engaged to write upon it; or, in short, a dozen reasons might be found, any one of which would be sufficient to cause the rejection of a given article. But what one magazine rejects another may be in need of; so that a really good article is almost certain of finding its billet somewhere. In these circumstances, while there is nothing that need eventually discourage a capable or promising writer, there is much to make parents and guardians take warning before they set a young man or woman adrift on the sea of life with only his or her pen as a rudder. Literature, like painting, affords to persons of inferior or only mediocre powers a very precarious means of livelihood. Besides, places are not to be got in the literary any more than in the artistic world without evidence of genuine capacity being given by the claimant. The number of aspirants is no doubt from year to year being winnowed, until the grain shall be finally selected from the chaff; but the process, we admit, is not pleasant to those who do not come within the metaphorical category of grain. Scarcely a week passes but we receive letters requesting us, from the specimens of work inclosed, to say whether the contributor might hope to become a successful writer for magazines, as he or she is presently a clerk or a governess, and would wish to attain a better position, which position, ‘kind friends’—often in this same matter, if they knew it, very unkind—think, might be reached through the channel of literature. It is not difficult, as a rule, to advise in such cases. It is, stick to your present occupation, if it is only respectable, and on no account throw it up in the hope of having your name engrossed in the higher rolls of literary achievement. Even in the case of what may be called successful minor contributors to periodical literature, it can hardly be possible, we should think, for them to rely _wholly_ upon the results for a livelihood. Nor is it necessary to do so. The kind of literary work to which we allude can, in general, be carried on side by side with the work of an ordinary occupation or profession, as it is rarely that the articles of a writer of this class are in such constant demand as to make it necessary to give his or her whole time to their production. When this combination can be maintained, a useful source of income is added, without in all cases necessarily detracting from one’s professional industry otherwise.