"THE play, the play's the thing!"--not whereby, as moody Hamlet hath it, to catch the conscience of the king, but as a possible means of emancipation from the galling and unprofitable conditions of a literary career. A book which embodies months of research, the refined outcome of scholarly labor and reflective observation, may secure a definite and honorable place for its author, but it is not likely to yield as much in a pecuniary way as the salary of a good clerk. Even a successful novel which strikes the popular fancy and circulates through many editions is only a matter of a few hundred dollars. We look over the whole field of bookmaking and periodical-writing without discovering one practitioner of average ability, any man with every requisite but genius itself, who, though diligent and adaptative to circumstances, can find in the general work of his profession the income of an average doctor or lawyer. There is a veteran whom we are reminded of, each of whose books has had a sale of more than five thousand copies, while some of them have exceeded fifty thousand--which is nearly forty-nine times more than many volumes reach--and we know that he, with this exceptional success and by the industry of a lifetime, has not accumulated the smallest fortune, though he has been fertile and has lived within five thousand dollars a year. The ground is overcrowded, the struggle for place is exhausting, and the man who is wholly dependent on his profession for bread and butter finds himself elbowed and pushed against, not only by competitors of his own class, but also by many to whom literature is a recreation, a source of distinction, or collateral to some other business, and not the obdurate necessity it is to him.