any outside advice or assistance. Those authors who are destined for it will assuredly win it, though all the world should intervene; those for whom it is not intended must content themselves with the temporary notoriety of pretty newspaper puffs and "stock" compliments, such as "the renowned" or "well-known" or "admired" author or authoress, and be glad and grateful for these meaningless terms, inasmuch as the higher Fame itself at its utmost is only a brief and very often inaccurate "line in history."
The rewards and emoluments of the happy life, such as I have always found the Life Literary to be, are manifold and frequently incongruous. They may be considered in two sections—the outward or apparent and the interior or invisible. Concerning these I can only, of course, speak from my own experience. The outward or apparent occur (so far as I myself am concerned) as follows:—
1. Certain payments, small or large, made by publishers who undertake to present one's brain work to the world in print, and who do the best they can for their authors, as well as for themselves.
2. Public appreciation and condemnation, about equally divided.
3. Critical praise and censure, six of one and half-a-dozen of the other.
4. Endless requests for autographs.
5. Innumerable begging letters.
6. Imperative, sometimes threatening, demands for "interviews."
7. Hundreds of love-letters.
8. Continual offers of marriage.
