ices of a more
competent party, were clearly an inconsistency and an injustice. If the
publisher himself be not capable of deciding upon the literary merits or
salable properties of the works laid before him, the best thing that he
can do is to secure the assistance of some one who _is_. Hence the
office of the "reader." It is well known that in some large publishing
houses there is a resident "reader" attached to the establishment;
others are believed to lay the manuscripts offered to them for
publication before some critic of established reputation out-of-doors;
while more than one eminent publisher might be named who has trusted
solely to his own judgment, and rarely found that judgment at fault. In
either of these cases there is no reason to assume the incompetency of
the judge. Besides, as we have said, the question to be solved by the
publisher or reader, is not a purely literary question. It is mainly
indeed a commercial question; and the merits of the work are often
freely acknowledged while the venture is politely declined.

Much more might be said of the relations between publishers and authors,
but we are compelled to economize our space. The truth, indeed, as
regards the latter, is simply this: It is not so much that authors do
not know how to make money, as that they do not know how to spend it.
The same income that enables a clergyman, a lawyer, a medical
practitioner, a government functionary, or any other member of the
middle classes earning his livelihood by professional labor, to support
himself and his family in comfort and respectability, will seldom keep a
literary man out of debt and difficulty--seldom provide him with a
comfortable well-ordered home, creditable to himself and his profession.
It is ten to one that he lives untidily; that every thing about him is
in confusion, that the amenities of domestic life are absent from his
establishment; that he is altogether in a state of elaborate and costly
disorder, such as we are bound to say is the characteristic of no other
kind of professional life. He seldom has a settled home--a fixed
position. He appears to be constantly on the move. He seldom lives, for
any length of time, in the same place; and is rarely at home when you
call upon him. It would be instructive to obtain a return of the number
of professional writers who retain pews in church, and are to be found
there with their families on Sundays. There is something altogether
fitful, irregula