ps there are two or three. When you go
out in the street, you are pestered to buy half a score more of them. In
your club reading-room there are a hundred different journals. When you
travel by the railway you see at every station a provincial newspaper of
more or less extensive circulation. Has it never struck you that to
supply these publications with their leading articles, there must be an
immense staff of persons called journalists, professing every
description of opinion, and advocating every conceivable policy? And do
you suppose these gentry only get L70 a year for their work, like a
curate; or L60, like a sub-lieutenant; or that they have to pay three
times those sums for the privilege of belonging to the press, as a
barrister does for belonging to his inn? Again, in London at least,
there are as many magazines as newspapers, containing every kind of
literature, the very contributors of which are so numerous, that they
form a public of themselves. That seems at the first blush to militate
against my suggestion, but though contributors are so common, and upon
the whole so good--indeed, considering the conditions under which they
labour, so wonderfully good--they are not (I have heard editors say) so
good as they might be, supposing (for example) they knew a little of
science, history, politics, English literature, and especially of the
art of composition, before they volunteered their services. At present
the ranks of journalistic and periodical literature are largely
recruited from the failures in other professions. The bright young
barrister who can't get a brief takes to literature as a calling, just
as the man who has 'gone a cropper' in the army takes to the wine-trade.
And what aeons of time, and what millions of money, have been wasted in
the meanwhile!

The announcement written on the gates of all the recognised professions
in England is the same that would-be travellers read on the faces of the
passengers on the underground railway after office hours: 'Our number is
complete, and our room is limited.' In literature, on the contrary,
though its vehicles may seem as tightly packed, substitution can be
effected. There may be persons travelling on that line in the
first-class who ought to be in the third, and indeed have no reasonable
pretext for being there at all. And if clever Jack could show his
ticket, he would turn them out of it.

Again, so far from the space being limited, it is continually enlargi