VOL. I.

Bulwer truly says that there is no royal road to literary success. Few literary men have realized the stern truth of this as did the accomplished author of "My Novel." Although "Pelham" gave him a sudden and brilliant reputation, he would have shone only as the comet of a London season, and been soon forgotten, had he not followed his first success by a rapid succession of novels,-less gay, less witty, less sparkling than “Pelham,” but all displaying an industry, a research, a power, a knowledge, perfectly amazing to those who had been accustomed to regard Edward Bulwer as a mere squire of dames, a curled darling of fashion, an amateur poet, whose chief literary occupation was writing sentimental verses in ladies' albums. For years after his first success, this young son of an ancient and distinguished house worked harder than any other literary man in England. Having married young, and against the wishes of his mother, he magnanimously gave up the handsome allowance which she had made him,

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and bravely determined to earn his living as a professional author. He wrote articles for newspapers, he wrote verses for annuals, he wrote short stories for magazines, beside writing at least one three-volume novel every year. He was always the most fastidious of writers, and his easy, graceful, and polished diction was acquired only by hard study and laborious care.

Few literary men have gone through so hard an experience as Thackeray did. For twelve years he wrote without public recognition, and with very little pecuniary return. But he followed Burke's noble advice: "Work on, even in despair, work on." Time and courage must conquer, and so it proved with Thackeray. "Vanity Fair" having been declined by a dozen publishers, more or less, Thackeray published the novel at his own expense. It was a great success, and was followed by others still better, which have placed Thackeray among the grand masters of fiction in that small but illustrious band which includes Cervantes, Balzac, Fielding, Scott, and Hawthorne.

Hawthorne won his way slowly and laboriously to literary success. For ten years he wrote and destroyed what he wrote; but he was acquiring that exquisite style, that literary art, — which has made him the greatest master of English of this century. At the age of fortyfour he declared himself to be "the obscurest literary man in America." In a letter written to Longfellow, long afterward, he said: "Here, in my chamber, I sat a long, long time, waiting patiently for the world to know me, and sometimes wondering why it did not know me sooner, or whether it would ever know me at all, at least, until I were in my grave. It may be true that there may have been some unanticipated pleasures here in the shadows, which I might have missed in the sunshine,

but you cannot conceive how utterly devoid of satisfaction all my retrospects are. I have a great difficulty in the lack of materials; for I have seen so little of the world that I have nothing but thin air to build my stories on, and it is not easy to give a life-like semblance to such shadowy stuff." Hawthorne was forty-six before "The Scarlet Letter" was published, but he is now a fixed star in the literary firmament.

Few authors, like Byron, wake up and find themselves famous. Few, like Dickens, bound into a sudden and immense popularity. Tennyson has achieved a splendid fame, but he did not reach it by a "primrose path." His first verses were laughed at by the critics. Christopher North said: "Alfred is best as an owl. All that he requires to make him immortal is to be shot, stuffed, set up in a glass case, and be stuck in a museum." After this, Tennyson did not publish anything for ten years. He studied. He wrote. He burned. When his next volume of poems was published, its reception, both from critics and readers, was very different from that accorded to his thin little volume of 1827. He was saluted as the rising young monarch of the throne of poetry, which had been vacant since the death of Byron. As Tennyson was not crushed by the harsh criticism of his first, so he was not unduly elated by the success of his second, literary venture. He studied harder, and in a few years astonished and delighted the world by a succession of poems, which have placed him among the first in that long line of illustrious English poets extending from Chaucer to the present time. Tennyson is the greatest of the living poets of the world, and his success has been worthily won. He deserves the laurel crown which has now adorned his brow for nearly thirty years.

During the first ten years of his literary life, Anthony Trollope did not earn enough to pay for his pens, ink, and paper, but he worked on, and lived to make fifteen thousand dollars by a single novel. Writing from his own pleasant later experience, Trollope declared that there was no career of life so charming as that of a successful man of letters. "If you like the town, you can live in the town, and do your

work there; if you like the country, you can live in the country. It can be done on the top of a mountain, or at the bottom of a pit. It is compatible with the rolling of the sea and the motion of the railway." When he sat down to write a novel, he confessed that he did not know and did not care how it was to end. Such indifference on the part of an author produces indifference to an author's work, and Trollope has almost ceased to be read.

By citing these examples of great authors who have been compelled to work long and hard to gain literary success, I wish to encourage young writers. Of all professions, literature, perhaps, is the most laborious; but success in no other profession is so superbly, so royally, rewarded. The prizes are hard to win, but they are glorious. Burns, the ploughman, becomes the companion of duchesses, and Tom Moore, a poor grocer's son, was the friend of princes and nobles. Eugene L. Didier. BALTIMORE, Md.

