ines--_Godey's Lady's Book_ and
_Graham's Monthly_--began to pay their contributors twelve dollars a
page, a price then thought wildly munificent. But the first magazine
of the modern type was _Harper's Monthly_, founded in 1850. American
books have always suffered, and still continue to suffer, from the want
of an international copyright, which has flooded the country with cheap
reprints and translations of foreign works, with which the domestic
product has been unable to contend on such uneven terms. With the
first ocean steamers there {512} started up a class of large-paged
weeklies in New York and elsewhere, such as _Brother Jonathan_, the
_New World_, and the _Corsair_, which furnished their readers with the
freshest writings of Dickens and Bulwer and other British celebrities
within a fortnight after their appearance in London. This still
further restricted the profits of native authors and nearly drove them
from the field of periodical literature. By special arrangement the
novels of Thackeray and other English writers were printed in
_Harper's_ in installments simultaneously with their issue in English
periodicals. The _Atlantic_ was the first of our magazines which was
founded expressly for the encouragement of home talent, and which had a
purely Yankee flavor. Journalism was the profession which naturally
attracted men of letters, as having most in common with their chosen
work and as giving them a medium, under their own control, through
which they could address the public. A few favored scholars, like
Prescott, were made independent by the possession of private fortunes.
Others, like Holmes, Longfellow, and Lowell, gave to literature such
leisure as they could get in the intervals of an active profession or
of college work. Still others, like Emerson and Thoreau, by living in
the country and making their modest competence--eked out in Emerson's
case by lecturing here and there--suffice for their simple needs,
secured themselves freedom from the restraints of any regular calling.
But in default of some such _pou sto_ our men of {513} letters have
usually sought the cities and allied themselves with the press. It
will be remembered that Lowell started a short-lived magazine on his
own account, and that he afterward edited the _Atlantic_ and the _North
American_. Also that Ripley and Charles A. Dana betook themselves to
journalism after the break up of the Brook Farm Community.

In the same way Willi