The rewards of Authors, we suspect, are greatest in France. In Germany, England and the United States they are about the same. Cooper, Irving and Prescott, in this country, have each received for copyrights more than one hundred thousand dollars. In England, Dickens has probably received more than any other living author—and in France Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Dumas, Scribe, Thiers, and many others, have obtained large fortunes by writing. In Germany Dieffenbach received for his book on Operative Surgery some $3,500; and Perthes of Hamburg, paid to Neander on a single work, more than $20,000, exclusive of the interest his heirs still have in it. Poets like Uhland, Freiligrath, Geibel, have also received as much as $6,000 or $12,000 on the sales of a single volume. Long ago in Boston, Robert Treat Paine received $1,500 for a song. Of our living poets, Longfellow has been most liberally paid.
George Stephens, the learned translator of the Frithiof's Saga of Bishop Tegner, in a letter to The International states that he is now printing at Copenhagen three Anglo-Saxon poems of the eleventh century, namely: The Old Testament Story, On the Sixth Day's Work, and The New Testament Story, by Aelfric, Archbishop of York, now just translated into the metre and alliteration of the original. The three poems will make a quarto volume of about thirty sheets, and copies may be ordered (price three dollars), through the Hon. H. W. Ellsworth, late United States Charge d'Affaires in Sweden, at New-York, or Dr. S. H. Smith, of Cincinnati. Of the ability and fidelity with which the work will be executed, the readers of the Frithiof's Saga need no other assurance.
"Etherization," after all, is not a modern discovery, and Wells, Jackson, and Morton, are alike undeserving of the praise they have received on account of it. The Paris Siècle states that a manuscript, written by Papin, known, for his experiments connected with the motive power of steam, has been discovered near Marburg in Electoral Hesse; that the work bears the name of Traité des Opérations sans Douleur, and that in it are examined the different means that might be employed to deaden, or altogether nullify, sensibility when surgical operations are being performed on the human body, Papin composed this work in 1681, but his contemporaries treated it with ridicule, and he abandoned the medical profession.
A new five-act play, tragic of course, has just appeared at Berlin, founded on the history of Philip Augustus of France. It is by a lady of the aristocratic circles of the Prussian capital, who now makes her debut in literature. It is praised as excellent by those who are not in the habit of being satisfied with the writings of ladies. A collection of poems from the same pen is shortly to appear.
M. Bianchi's Turkish and French Dictionary, in two large octavos, has reached a second edition at Paris. It is all that could be desired for the use of diplomatic and consular agents, traders, navigators, and other travellers in the Levant, but not designed for critics in the language or its literature.