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THE AUTHOR:
A MONTHLY MAGAZINE TO INTEREST AND HELP ALL LITERARY WORKERS.
VOL. I.
BOSTON, JANUARY 15, 1889.
The glory for which authors are traditionally
regarded as thirsting is in the main an elusive
thing, especially when it comes to be measured
in the prosaic terms of a publisher's accounts;
but on one side, what we may call its domestic
side, it is real, and not ungratifying. Whether
his literary work keeps him in shoe-strings or
not, in which latter case he is in the illustri-
ous company of Wordsworth, of one thing
the author may be sure, that the world will take
as much interest in him as he deserves. There
is no class of people about whom there is so
much eagerness for information as the literary
class. What the author writes awakes every-
where the desire to know what the author does,
No. 1.
how he lives, what kind of man he is when he
lays aside his full-dress suit of types and binding,
and eats, or sleeps, or talks like an ordinary
person. Of the biographies that appear every
month, the biographies of literary men are far
in the predominance. Books of anecdote, table-
talk, reminiscence, treat for the most part of
men of letters. The lions of a metropolis are
literary lions, literary at least to the extent of
clever after-dinner speaking or skill in touching
off a story. How desperate have been the en-
deavors to track Shakespeare, through his Son-
nets, his "Tempest," his Prince Hal, to that
hiding-place where his baffling personality has
retreated! It is a great point gained, everyone
feels, if it may reasonably be inferred from the
Sonnets that Shakespeare the actor, working
among associations that soil and stain, felt his
sensitive nature recoil, as it became "subdued
to what it works in, like the dyer's hand"; or if
from the Tempest " we may identify Prospero
with the friendly magician who, as the almost
unknown playwright, has created so much for
the world. Every shred of fact about such a
personality is precious. Nor are men exacting
about facts poetical or mysterious. They like
to read, also, at their breakfast-tables that Mr.
Whittier spent his eighty-second birthday quiet-
ly at home, receiving his friends, and that Lord
Tennyson was removed the other day, in a
special invalid's car, from Aldworth to Farring-
ford, where he will spend the winter. All the
prose of a poet's life the world insists on trans-
muting into poetry. Pilgrimage to holy shrines
is not antiquated, it has only taken the new
Copyright, 1889, by WILLIAM H. HILLS. All rights reserved.
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