Gaudens whether to call it success. Hay had
passed ten years in writing the "Life" of Lincoln, and perhaps
President Lincoln was the better for it, but what Hay got from it
was not so easy to see, except the privilege of seeing popular
book-makers steal from his book and cover the theft by abusing
the author. Adams had given ten or a dozen years to Jefferson and
Madison, with expenses which, in any mercantile business, could
hardly have been reckoned at less than a hundred thousand
dollars, on a salary of five thousand a year; and when he asked
what return he got from this expenditure, rather more extravagant
in proportion to his means than a racing-stable, he could see
none whatever. Such works never return money. Even Frank Parkman
never printed a first edition of his relatively cheap and popular
volumes, numbering more than seven hundred copies, until quite at
the end of his life. A thousand copies of a book that cost twenty
dollars or more was as much as any author could expect; two
thousand copies was a visionary estimate unless it were canvassed
for subscription. As far as Adams knew, he had but three serious
readers -- Abram Hewitt, Wayne McVeagh, and Hay himself. He was
amply satisfied with their consideration, and could dispense with
that of the other fifty-nine million, nine hundred and
ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-seven; but neither
he nor Hay was better off in any other respect, and their chief
title to consideration was their right to look out of their
windows on great men, alive or dead, in La Fayette Square, a
privilege which had nothing to do with their writings.
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