Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

LITERARY RECOMPENSE. 99
literary provision for the periodical, while he took the
risk and expense of the printing and publishing. The
profits were then to be divided between them. Who
was to pay the contributors, or if they were content
to remain without remuneration, we are not told. In
those days it was considered right at all events to say,
and if possible to believe, that literature was superior
to payment, and that to imagine a man of genius as
capable of being stirred up to composition by any
thought of pecuniary reward was an insulting and
degrading suggestion — an idea in which a fanciful
spectator would fain take refuge once more, in face of
a generation which weighs out its thousand words
across the counter, with the affectation of finding in
sale and barter its only motive. It is stated in one of
the letters that the expectation of the editors was to
receive jointly a sum of about £50 monthly when the
sale of the Magazine reached 2000 copies,—matters
being much simplified, as the reader will perceive,
by this high generosity on the part of the con-
tributors ; but the demand for the Magazine does
not seem ever to have risen above 2500 copies, a
sale which would hardly content any publisher now-
adays.
The Magazine, however, did not last long enough
to have time for development. The editors already
had begun to complain piteously of the publisher's
interference in the second number. He who had
incurred the loss of the greatest of literary labourers
by his habit of stating his opinion,—who had freely
criticised Scott, besides braving the anger of two such
important authorities in Edinburgh as Henry Mac-
kenzie and Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe,—was not likely