Various

“ These vines produce the dark, rich wine of Roussillon, the best vintage of Southern France. Hedges of aloes, clumps of Southern cypress, poplars by the dry beds of winter streams, with brown tints in the houses and red in the soil, increased the resemblance to Spain. Rough fellows, in rusty velvet, who now and then dug their dangling heels into the sides of the mules or asses they rode, were enough like arrieros or contrabandistas to be the real article. Our stout and friendly coachman, even, was hailed by the name of Moreno, and spoke French with a foreign accent. ”

“ It is an abominable extravagance to buy a great and good novel in a perishable form for a few cents; it is good economy to pay a few dollars for one substantially bound, that will amuse and inform generations. A good novel, play, or poem can be reread every five years during a long life. When a book is to be selected out of the mass, to become thenceforth part and parcel of a home, let it be well printed and well bound, and, above all, let it be of an edition to which the author has set the seal of his consent and approbation. ”

“ There are fifty American inventions now in use in Europe from which the inventors derive revenue. Revenue!—not a sum of money which, once spent, is gone forever, but that most solid and respectable of material blessings, a sum per annum! Thus we reward those who light our matches. It is otherwise that we compensate those who kindle our souls.
"Uncle Tom's Cabin," like every other novelty in literature, was the late-maturing fruit of generations. ”

“ A few great men, exceptional in character as in circumstances, blind like Milton, exiled like Dante, prisoners like Bunyan and Cervantes, may have written for solace, or for fame, or from benevolence; but, as a rule, nothing gets the immortal work from first-rate men but money. We need only mention Shakespeare, for every one knows that he wrote plays simply and solely as a matter of business, to draw money into the treasury of his theatre. ”

“ In the most exquisitely organized system of piracy, no man can rely upon the enjoyment of a right which he is not strong enough personally to defend. It is not every house that can crush a rival edition by selling thousands of expensive books at half their cost. Between the giant houses that tower above him, and the yellow-covered gentry that prowl about his feet, an American publisher of only ordinary resources has a game to play which is really too difficult for the limited capacities of man. ”

“ Many authors would be instantly delivered from the fatal necessity of over-production,—the vice that threatens literature with annihilation.
There is another aggravating circumstance,—most aggravating. The want of an International Copyright chiefly robs our best and brightest! A dull book protects itself; no foreigner wants it. An honest drudge, who compiles timely works of utility, or works which appease a transient curiosity, and which thousands of "agents" put under the nose of the whole population, can make a fortune by one or two lucky hits. ”

“ All our courage and all our cowardice, all our pride and all our humility, all our generosity and all our selfishness, all that can incite and all that can scare us to exertion, may enter into the complex motive that is urging us on when we are doing the work by which we earn our right to exist. Nothing is of great and lasting account,—not religion, nor benevolence, nor law, nor science,—until it is so organized that honest and able men can live by it. ”

“ Here are four great and growing empires, Great Britain, the United States, the Dominion of Canada, and the states of Australia, in which the same language is spoken and similar tastes prevail. In all these nations there is a spirit abroad which will never rest content until the whole population are readers, and those readers will be counted by hundreds of millions. Already they are so numerous, that one first-rate literary success, one book excellent enough to be of universal interest, would give the author leisure for life, if his rights were completely protected by international law. ”

“ We want an international system which shall protect a kind of property which cannot be brought to market without exposing it to plunder,—property in a book being simply the right to multiply copies of it. We want this property secured, for a sufficient period, to the creator of the value, so that no property in a book can be acquired anywhere on earth unless by the gift or consent of the author thereof. There are men in Congress who feel all the magnitude and sacredness of the debt which they owe, and which their country owes, to the authors and artists of the time. ”

“ Stowe, instead of creating for our delight and instruction a glorious work of fiction, had contracted her fine powers to the point of inventing a nutcracker or a match-safe, a rolling-pin or a needle-threader, every individual purchaser could have been compelled to pay money for the use of her ingenuity, and everybody would have thought it the most natural and proper thing in the world so to do. ”

