his
verses accepted is very well paid. Take a typical instance. You spend an
absolutely beatific evening with Clarinda in the moonlit woodland. You go
home and relieve your emotions in a sonnet, which, we will say, at a
generous allowance, takes you half an hour to write. Next morning in that
cold calculating mood for which no business man can match a poet, you copy
it out fair and send it to a friendly editor. Perhaps out of Clarinda
alone you beget a sonnet a week, which at L2, 2s. a week is L109, 4s. a
year--not to speak of Phyllis and Dulcinea. At any rate, take that one
sonnet. For an evening with Clarinda, for which alone you would have paid
the sum, and for a beggarly half-hour's work, you receive as much as many
a City clerk earns by six hard days' work, eight hours to the dreary day,
with perhaps a family to keep and a railway contract to pay for.
Half-an-hour's work, and if you can live on L2, 2s. a week, the rest of
your time is free as air! Moreover, you have the option of going about
with a feeling that you are a being vastly superior to your fellows,
because forsooth you can string fourteen lines together in decent
Petrarcan form, and they cannot. And to return for a moment to Clarinda:
it seems to me that your publisher, with all his ill-gotten gains,
compares favourably with you in your treatment of your partner in the
production of that sonnet What about the woman's half-profits in the
matter? For, remember, if the publisher depends on the brains of the poet,
the poet is no less dependent on the heart of the woman. It is from woman,
in nine cases out of ten, that the poets have drawn their inspiration. And
how have they, in eight cases out of this nine, treated her? The story is
but too familiar. Will it always seem so much worse to pick a man's brains
than to break a woman's heart?

We touched just now on the arrogance of the poet. It is one of the most
foolish and distasteful of his faults, and one which unfortunately the
world has conspired from time immemorial to confirm. He has been too long
the spoiled child, too long allowed to think that anything becomes him,
too long allowed to ride rough-shod over the neck of the average man.

Mrs. Browning, in _Aurora Leigh_, while celebrating the poet, sneers at
'your common men' who 'lay telegraphs, gauge railroads, reign, reap,
dine.' But why? All these--with, perhaps, the exception of reigning--are
very proper and necessary things to be done, and any one