MRS. OLIVE THORNE MILLER AT HOME.

There is no name more familiar in literary circles of Brooklyn and New York than that of Olive Thorne Miller. Through her young people's stories and her many delightful articles on birds and animals she has endeared herself to the reading juvenile world and to all lovers of natural history. Mrs. Miller is not only an active literary worker; she is a housekeeper, and her controlling hand is seen and felt in every department of her pleasant home on Greene avenue, in this city, where, with her husband, Watts T. Miller, for many years an active Wallstreet business man, she dispenses a hearty hospitality, and lives with her grown-up family. One room of the house, divided from the parlor by heavy portières, is designated as the bird room, it being the familiar home of a dozen or more of our native birds. This room is the author's study as well. An abundance of sunlight streams in through a large south window, and on one side stands a good-sized desk covered with books and papers. The room is comfortably, though not luxuriously, furnished, and on every side hang large cages, with doors wide open. Before each window rests a long perch. At the further end stands a low table covered with a white towel, on which are two or three deep tin plates, painted in dark color, and full of water for bathing, with a convenient perch between them. All over the room are birds, robins and blackbirds,

orioles and thrushes, and many other species. A bluebird is seen splashing in the water. On one side a rose-breasted grosbeck is sunning himself in a corner of the window sash, and others running here and there on the floor with as much freedom as a robin redbreast in the meadow in early morn. Of course, the presence of a visitor changes their behavior somewhat, but they do not lose confidence while Mrs. Miller is present. Though she does not appear to watch them, yet not a motion of one of them escapes her notice. On a little stand near Mrs. Miller's chair is a pile of note-books, each one bearing the name of some bird, and anything peculiar, or interesting and unusual habit, or unaccustomed sound, is at once recorded, and in this way a history is kept of each day's incidents. In this way she not only gets a fair acquaintance with the birds, but a minute record of their behavior and habits in the house and under her eye. If some certain bird evinces shyness, Mrs. Miller often turns her chair around so that her back is toward him, and with a hand glass still watches him. During the winter months she spends much time in study of the birds, and does her writing in the summer, when one after another of her feathered family has flown.

"You seem to enjoy your peculiar study and methods very much," I remarked.

"Yes," replied Mrs. Miller, "I have more enjoyment in my studies of birds than I have in human life, because I need not take part in what goes on in the feathered world. I can sit and stare at the small actors in bird dramas exactly as if it were a play, while in human society I must do my share, and not be so rude as to stare. To me a bird is as much an individual as a person. I never have a wild bird caught or killed for me. I buy them in the bird stores, and after studying them through the winter, I take them out to the park, and if they are capable of taking care of themselves, I let them go free. It is the habits and life of the birds, and not their classification, that I am interested in. Most writers, I believe, kill the birds, count their feathers and the number of their bones, and classify them. I don't care a rap for classification. Life and action are what interest me. For many years I visited Prospect Park in my studies, and spent hours there in the most wild and unfrequented parts. I used to go every morning, rain or shine, with my notebook and a pair of good opera glasses. Sometimes I would take lunch with me, and lie around, and read, write, and observe until after sundown. But nowadays so many boys and strangers frequent the park that birds are not at full liberty, and I have been doing my studying in the country of late. I

get small boys to hunt up the birds' nests, and then I watch their conduct for the day. I spent a whole month in North Carolina once studying the mocking-bird through its nesting. I always try, after studying a bird in confinement, to study the same bird in freedom. I take copious notes, and then, when I sit down to write, everything I saw comes back to me. I am very careful not to draw on my imagination in writing up birds. Every line I write upon birds I have seen myself, without exaggerations or additions, unless explicitly stated otherwise." "How long have you studied birds?" "Only about eight years. My first bird paper was a study of a cat-bird, published July, 1883, in the Atlantic Monthly, - and most of my bird papers have been published in that magazine."

"Do you not find it rather difficult work to look after your bird room?"

"Much curiosity has been expressed in many letters from strangers about my arrangement for keeping up a bird room in a house of the ordinary city pattern. An account of the plan and its working is published in the February number of the Home Maker. I intend to prepare a book, indeed, it is already far on the way, giving practical directions for keeping and making happy a roomful of birds, with minute directions about preparing quarters and the many little conveniences, the result, in fact, of seven years' experience. There never was a worker so in love with his work as I am with mine. I am as enthusiastic as if I were fifteen instead of fifty (plus ).”

