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it certainly has tempted--men who could produce, and would otherwise
have produced, solid literature. And there is so much more room in it
for light things than for things which the average reader regards as
heavy, that the heavy contributor is apt to be at a discount, and the
light at a premium. But all this is exceedingly obvious. And it may be
met on the other side by the equally obvious consideration already
referred to, that periodicals have made the literary life possible in a
vast number of cases where it was not possible before; that whereas
"toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol" was not a very exaggerated
description of its prospects little more than a hundred years ago, the
patron has become superfluous, want and the gaol rather unlikely, except
in cases of extreme misconduct, incompetence, or ill-luck, while if toil
and envy remain unvanquished, they are not specially fated to the
literary lot. Indeed the more paradoxical of Devil's Advocates against
the press usually urge that it has made the literary life too easy, has
tempted too many into it, and has thereby increased the flood of
mediocrity.

The most serious objection of all perhaps, though even this is rather
idle in face of accomplished facts, is that the perpetual mincing up and
boiling down of the constituents of the diet of reading have produced,
in the appetite and digestive faculties of the modern reader, an
inability to cope with a really solid meal of perhaps slightly tough
matter, and that periodicals not merely eschew the provision of this
solid stuff themselves, but do their best to make things worse by
manipulating the contents of books that do contain it.

The fact, however, once more, concerns us much more than moralisings
about the fact; and the fact of the prominence, the extraordinary
prominence, of the periodical press in the nineteenth century, is as
little open to dispute as the prominence in that century's later
mechanical history of discoveries in electricity, or in its earlier of
experiments with steam. Occasionally one may hear enthusiasts of one
kind or another announcing with joy or horror that the periodical is
killing the book. But if it is, it is very impartially engaged in
begetting it at the same time that it kills; and it may be very
seriously doubted whether this killing of a book is an easy act of
murder to commit. With the printing press to produce, the curiosity of
man to demand, and his vanity and greed--i