The authors themselves sometimes were glad of the privacy, as they thought it secured them more independence and possibility of frankness. Lowell thus wrote in September, 1859, to one of his contributors, who complained of what he thought want of care: “I am very sorry indeed for the mischance, but am quite sure it was no fault of mine. Where the ‘copy’ passes through four or five hands, all of whose owners know the handwriting, the chances of leakage are great. I confess that in the worry of the last week or two, I did not remember to give any new caution just before the publication of the October number. I am the more sorry if it is to deprive us of your contributions. For myself, I have always been opposed to the publication of the authors’ names at all. I do as well as I can with so many things to think of at once.” The practice of withholding names publicly continued till 1862, when the index at the end of the volume disclosed the authorship of the articles in the body of the magazine, and in 1870, the practice was begun of signing contributions. The anonymous character of the early volumes served, however, to bury the authorship in some cases past resurrection, as I found when I undertook to prepare a General Index in 1877, and again in 1889. The ideal which Lowell formed for the magazine may best be inferred from the character of the numbers issued under his control, but in a few passages in his letters to contributors and friends he gives some glimpses of what was going on in his mind as he faced the very practical questions which arose in the conduct of the magazine. When I became editor of the _Atlantic_, in the spring of 1890, he contrasted my position with his own, and remarked on the very much larger number of writers on whom I could call for contributions, and the higher average of training in literary work. “Your task,” he wrote me, “will be in one respect at least easier than mine was thirty odd years ago, for there are now twenty people who can write English where there was one then. Indeed, there are so many, and they do it so well, that it looks as if literature as a profession or guild were near its end, and as if every man (and woman) would do his or her own on the principle of Every man his own washerwoman.” I thought and said, however, that it was not general average but distinction which gave a stamp to the magazine, and that in that respect he certainly had the advantage. In one of his letters to Mr. Richard Grant White, who feared a Shakespeare article he had furnished might be the one paper too much, he wrote: “I don’t care whether the public are tired of the Divine Villiams or not--a _part_ of the magazine, as long as I have anything to do with it, shall be expressly _not_ for the Mob (of well-dressed gentlemen who read with ease).”