In all this bustle and reverberation, however, it may be said that there is not much place for those who desire, like Jean Chapelain, to live in innocence, with Apollo and with their books. There can be no question, that the tendency of modern life is not favourable to sequestered literary scholarship. At the same time, it is a singular fact that, even in the present day, when a Thomas Love Peacock or an Edward FitzGerald hides himself in a careful seclusion, like some rare aquatic bird in a backwater, his work slowly becomes manifest, and receives due recognition and honour. Such authors do not enjoy great sales, even when they become famous, but, in spite of their opposition to the temper of their time, in spite of all obstacles imposed by their own peculiarities of temperament, they receive, in the long run, a fair measure of success. They have their hour, sooner or later. More than that no author of their type could have under any form of political government, or at any period of history. They should not, and, in fairness it must be said they rarely do, complain. They know that "Dieu paie," as Alphonse Karr said, "mais il ne paie pas tous les samedis." It is the writers who want to be paid every Saturday upon whom democracy produces the worst effect. It is not the neglect of the public, it is the facility with which the money can be wheedled out of the pockets of the public on trifling occasions that constitutes a danger to literature. There is an enormous quantity of almost unmitigated shoddy now produced and sold, and the peril is that authors who are capable of doing better things will be seduced into adding to this wretched product for the sake of the money. We are highly solicitous nowadays, and it is most proper that we should be, about adequate payment for the literary worker. But as long as that payment is in no sort of degree proportioned to the merit of the article he produces, the question of its scale of payment must remain one rather for his solicitor than for the critics. The importance of our own Society of Authors, for instance, lies, it appears to me, in its constituting a sort of firm of solicitors acting solely for literary clients. But the moment we go further than this, we get into difficulties. The money standard tends to become the standard of merit. At a recent public meeting, while one of the most distinguished of living technical writers was speaking for the literary profession, one of those purveyors of tenth-rate fiction, who supply stories, as they might supply vegetables, to a regular market, was heard to say with scorn, "Call _him_ an author?" "Why, yes!" her neighbour replied, "don't you know he has written so and so, and so and so?" "Well," said the other, "I should like to know what his sales are before I allowed he was an author."