He read it with
as much relief as the debtor, if it had brought him the loan. The
letter gave the new writer literary rank. Henceforward he had the
freedom of the press. These articles, following those on
Pocahontas and Lyell, enrolled him on the permanent staff of the
North American Review . Precisely what this rank was worth, no
one could say; but, for fifty years the North American Review
had been the stage coach which carried literary Bostonians to
such distinction as they had achieved. Few writers had ideas
which warranted thirty pages of development, but for such as
thought they had, the Review alone offered space. An article was
a small volume which required at least three months' work, and
was paid, at best, five dollars a page. Not many men even in
England or France could write a good thirty-page article, and
practically no one in America read them; but a few score of
people, mostly in search of items to steal, ran over the pages to
extract an idea or a fact, which was a sort of wild game -- a
bluefish or a teal -- worth anywhere from fifty cents to five
dollars. Newspaper writers had their eye on quarterly pickings.
The circulation of the Review had never exceeded three or four
hundred copies, and the Review had never paid its reasonable
expenses. Yet it stood at the head of American literary
periodicals; it was a source of suggestion to cheaper workers; it
reached far into societies that never knew its existence; it was
an organ worth playing on; and, in the fancy of Henry Adams, it
led, in some indistinct future, to playing on a New York daily
newspaper.
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