In 1823, London society was much exercised on the subject of literary gains. Miss Wynn writes in her “Diaries of a Lady of Quality”—“I heard to-day from Mr. Rogers that Constable, the bookseller, told him last May that he paid the author of ‘Waverley’ the sum of £110,000. To that may now be added the produce of ‘Red Gauntlet,’ and ‘St. Ronan’s Well;’ for I fancy Quentin Durward’ was at least printed, if not published. I asked whether the ‘Tales of my Landlord,’ which do not bear the same name, were taken into calculation, and was told they were, but of course the poems were not. All this has been done in twenty years.” In 1803, an unknown Mr. Scott’s name was found as the author of three very good ballads in Lewis’s “Tales of Wonder.” This was his first publication.—Pope, who until now had been considered as the poet who had made the most by his works, died worth about £800 a-year.—Johnson, for his last and best work, his “Lives of the Poets,” published after the “Rambler” and the “Dictionary” had established his fame, got two hundred guineas, to which was added one hundred more. Mr. Hayward, in a note, adds—“‘Waverley’ having been published in 1814, the sum mentioned by Constable was earned in nine years, by eleven novels in three volumes each, and three series of ‘Tales of my Landlord,’ making nine volumes more; eight novels twenty-four volumes, being yet to come. Scott’s first publication, ‘Translations from the German,’ was in 1796. During the whole of his literary life he was profitably engaged in miscellaneous writing and editing; and whatever the expectations raised by has continued popularity and great profits, they were surpassed by the sale of the collected and illustrated edition of the novels commenced under his own revision in 1829. Altogether, the aggregate amount gained by Scott in his lifetime, very far exceeds any sum hitherto named as accruing to any other man from authorship. Pope inherited a fortune, saved and speculated; and we must come at once to modern times to find plausible subjects of comparison. T. Moore’s profits, spread over his life, yield but a moderate income. Byron’s did not exceed £20,000. Talfourd once showed me a calculation, by which he made out that Dickens, soon after the commencement of ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ _ought_ to have been in the receipt of £10,000 a-year. Thackeray never got enough to live handsomely and lay by. Sir E. B. Lytton is said to have made altogether from £80,000 to £100,000 by his writings’. We hear of 500,000 francs (£20,000) having been given in France for Histories—to MM. Thiers and Lamartine for example; but the largest single payment ever made to an author for a book, was the cheque for £20,000, _on account_, paid by Messrs. Longman to Macaulay soon after the appearance of the third and fourth volumes of his History, the terms being that he should receive three-fourths of the net profits.” This note of Mr. Hayward’s, it should be remembered, was written in 1864.