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"Harper's Monthly" 309 your pillage, I have wondered that they were not better; it displays a large number of well-printed pages, and generally boasts a few thievings from Punch hardly up to the style of that very amusing sheet; and it pleases the economical tastes of its readers. As a scheme for making money, I cannot too highly commend your en- terprise. It is a manifest improvement of the shopkeeper's maxim oiE buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest, for you do not buy in the market at all. You walk through the array of literary wares which the English nation spreads before you, taking what you please, and giving neither money nor thanks in return. You reproduce what you have so cheaply obtained, and are thus enabled to undersell your more scrupulous competitors. By this process of appropriation and sale, you prove your right to the en- viable title of sharp business men, but you also show yourselves utterly destitute of regard for the literary talent of your own coun- trymen, and for those national opinions and sentiments which are only partially disseminated by the newspapers, and which it is the peculiar province of English literature to supplant and destroy. In time Harper's came more and more to take the work of Americans, and it has long made a practice of printing only original contributions. If during its early career it sinned by ignoring and discouraging American authors, it seemed at a later date almost to sin in the opposite direction. At times it has published so many contributions from a young author of growing popularity as to raise the question whether it was not encouraging hasty and ill-considered writing. Among writers of tales whom it exploited in this way were Richard Harding Davis, Mary E. Wilkins, and Stephen Crane. The first editor of Harper's Monthly was Henry J. Raymond. Henry M. Alden, his successor, was editor for fifty years (1869-1919). Fletcher Harper, a member of the firm, habitu- ally contracted for the serials and for much other fiction, and had a great share in determining the contents of the maga- zine. Of the special departments which are distinctive of Harper's Magazine the most important is " The Editor's Easy Chair." George William Curtis assumed control of this in 1853, and his essays which appeared under this head are among the most delightful of his works. The most distinguished of Curtis's successors in the "Easy Chair" is its present occupant, William Dean Howells. Another department, "The Editor's