Eighty thousand pounds is the amount of Bulwer Lytton's earnings as a novelist. The remuneration he received, when his books first appeared, did not reach large figures, the sums usually ranging from £600 to £1,000, although his books were in great favour with lovers of fiction. When a collected edition of his novels was issued, the publishers paid liberally for the copyrights. The sale of Lytton's novels is very large; about 80,000 copies of the sixpenny edition, and some thousands of the three-shillings-and-sixpenny edition, are sold every year. The Earl of Beaconsfield, it is said, received the largest amount ever paid in this country for a single novel. His last work, "Endymion," was sold for £12,000. He only produced one other successful story, and that was "Lothair." It is stated, on good authority, that these two novels have together brought more than double the sums realised for his other books, although inferior to some of his former writings. In his later years the public paid for the novelty of reading stories by a statesman, and not for the merits of his works. Some of his novels have recently been brought out in a shilling edition, but they have already lost the allurements of fiction, and are only read by students of politics, or persons curious as to the character of the author. Wilkie Collins was paid for "Armadale" £5,000. Mr. James Payn recently received £1,000 for the rights of running one of his novels in the pages of a sixpenny magazine. This author tells rather a good story about the mode of payment for his novels. "It was," says Mr. Payn, "the custom with a very respectable firm of publishers, with whom I did business, to pay my cheques to the names of my immortal works, instead of to myself: and since it suited their convenience to do so, I never complained of it, though it sometimes put me in rather a false position when I presented my demands in person, as, for example, in the case of the 'Family Scapegrace.' When I came for the proceeds of 'Found Dead,' it was too much for the sense of professional propriety of the banker's clerk, who gravely observed: 'It is very fortunate, Sir, that this cheque is not payable to order, or it would have to be signed by your executors.'" Said Dickens, to whom Payn related the incident, "I should not like to have much money at a bank which keeps so clever a clerk as that."