WHAT IT COSTS TO ISSUE BIG NEWSPAPERS.

It certainly does not seem to cost a great deal. Doubtless the average reader of an eight-page daily journal of the first class has not the remotest idea of the amount of money required to publish it. It looks so cheap, and—when one has gleaned the news from it-so worthless.

The heaviest single item of expense, for a metropolitan newspaper of large circulation, is for the paper on which it is printed. Of course this varies greatly. The New York World and the New York Times are each, let us say, eight pages, but the World spends more in a day for its white paper than does the Times in a week. It is within bounds to place the paper-bill of an eight-page journal, with an average daily circulation of seventy-five thousand, at close upon one thousand dollars per day. During 1888 the New York World is said to have paid out six hundred thousand dollars for its paper. The bulky Sunday editions, of from sixteen to thirty-two pages, of the larger newspapers swell the weekly totals.

The "composition" bills vary from about seven hundred and fifty dollars a week for four-page papers like the Boston Post, Philadelphia Record, Baltimore News, and Chicago Evening Journal, to six thousand dollars a week for the largest ten- and twelve-page papers, which issue special suburban editions involving the waste of many columns of "local" news put in type for particular places and not used in the principal city editions. It is by means of these special editions that the amazing circulation of certain metropolitan journals is secured.

It is impossible to cover in a single statement the editorial expenditures of the leading newspapers. They differ in this respect more widely than in any other. There is one successful class, represented by the Cincinnati Enquirer, whose staff of editorial writers does not cost it one hundred dollars a week; there is another class, including papers like the New York Sun and Chicago Tribune, the weekly salaries of whose editorial writers foot up not less than one thousand dollars. Perhaps the best-paid editorial writer on any daily journal in the country is Mayo W. Haseltine, of the New York Sun, who is said to receive one hundred and seventy-five dollars a week.

In the same way great newspapers differ extremely in the money they expend for special telegraphic news. Certain excellent "local" newspapers with established advertising patronage, notably the Philadelphia Ledger and the Baltimore Sun, satisfied with the outside news-service of the Associated Press, pay for telegraph-tolls not more than one hundred dollars a week; while other enterprising newspapers, like the New York World, Sun, Times, and Herald, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the Cinciunati Enquirer, and the Philadelphia Press, pay from five hundred dollars to twelve hundred dollars a week. This, it should be borne in mind, is for telegraph-service alone; for here another important distinction between these two classes must be noted. The first (the great local newspapers or advertising mediums) probably expend only from seventy-five dollars to one hundred and twenty-five dollars per week on the special correspondents who send news by telegraph or mail, and are paid by "space," or at so much per column, contributed or printed; while for the same

services the papers of the second class pay out from eight hundred dollars to two thousand dollars per week.

The staff of reporters is not such a variable quantity, since all metropolitan journals must give, with more or less completeness, the news of the cities in which they are published. There are, indeed, in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, and Chicago, penny newspapers whose entire weekly outlay for the gathering of "local" news, including the salary of the city editor, does not exceed one hundred and thirty-five dollars. But the larger newspapers employ from twenty to twenty-five reporters at an average weekly salary of twenty dollars, and pay their city editors from fifty dollars to seventy-five dollars.

Then there are the telegraph editors, say five of them at an average weekly wage of twenty-five dollars (the New York Sun pays best for this important and laborious service); the literary, dramatic, and financial editors, on salaries ranging from thirty dollars to seventy-five dollars per week; the "news," sometimes the same as the "night," editor, who "makes up" the paper and "puts it to press," and rightly gets well paid therefor; and-saving his highness the editor-in-chief, whose income is too magnificent for mention-there is, finally, the managing editor, who may be paid from fifty to sixty dollars a week all the way up to the princely salary of Colonel John Cockerill, of the New York World, who receives from Mr. Pulitzer the snug fortune of twenty thousand dollars a year.