"You are deeply interested in women's clubs, are you not?"

"Yes; of late I have written a number of articles on women's clubs, and have given them warm endorsement."

"Now tell me something about your working day."

"Well, my idea of a perfect day," said Mrs. Miller, "is to devote all the morning of it to writing, — that is, until one o'clock, and in that time I can get through a pile of work. Occasionally I write in the afternoon, but never at night. I spare the evening for reading, recreation, and visiting with my family."

Olive Thorne Miller has been before the world as an author but a short time, - about eight or ten years; but perhaps for five years prior to that she began writing for children, mostly sketches in natural history, with an occasional story. She has published six books, through the house of E. P. Dutton & Co., for children: "Little Folks in Feathers and Fur," first and most famous and dear

to the hearts of thousands of children; "Queer Pets at Marcy's," true stories of animal life in domestication; "Little People of Asia," sketches of children all over that continent; and "Nimpo's Troubles," a story that ran as a serial in the early days of St. Nicholas. Her two later books are exclusively her bird sketches, and are published by Houghton, Mifflin, & Co., Boston: “Birds' Ways" and "In Nesting Time." Mrs. Miller began to write under the name of "Olive Thorne." Her pen has brought such success that she has hardly an idle hour. She is a member of the Meridian Club, and prominent in many noteworthy movements, with other leading literary women of New York and Brooklyn. In appearance she is tall and somewhat stout in figure, with a face highly flushed with vigorous health, beaming with good nature, and encircled in a frame of wavy iron-gray hair. She is sociable, and almost jolly in manner, but is not a society woman (so-called). Mrs. Miller was born in Auburn, N. Y., but spent much of her earlier life in Chicago and other Western cities. She has made Brooklyn her home for the past twelve years. “J. A. McK.," in the Brooklyn Eagle.

THE ENGLISH OF EDGAR SALTUS.

We can understand that a man of clay so fine as that of Gonfallon in "A Transaction of Hearts" would soon weary of a woman whose skin was "eburnean in its clarity, and whose eyes were of Iserine." Besides, she presented the "disposition of a sun-dial"; and, worse than all, "she was as clairvoyant as a nyctalope!"

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Taking these facts into consideration, together with the other facts that her husband was "myope" and somewhat afflicted with "akosmism," which made him roam his study like a gryfalcon," we have some reasonable grounds for a coolness. Then, too, his eyes were of that green-black seen only in "dysodile coal," and the dysodile eyes meeting the Iserine eyes could not reasonably be expected to lay aside their astonishment for mere sympathy's sake.

Mr. Saltus' story is told with a strain of English that is pretentious, pedantic, and often obscure. No one will know what "Iserine eyes" are till he thinks of Campbell's well-known poem, and remembers the line, "Of Iser rolling rapidly." Then it may occur to him that there is a mineral found in that river called "Iserine."

There was a good deal of that kind of writing in "Eden." Mr. Usselex in that book, I remember, sat down incidentally "like Thor in the court of

Utgarda." If he did not get up again like Ujjadhildig in the Sarawass of Redjidwuld, during the same chapter, it was probably owing to considerations of terminology. I remember that this same Mr. Usselex when he wanted to crush an enemy wished him "vertiginous success," and Eden, who listened to him on one of these sesquipedalian occasions, thought he was an "engastrimuth," but afterward her mind cooled down, and “her goblins were replaced by glyptodons."

In "A Transaction of Hearts" I find that the Countess of Cinq-Cygne had a beauty that was "that of a city raised from the ground." In another place Gonfallon assists at "the fabulization of a masquerade," and Bucholz's laugh "had in it the ghoulish mock of the graphophone." In another Gonfallon is represented as preaching to a congregation of neurosthenes.

Lucidity is certainly not attained by this use of technical terms, nor is accuracy always preserved. When Mr. Saltus describes Ruth as being clairvoyant as a nyctalope he is really saying that she had the clear sight of a diseased eye, which is not what he meant to say. He has sacrificed accuracy to pretentiousness of expression.

If life were made up of negations, and terminology furnished proof of it, Mr. Saltus would be not only a profound, but a brilliant man. But even then I should object to his speaking of lamp-posts as "disorganized," and probably get a little tired of his " intussusceptions and " tangential flights," which exceed anything that I ever encountered in the most transcendental Massachusettsian" village."Nym Crinkle," in the New York World.

WALTER SCOTT'S LITERARY HABITS.