“ There is a modern restaurant, with bill of fare and wine list, inside the gate, ticket-office for travellers, and a daily omnibus to the nearest railway station. Ladies in black mantillas lounge about the court-yards, gentlemen smoke on the balconies, and only the brown-faced peasant pilgrims, arriving with weary feet, enter the church with an expression of awe and of unquestioning faith. The enormous wealth which the monastery once possessed—the offering of kings—has disappeared in the vicissitudes of Spanish history, the French, in 1811, being the last pillagers. ”

“ We shall endeavor, in the following pages, to present our readers with the image of one calculated to reverse this impression,—the image of a stalwart man of letters, who lived two centuries and a half ago, in the greatest age of English literature,—who undeniably had brawny fists as well as forgetive faculties,—one who could handle a club as readily as a pen, hit his mark with a bullet as surely as with a word, and, a sort of cross between the bully and the bard, could shoulder his way through a crowd of prize-fighters to take his seat among the tuneful company of immortal poets. ”

“ The escort was illustrious: there were the old Nan-ma-dau-Phra Woon, or Lord-Governor of the Queen's Palace; the Woondouk Mhoung Mhon, a minister of the second order in the High Court and Council; and the Tara-Thoogyi, or Chief Judge of Amarapoora; besides other magnificos of less note, but all very fine in their heavy, wide-sleeved court robes of crimson velvet, laced with a broad edging of Benares brocade. On their heads they wore high mitres, also of crimson velvet, curving backward in a volute, and encircled at the base with a coronet of tinsel spear-heads. ”

“ How monstrous for a volume of Emerson to be sold for a dollar! In England and France, when the price is to be fixed upon works of that nature, the mere cost of paper and printing is hardly considered at all. Such trifles are felt, and rightly felt, to have little to do with the question of price. The publisher knows very well that he has to dispose of one of those rare and beautiful products which only a very few thousands of his countrymen will care to possess, or could enjoy if it were thrust upon them. ”

“ Carlo, the young noble, is a true portrait of the kindly, genial, but shallow and pleasure-seeking Florentine youth of the day, such as we have loitered with on the promenade and chatted beside at the Caffè Doney,—without convictions, playful, always half in love, with a little stock of philosophy and a lesser one of religion, yet alert to do a kindness,—full of tact, charming in manner, tasteful and tolerant, with no higher aim than being agreeable and ignoring care,—impatient of duty, fond of pastime, utterly incapable of giving pain or attempting hard work. ”

“ Then it lures talent, character, ambition, wealth, and force to its support and illustration. The whole history of literature, so far as it is known, shows that literature flourishes when it is fairly rewarded, and declines when it is robbed of its just compensation. Mr. Reade has admirably demonstrated this in his "Eighth Commandment," a little book as full of wit, fact, argument, eloquence, and delicious audacity as any that has lately appeared. ”

“ Wanting this protection, the literature of both countries languishes. The blight of over-production falls upon immature genius, masterpieces are followed by labored and spiritless repetitions, and men that have it in them to inform and move mankind grind out task-work for daily bread. One man, one masterpiece, that is the general law. Not one eminent literary artist of either country can be named who has not injured his powers and jeoparded his fame by over-production. ”

“ Peterson honestly thought he had acquired a right, by fair purchase, to sell the property of Charles Dickens in the United States as long as he should continue in business, and then to dispose of that right to his successor. We are equally confident that Messrs. Harper felt themselves completely justified in endeavoring to crush the Diamond Edition of Thackeray. All this chaos and uncertainty, all these feuds and enmities, have one and the same cause,—the existence in the world of a kind of property which is at once the most precious, the easiest stolen, and the worst protected. ”

“ Does it seem too much to say, gentlemen, that, with the divine instinct of poetry, the unequalled bard of the court of Augustus, looking down the ages beyond the sickly purple of the palace, to the days when armies should be the armies of freemen, and not the Prætorian guards of a tyrant,—that he veiled the glad prophecy of the future in the words in which he describes even the thunderbolt itself? ”

