Thus the publishers were prepared to undertake the venture upon a somewhat liberal scale for those days. They chose the best printer near by, Mr. Houghton, who had already given distinction to the name “Riverside,” and they proposed to make a handsome magazine, not wholly unlike in its appearance the Edinburgh _Blackwood_. They paid their editor a salary of $2500, and they expected to pay contributors on a scale not to be sure much in advance of what the best writers could secure in other periodicals in Philadelphia and New York, but more generous as regards the average contributor. I think the mean rate of prose was six dollars a page, though it may occasionally in the case of a tyro have dropped to five dollars, and for poems they paid usually fifty dollars apiece. In a letter to a contributor who took exception to the price paid him, Lowell wrote, when the magazine had been running three or four months, “You must be content. Six dollars a page is more than can be got elsewhere, and we only pay ten to folks whose _names_ are worth the other four dollars. _Capite?_ What we may be able to do hereafter, I know not. _I_ shall always be for liberal pay.” It might seem as though the distinction thus referred to would hardly exist when all the articles were unsigned, but the authorship for the most part was an open secret. In those days the _North American Review_, as well as other like periodicals, used to print a little slip with the authorship of the separate articles set against the successive numbers of the articles, and this slip, though not inserted in all the copies sold or sent to subscribers, was at the service of newspapers and the inner circle of contributors and near friends. In like manner the authorship of the principal articles and poems in the _Atlantic_ leaked out, and for some, like Emerson’s poems and Holmes’s “Autocrat,” there could be no concealment.