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INTRODUCTION.

"THERE are three difficulties in authorship," says the author of Lacon, "to write anything worth publishing, to find honest men to publish it, and to get sensible people to read it when written." To remove the chief of these stumbling stones is the aim of the present work, which has been undertaken in the belief that a few simple and practical rules for the guidance of beginners would remove much of that sheer ignorance which is the cause of so many literary failures. The chief incentives to authorship have always been "parts and poverty," and while the great growth of intellect in this age of general intelligence has increased the proportion of possible writers, the wages for good literary work are now distinctly worth winning.

At no former period has literature been so widely diffused as at the present day, and those who can look back over thirty or forty years must observe an increase in the number of readers and an improvement in the tone and standard of popular literature, which plainly prove that year by year the demand for books is growing greater, and that any writer who has mastered the difficulties which beset all beginners is sure of gaining a hearing sooner or later. For the nice adaptation of style to the station of the reader has now been brought to such perfection that we find every class provided with mental food convenient for its needs. There is scarcely a household, above the ranks of the miserably poor, where some magazine or weekly paper does not bring fresh thoughts and interests to brighten the monotonous round of hard-working lives. Homes where a borrowed

weekly paper was once the only literary amusement to be counted on, have now a wide choice offered them in the numerous cheap and excellent magazines whose number is so rapidly increasing. Every variety of cultivated taste-scientific, antiquarian, artistic, scholarly and critical, is now ministered to in the steady stream of literature which flows through those country homes where, a short time since, a certain number of books collected in the early history of the family was regarded as sufficient literary furniture, when eked out by a grave quarterly and a casual box from Mudie's. Writing his memories of the early years of the century, Serjeant Ballantine tells us that the magazines he remembers, then only amounted to about half-a-dozen, and with few exceptions they compare very ill with the almost countless periodicals now issued. Personalities and prejudices were openly culti vated in them. The disgraceful system of puffing the writers and their friends prevailed so widely that Christopher North boasted of the adroitness he had achieved in the art, whilst Macaulay sternly censured it as one of the most marked literary characteristics of his day, and eloquently appealed to English authors by their honour and their self respect to let their work win its own way by its own merits.

A comparison of the magazines of that day with those of the present shows a marked advance in literary ability, even in the least ambitious of them. Freshness and finish of style, we now find, distinguish the contributions in the place of the dull disquisitions, the borrowed wisdom, and the doubtful archaeology which filled the old periodicals. Readers are more critical as well as more numerous, and the demand for good writing is so great that no one who can supply it need fear failure. But authors, unlike the proverbial critics, are not "ready-made," and if they do not literally require to "serve their trade," they often, in the initial stages of their career, require such help and guidance as this book proposes to give them, so as to spare themselves and the much-enduring editors they beset, a weary

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