“ It is this terrible uncertainty as to the value of the commodity purchased, which renders publishing a business so difficult, precarious, and unprofitable; and the higher the character of the literature, the greater the difficulty becomes. Publishers who confine themselves chiefly to works of utility and necessity, or to works professional and sectarian, have an easy task to perform, compared with that of a publisher who aims to supply the public with pure science and high literature. ”

“ Not less absurd is it to compel an author to try and write two Sketch-Books, two David Copperfields, two Uncle Toms, two Jane Eyres, or two books like "The Newcomes." When once a great writer has given such complete expression of his experience as was given in each of those works, a long time must elapse before his mind fills again to a natural overflow. ”

“ My first Phi Beta dinner was, like yours, my first public dinner. It was on the day, which this year everybody remembered who was old enough, when Mr. Emerson delivered his first Phi Beta oration at Cambridge. How proudly he has the right to look back on the generation between, all of which he has seen, so much of which he has been! ”

“ The United States stands higher to-day in the regard of every civilized being in Christendom because she lives in the United States. She is the only woman yet produced on the continent of America to whom the world assigns equal rank in literature with the great authoresses of Europe. If, in addition to the admirable talents with which she is endowed, she had chanced to possess one more, namely, the excellent gift of plodding, she had been a consummate artist, and had produced immortal works. ”

“ He was author and publisher, actor as well, and thus derived a threefold benefit from his labors. Molière, too, the greatest name in the literature of France, and the second in the dramatic literature of the world, was author, actor, and manager. Play-writing was the career of these great men. It was their business and vocation; and it is only in the way of his business and vocation that we can, as a rule, get from an artist the best and the utmost there is in him. Common honesty demands that a man shall do his best when he works for his own price. His honor and his safety are alike involved. ”

“ The modern life of a decayed branch of the Tuscan nobility in the nineteenth century, the process and method of its decadence, the charm of "a local habitation and a name," once identified with the vital power of the old republic, and the sad, effeminate, yet not unromantic sentiment incident to its passing away, through the prosperous encroachments of new men, with whom money is the power once only attached to birth, are most aptly described. The thrifty farmer of the Apennine, and his slow and handsome son, are capital types of the frugal and shrewd fattore and rustic proprietor of Tuscany ”

“ The production of a work which demands strict fidelity to truth, as well as excellence in composition,—which obliges the author, first, to know all, and, after that, to impart the essence of his knowledge in an agreeable and striking manner,—is the hardest continuous work ever done by man. It is at times a fierce and passionate joy; it is at times a harrowing anxiety; it is at times a vast despair; but it is always very hard labor. ”

“ He never received any revenue from us until he came here and turned actor. He gets a little money now by associating with himself an American friend, who writes a few sentences of a play, then brings it to New York and disposes of it to managers as their joint production. But what an exquisite shame it is for us to compel an artist to whom we owe so many delightful hours to resort to an artifice in order to be able to sell the product of his talent! Our injustice, too, damages ourselves even more than it despoils him ”

“ Wonderful magic of genius! The hovels and cotton-fields which this authoress scarcely saw she made all the world see, and see more vividly and more truly than the busy world can ever see remote objects with its own unassisted eyes. We are very dull and stupid in what does not immediately concern us, until we are roused and enlightened by such as she. Those whom we call "the intelligent," or "the educated," are merely the one in ten of the human family who by some chance learned to read, and thus came under the influence of the class whom Mrs. Stowe represents. ”

“ This man, Ben Jonson, commonly stands next to Shakespeare in a consideration of the dramatic literature of the age of Elizabeth; and certainly, if the "thousand-souled" Shakespeare may be said to represent mankind, Ben as unmistakably stands for English-kind. He is "Saxon" England in epitome,—John Bull passing from a name into a man,—a proud, strong, tough, solid, domineering individual, whose intellect and personality cannot be severed, even in thought, from his body and personal appearance. Ben's mind, indeed, was rooted in Ben's character ”