A word should be said about the cable-tolls. These are not so heavy as the public may think. The cable despatches and Sunday letters not only come in skeleton form, very much condensed in substance and abbreviated in letter, to be expanded (though not unduly) on this side of the sea, but they are paid for by the various syndicates of newspapers which receive them. Thus, the New York journal which arranges for a cable letter sells it to a leading paper in five other cities. The cable letter as printed makes one thousand words, we shall say. As received it was five hundred words in length, and the toll for it (at twelve cents a word) was sixty dollars. But divided among six the cost is only ten dollars a thousand words,-not such a lavish outlay, after all. Three New York papers published short reports from the American base-ball team that lately played its way around the world. Now, the telegraph rate to and from Australia is two dollars and fifty cents a word, as the message must be repeated twenty times and go and come by way of Europe. Even at the rate for newspapers of one dollar and twenty-five cents a word these base-ball reports seem a remarkable piece of extravagance, until one knows of the ingenious cipher system by which they were received. There are just so many probable plays in a game of base-ball; only about twenty words were necessary for each report. Divide this trivial cost among the syndicate, and see how insignificant one phase of newspaper "enterprise" becomes.

In my list of expenditures I have taken no account of the force in the business office, the mailing-room, the foundry, and the press-room. I have not the space to dwell upon them. But add the various items for a mammoth newspaper and you'll find the grand total far over a million. This is stunning; but I learn from a trustworthy source that the World cleared a million dollars last year.

Melville Philips.

BOOK-TALK.

THERE can be no greater literary treat than the autobiography of a genuine man. Now, Edward Fitzgerald was above all things a genuine man, and the first volume of his "Letters and Literary Remains" (Macmillan), which is edited by that able craftsman William Aldis Wright on much the same principle that gave its charm to Cross's "Life of George Eliot," has all the essentials of an autobiography. Mr. Wright allows the Letters to tell their own tale; he adds only a very slender connecting thread of narrative,-enough to be explanatory, not enough to be obtrusive. It is a fine honest mind and heart that are here revealed. Fitzgerald was one of those rare characters who are thoroughly frank with themselves. No wonder Thackeray's daughter thought she discerned in him many of the traits of the novelist's "Warrington." There is no room here for cant and humbug, any more than there was in Pendennis's friend. Fitzgerald speaks his mind out plainly about men and things, but a royal good nature dominates all he says. Even the passage which excites Mr. Browning to his unfortunate ebullition of bile and saliva had no ill feeling in it. Mr. Browning fancied that Fitzgerald thanked God his wife was dead, and so suggested that there would be an admirable appropriateness in spitting upon the dead critic with lips once consecrate by hers. Fitzgerald did not thank God for Mrs. Browning's death. He obviously had no personal grudge against her. He did not even know her. But critically he was prejudiced against her writings; he was glad that no more Aurora Leighs were to be added to English literature. The Deo gratias occurred in a letter to a personal friend; it was never meant for publication (Mr. Wright has acknowledged, indeed, that he erred in giving it to the light), and it is dictated by no unkindly feeling. It is such a remark as any one of us might casually drop, in a letter or in conversation, on the death of some public person with whom we did not agree.

Now, this is not saying that Fitzgerald was right in his estimate of Mrs. Browning's literary worth. Fitzgerald, it has already been adjudged by competent authority, was often wrong in his judgments of writers both of his time and of the past, as every genuine man is likely to be. One distrusts a taste that is too catholic, that is always in touch with what we call the cultivated opinion. Cultivated opinion is only too apt to like the books that it never reads. It was with no great shock of surprise that some years ago we heard one eminent critic charge, and prove, that another eminent critic had never read some of the "recognized" masterpieces which he freely praised. If the latter had read them, however, he would have praised them quite as freely. Educated opinion is a bugaboo which deprives the critic of his manliness. Not many people perhaps would agree with the verdicts which Mr. Fawcett, for example, has passed upon Browning and Carlyle in his volume "Agnosticism, and Other Essays" (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.). Yet we should do homage to a critic who has the courage of his convictions, who consciously and without affectation of singularity runs counter to educated opinion. We should be glad to see a man who depends not upon hearsay but upon the report of his own faculties for his convictions.

