protest, in May, 1834, had been changed by him twelve times, before he reduced it to a shape that entirely met his approval. Perhaps it is not surpassed, for poetical beauty, by anything that ever fell from his eloquent lips. Speaking of resistance by the United States of the aggressions of Great Britain, he said: "They raised their flag against a power, to which, for the purposes of foreign conquest and subjugation, Rome, in the height of her glory, is not to be compared. A power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts--whose morning drum-beat following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth daily with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England." As to compensation, it is stated that Goethe's works were not in his own time commercially successful. After his return from Italy, the edition of his collected works, which he had compared and revised with labor and with care, sold, as his publisher complained, only "very slowly." Coleridge gained little or no money by his writings. He says, "I question whether there ever existed a man of letters so utterly friendless, or so unconnected as I am with the dispensers of contemporary reputation, or the publishers in whose service they labor." When Newton lectured, a Lucasian professor, "so few went to hear him, that ofttimes he did, in a manner, for want of hearers, read to the walls." The Paradise Lost had a very limited sale, till, fifty years after its publication, it was brought into light by the criticisms of Addison. Campbell for years could not find a bookseller who would buy The Pleasures of Hope. In the first thirteen years after the publication of Boswell's Life of Johnson, less than four thousand copies were sold. There were only forty-five copies of Hume's History sold in the first twelvemonth. Twelve years elapsed before the first five hundred copies of Emerson's Nature were purchased by the public. Washington Irving was nearly seventy years old before the sale of his works at home met the expenses of his simple life at Sunnyside. It has been related that while Madame Titiens was receiving an ovation for her singing of Kathleen Mavourneen, the author of the song sat weeping in the audience, the poorest and obscurest man present. Willis, breakfasting at the Temple with a friend, met Charles and Mary Lamb. He mentioned having bought a copy of Elia the last day he was in America, to send as a parting gift to one of the most lovely and talented women in his country. "What did you give for it?" said Lamb. "About seven and six-pence." "Permit me to pay you that," said he; and with the utmost earnestness he counted out the money upon the table. "I never yet wrote anything that would sell," he continued. "I am the publishers' ruin."