Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[199] sold, and another called ‘Delaplaine,’ that had gone up to forty-five thousand. Another author of the same school, known as ‘Ned Buntline,’ is said to have earned sixty thousand dollars in a single year by his efforts; and still another, Sylvanus Cobb, Jr., is known to have habitually received a salary of ten thousand dollars for publications equally popular. No community can do without such books, but in America they are not usually counted as literature. Their authors scarcely obtain even the cheap immortality of the encyclopaedia. Such books are innocent enough; they are simply harmless weeds that grow up wherever the soil is rich, and sometimes where it is barren; science must catalogue them impartially, but they are not reckoned as a part of the horticultural product. The peculiarity is, that in England Mr. Haggard's crop of weeds is counted into the harvest; his preposterous plots are gravely discussed, compared, and criticised; he is himself admitted into the Contemporary Review as a valued contributor; Mr. Lang writes books with him; his success lies not merely in his publisher's balance, like