A
manuscript accompanying the letter is offered for publication. It
is not commonly brilliant, too often lamentably deficient. If
Rachel's saying is true, that "fortune is the measure of
intelligence," then poverty is evidence of limited capacity which
it too frequently proves to be, notwithstanding a noble exception
here and there. Now an editor is a person under a contract with
the public to furnish them with the best things he can afford for
his money. Charity shown by the publication of an inferior article
would be like the generosity of Claude Duval and the other
gentlemen highwaymen, who pitied the poor so much they robbed the
rich to have the means of relieving them.
Though I am not and never was an editor, I know something of the
trials to which they are submitted. They have nothing to do but to
develope enormous calluses at every point of contact with
authorship. Their business is not a matter of sympathy, but of
intellect. They must reject the unfit productions of those whom
they long to befriend, because it would be a profligate charity to
accept them. One cannot burn his house down to warm the hands even
of the fatherless and the widow.
THE PROFESSOR UNDER CHLOROFORM.
- You haven't heard about my friend the Professor's first
experiment in the use of anaesthetics, have you?
He was mightily pleased with the reception of that poem of his
about the chaise.
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