LITERATURE LOOKING UP.
What was it that Mr. Milton pocketed for his Paradise Lost? (We have a horribly bad memory, and have mislaid our Commonplace book, or we should never dream of asking so commonplace a question.) Was it Ten Thousand Pounds, think you? Certainly not more, you say. Well, then, we can tell you, there is extant now a poem, whose estimated value equals that of Mr. Milton’s, and yet, actually, no offer has, it seems, been made to publish it!
This we learn from a perusal of the following advertisement, which was copied from the Hull Advertiser, the other day, into the Times:-
Wanted to borrow £500 on a manuscript poem, the estimated value of which is £10,000.
The Times calls this, in irony, “A Modest Request.” But what the Times intends for sarcasm, we prefer to take as truth. To ask for such a paltry sum as only Five Hundred Pounds to be advanced on what is estimated to be worth Ten Thousand, appears to our mind a request that could never cause a blush. As for raising brutal doubts it the security be really of the value it is judged at, it is enough to point to poems which have recently been printed, and which, according to the statements of reliable authorities (of whom “Our London Correspondent” stands conspicuously first), have been paid for at the most exorbitant of rates. When it is known that sums of one, three, five, nay, even twenty, fifty, and a hundred pounds per line have just been handed across counters for poetic compositions, one surely can’t feel wonder that a poem should be valued at a mere Ten Thousand Pounds, nor that the Milton who has written it, instead of keeping “mute,” should open wide his mouth.
No! Prosaic as we call ourselves, Poetry is looking up. Poets are no longer out at elbow and of credit, whatever they may possibly have been in days of yore. They can afford to put their Pegasus in harness as a carriage-horse, and are not driven to use him as a half-fed printer’s hack. Every line they write is, now-a-days, a golden line: every verse they scan for us is worth a guinea a foot. Their manuscripts are all of them negotiable paper; money-lenders will advance on them to an uncountable amount. Rampant idiots who doubt this, and who question if a poem now would fetch Ten Thousand Pounds (whatever, in its writer’s estimation, be the value of it), may be silenced in a jiffy by propounding just one problem: How many Hundred Millions is the “estimated value” of the poetry of Punch?
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