There is another reason why Scott's literary habits have a special interest. He may be said to be the father of a new race of literary workmen, to be the prototype of the authors of to-day, with their regular habits, methodical industry, proper remuneration, and general sanity. Scott did not wait for "inspiration." He had no fantastic notions about genius, but he did have a literary gift, which he used in an eminently rational way.

Like so many men who have attained fame in literature, he was early dropped into a legal apprenticeship. Scott had an aversion to the mechanical effort of writing, and how effectually he was helped to overcome it by his apprenticeship may be understood when he tells us that he remembers having written during that period upward of one hundred and twenty folio pages without interval for food

or rest. The total amount he received from the first ten years of his practice was, as his fee-books show, about £1,100, the annual receipts being from £24 to 200; and this total amount of his first ten years of law practice was equal to about oneeighth of the cash sum for which he sold "Woodstock," a novel that cost him less than three months' work. However, with his characteristic good sense, he did not give up the law until he had secured a safe place in literature.

In 1806, he was appointed Clerk of the Session. His work was not affected by his surroundings, and he labored as faithfully in his little den in Edinburgh as in the much seen library at Abbotsford, although the former room seemed especially adapted for a literary workman. The den" in Castle street was a small room, with a single window and a single picture, the window looking out upon a patch of turf, just large enough to provoke the imagination of one who loved the country. The walls were entirely hidden by books, arranged systematically in classes, the cases and shelves of each class being plainly lettered. Each book had its proper place, and if one were loaned, a wooden block, bearing a card with the name of the borrower and date of the loan, stood substitute on the shelf. The books were all richly bound, and never misused; indeed, Scott confessed himself a great coxcomb about them, and hated to see them specked or spotted. A few reference books were at hand, near the massive table where he worked; and within reach were his Session papers, literary manuscripts, sheaves of letters and proof-sheets, all neatly tied up. There was no picturesque disorder, no posing. All his writing apparatus was in perfect order. The rest of the furniture consisted of two chairs and a stepladder, upon which a big tom-cat usually lay dozing. Hard work, a dinner engagement, an evening at the theatre, or a ride with a friend made up Scott's life in Edinburgh.

In the country at Ashestiel, before he had drawn upon himself the cares of the Abbotsford estate, the long solitary evenings were given up to writing. But he afterward found that working at night was likely to bring on his nervous headaches, and that he was only half a man unless he had seven hours of utter unconsciousness; thenceforth his habits in the country were those described with delight by the many who enjoyed the hospitality of Abbotsford.

He arose at five o'clock, lit his fire, shaved and dressed himself with particular care, for he disliked any sort of slovenliness, and by six o'clock he was busy at his desk, with his papers and books of

reference where he could find any one of them without the loss of a moment. He worked until eleven or twelve o'clock, save for his breakfast hour between nine and ten, and by one o'clock he was on horseback. The dinner hour was early, and the host and his family, with their guests, passed a short evening in conversation and music. As he said, "he broke the neck of the day's work before breakfast."

Though Scott devoted many hours to the mere putting of his thoughts on paper, yet the creative process was going on at other times. Scott himself bears witness to this condition when he tells us: "I lie simmering over things for an hour or so before I get up, and there is the time I'm dressing to overhaul my half-sleeping, half-waking projet de chapitre, and when I get the paper before me, it commonly runs off pretty easily."

The year 1816, during which Scott produced nine volumes, affords another instance of his tremendous capacity for work. His unconquerable industry did not flag even when he was travelling, and in the morning he rarely ever resumed his journey without forwarding a package directed to the printer at Edinburgh. He found dogged persistency at composition was an unfailing remedy for discouragement, and that adversity drew out the best that was in him. Illness and intense bodily pain could no more deter him from writing than could travel or pleasure. The greater part of both "Ivanhoe" and "The Bride of Lammermoor" was dictated, and its composition was punctuated by the groans of the suffering author. When one work was finished, he took up another: "Anne of Geierstein " was completed one morning before breakfast, and after breakfast he began his compendium of Scottish history.

The manuscript page of one of the Waverley novels is of quarto size, evenly written in a free and open hand, without a dotted "i" or a crossed "t." A short dash alone indicates the place for a punctuation mark, but the mark itself is left for the printer to insert. The writing is so uniform as to suggest that it might almost have been projected against the paper by a single effort rather than penned line by line. Indeed, the handwriting was so regular that Scott could from the amount of copy calculate exactly to a page the length of a volume: this he has done on the margin of a proofsheet of "Peveril of the Peak." Each of these pages of copy contained about eight hundred words. At the time of the composition of "Ivanhoe" three such pages, equal to fifteen or sixteen of the original impression, were considered a day's work,