"How, sir?" cried Leonard. "Not that I would ask you to injure yourself for me," he added, with proud tears in his eyes.
"How, my young friend? I will explain. There is enough talent in these verses to induce very flattering reviews in some of the literary journals. You will read these, find yourself proclaimed a poet, will cry, 'I am on the road to fame.' You will come to me, 'And my poem, how does it sell?' I shall point to some groaning shelf, and say, 'Not twenty copies!' The journals may praise, but the public will not buy it. 'But you will have got a name,' you say. Yes, a name as a poet just sufficiently known to make every man in practical business disinclined to give fair trial to your talents in a single department of positive life; none like to employ poets; a name that will not put a penny in your purse—worse still, that will operate as a barrier against every escape into the ways whereby men get to fortune. But, having once tasted praise, you will continue to sigh for it: you will perhaps never again get a publisher to bring forth a poem, but you will hanker round the purlieus of the Muses, scribble for periodicals, fall at last into a bookseller's drudge. Profits will be so precarious and uncertain, that to avoid debt may be impossible; then, you who now seem so ingenuous and so proud, will sink deeper still into the literary mendicant—begging, borrowing—"
"Never—never—never!" cried Leonard, vailing his face with his hands.
"Such would have been my career," continued the publisher. "But I luckily had a rich relative, a trader, whose calling I despised as a boy, who kindly forgave my folly, bound me as an apprentice, and here I am; and now I can afford to write books as well as sell them. Young man, you must have respectable relations—go by their advice and counsel; cling fast to some positive calling. Be any thing in this city rather than poet by profession."
"And how, sir, have there ever been poets? Had they other callings?"
"Read their biography, and then envy them!"
Leonard was silent a moment; but, lifting his head, answered loud and quickly, "I have read their biography. True, their lot poverty—perhaps hunger. Sir, I envy them!"
"Poverty and hunger are small evils," answered the bookseller, with a grave, kind smile. "There are worse—debt and degradation, and—despair."
"No, sir, no—you exaggerate; these last are not the lot of all poets."
"Right, for most of our greatest poets had some private means of their own. And for others, why, all who have put into a lottery have not drawn blanks. But who could advise another man to set his whole hope of fortune on the chance of a prize in a lottery? And such a lottery!" groaned the publisher, glancing toward sheets and reams of dead authors lying like lead upon his shelves.