright of books, has driven nearly all the American literateurs
to Magazines contribution. There are few names of eminence in
cis-Atlantic
letters which are not occasionally seen, in starting capitals, in the
content-table
of one or more of our Monthlies: — the Quarterlies are anonymous, and
for no better reason than that the British Quarterlies have been
anonymous
before them. Who, to-day, is so weak as to value an anonymous opinion
and,
unluckily, our reviews are for the most part either disingenuous essays
concocted from the material of the book reviewed, or summaries of sheer
opinion. Besides, who shall undertake to determine whether an anonymous
criticism is or is not written by the author of the work criticised;
or,
if not precisely this, then through his instrumentality, or at his
dictation?
But to our sheep: — Not long ago we
observed, in
the Democratic Review, an essay on "American Criticism" in which we
were
startled by the assertion that the contributions in "Graham" and
"Godey"
were without exception, trash. We quote from memory, but are
sure
of the sense of the passage. Now an assertion of this kind is
"mere
pride and arrogance, and the evil way, and the froward mouth." it will
not do to maintain, even in the choicest phraseology, that the writings
of such persons as Mrs. Osgood, Mrs. Sigourney, Mrs. Child, Mrs.
Kirkland,
Mrs. Stephens, Mr. Seba Smith, Mrs. Ellet, Mrs. Embury, Mrs. Hale, Miss
Leslie, Miss Sedgwick, Fanny Kemble, "Fanny Forrester," Cooper,
Paulding,
Simms, Kennedy, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Halleck, Bryant, Lowell,
Hoffman,
Mathews, Duyckinck, Tuckerman, Grattan, and so forth — it will not do,
we say, to maintain, even in the pages of the Democratic Review, that
the
contributions of these writers are trash. And we have merely
glanced
over the long list in our mind — there are numerous other names equally
eminent which no doubt we have omitted. Such are the "regular
contributors"
to "Graham," to "Godey," and to "The Columbian," — the three principal
three-dollar Magazines. |
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