nclose in a
small compass the wealth of the language--its family jewels." But when
poems are paid by the line, bards are pardonable for diffuseness. And
then, besides diffuseness, our age has wonderful literary fecundity. Few
people know how much painters paint, and how much great writers write;
for the bards of a single poem, as Mr. Stedman shows, are exceptional,
and rich quantity as well as rich quality is the usual rule for
greatness, whether of novelist, poet, essayist, metaphysician, or
historian. So here we come upon another source of the accumulated floods
of literature. The other day I was looking through a prodigious list of
the works of Alexandre Dumas, _pere_. There were 127 of them, mostly
novels--"Monte Christo," "Three Musketeers," "Bragelonne," and the rest
that we used to read. They made 244 volumes; but the plays were not
included, and many slighter miscellanies did not seem to be there; and
the posthumous work on cookery was certainly not there; and of course
there was no effort to collect everything from "Le Mois," "La Liberte,"
and the half dozen other journals he edited or wrote in; so that I doubt
not the writings of this illustrious man, if ever brought together in a
complete edition, would make at least 150 works of 300 or 400 stout
volumes. And in English literature we have many Salas and Southworths. I
remember an announcement in the "Lancet" that "Mr. G. A. Sala is
completely restored to health, and in the full discharge of his
professional duties." An expressive term, that "full discharge"!

Again, some popular authors employ apprentices to do the bulk of their
work, only touching it up with mannerisms, and so turn out much more
than if they wrought it all. The world, too, has now accumulated a
myriad handbooks of facts and compilations of statistics, which enable
writers with a fondness for theory, like Buckle, to have all their
material ready to spin into generalization. Then there is a popular
education toward prolixity in the telegraphic part of newspapers. The
associated press writers from Washington seem to be selected for their
inability to be terse and pithy, and dribble out the simplest fact with
pitiful iteration. The special news-writers, being often at their wits'
end for their dole of day's work, can hardly be asked to be laconic. The
special messages which the ocean wires bring, doubtless with exquisite
terseness and picturesqueness, are most carefully interwritten and
diluted;