It would be highly inopportune to call for a return of the _bonâ fide_ sales of those of our leading authors who are not novelists. It is to be hoped that no such indulgence to the idlest curiosity will ever be conceded. But if such a thing were done, it would probably reveal some startling statistics. It would be found that many of those whose names are only next to the highest in public esteem do not receive more than the barest pittance from their writings, even from those which are most commonly in the mouths of their contemporaries. To mention only two writers, but these of singular eminence and prominence, it was not until the later years of their lives that either Robert Browning or Matthew Arnold began to be sure of even a very moderate pecuniary return on their books. The curious point was that both of them achieved fame of a wide and brilliant nature long before their books began to "move," as publishers call it. It is not easy to think of an example of this curious fact more surprising than this, that _Friendship's Garland_ during many years did not pass out of one moderate edition. This book, published when Arnold was filling the mouths of men with his paradoxical utterances, lighted up all through with such wit and charm of style as can hardly, of its kind, be paralleled in recent prose; a masterpiece, not dealing with remote or abstruse questions, but with burning matters of the day--this entertaining and admirably modern volume enjoyed a sale which would mean deplorable failure in the case of a female novelist of a perfectly subterranean order. This case could be paralleled, no doubt, by a dozen others, equally striking. I have just taken up a volume of humour, the production of a "funny man" of the moment, and I see on its title-page the statement that it is in its one hundred and nineteenth edition. Of this book, 119,000 copies have been bought during a space of time equal to that in which Matthew Arnold sold probably about 119 copies of _Friendship's Garland_. In the face of these facts it is not possible to say that, though it may buy well, the democracy buys wisely.