hardly have made less--was in any case not an example of an ill-paid author. If he had to complain of want of money it must have been because he was a gentleman of extravagant habits, with a fatal weakness for bad investments. To be sure, if an author were to be paid according to the pleasure he has given others, and if “the shop” which makes a profit on selling his work had to render some royalty on it for ever and ever, then indeed was Marryat, together with all those whose work is of the widely-read and lasting order, ill rewarded. But insuperable difficulties bar the road to that ideal. Since paper, printing, and advertisements must be provided, the provider of these necessary things must share; since the novelist cannot hawk his own goods in a barrow, he must pay somebody to do it for him; since the world’s copyright laws put a limit on the duration of proprietary right in books, there must come a time when they are at any man’s disposal to reprint. In the long run the balance of profit must needs be in favour of the shop. To be sure, the nation of authors may console itself by reflecting that it has its revenge. There is much on which the shop makes no gain, first or last. The first of Marryat’s books is one which, for reasons very neatly stated by himself, may stand apart from the others. When he had given it three successors, he thought fit to publish a proclamation on the subject of his work in the _Metropolitan_, and in that document he described “Frank Mildmay” as fairly as any honest critic could do for him.