You remember the story of the young physician who was so modest of his own powers that he determined to begin by practising on an infant. Something of the same feeling prompts many authors to flesh their maiden pens on translation. Now, a genuine translation, a translation that does not play traitor to the original, is one of the most difficult of literary feats. The really good versions of foreign authors that enrich English literature may be counted upon one's fingers. Among these, of course, the King James Bible stands out pre-eminent. Thomas Urquhart's translation of Rabelais is another marvellous bit of work that belongs to the same era. Had Rabelais written in English, not French, he could not have been more spontaneous and Rabelaisian than Urquhart. Some of Swinburne's versions of Villon are excellent, and Swinburne himself has recorded his admiration of Rossetti's translation of the same poet's "Ballade of Dead Ladies,”-refusing, indeed, to enter into competition with the elder translator by producing a rival version. Carlyle's renditions of German authors are all good, though too uniformly Carlylese to be thoroughly representative of the originals. Bayard Taylor's "Faust" comes very near being a great work, but Goethe is too mighty an artist not to elude the grasp of the most patient art, the most fruitful scholarship, unless animated by a similar genius. Longfellow is our best American translator, yet his Dante is not quite a success: he has earned his pre-eminence by such exquisite tours de force as his "The Castle by the Sea" from Uhland, and "The Silent Land" from Salis. Charles T. Brooks and Charles G. Leland are entitled to respect for many of their renditions of German authors: the latter's Heine should be contrasted with the barbarisms of Sir Edgar Bowring's and Sir Theodore Martin's. Any one who makes the acquaintance of Heine through the atrocities perpetrated by those ruthless knights must find himself face to face with an enigma in literary reputation.

Translating has been aptly called pouring from a gold into a silver chalice. If the silver be sound and pure we thankfully accept the substitute. Yet in rare instances translators have done even better: they have poured from gold into gold, they have even poured out of the silver into the gold, they have improved upon their originals. Fitzgerald is one of these; still another was the forgotten James Clarence Mangan, whom some of us fret to see forgotten. Not, indeed, the Mangan who vulgarized a few of Goethe's and Schiller's best poems, but the Mangan (strange it should be another, yet the same!) who gave us golden substitutes for the silver of Rückert, Freiligrath, and Zedlitz in "The Ride across the Parapet," "Grabbe," and "The Midnight Review.” Mangan's Lenore," considered simply as an English poem, is one of the finest ballads of the weird and the supernatural in the language. It is a finer poem than William Taylor's paraphrase, which Sir Walter Scott admired and imitated, and it is more literal; it is far superior to Brooks's version,-the only other one, out of a hundred different attempts, which can be mentioned in the same breath.

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Of the relative merits of Fitzgerald and Omar Khayyam most of us can speak only by hearsay,-Persian is not a common accomplishment,—though we may credit hearsay the more when we find its report strengthened by corroborative evidence. We are told that not Omar Khayyam but Saadi and Hafiz are the great names of Oriental poetry. Now, to us Saadi and Hafiz are names and little more; their subtler beauties have been mastered by no interpreter among the several who have essayed the task. Omar Khayyam has had some half

dozen translations (here comes the clever Mr. Justin H. McCarthy with one, and here also is another which hails from Chicago), and they all, with the exception of Fitzgerald's, claim at least the merit of being literal. Now, these literal versions lose not only the nameless aroma of Fitzgerald's verse, which may, indeed, exist in the Persian and need a poet's touch to reproduce, but also some of the most striking thoughts, metaphors, and epigrams which certainly should not fail to reappear, roughly at least, in a literal translation.

In the preface to the translation which he and a collaborator have made of a number of French short stories or contes-"The Dead Leman, and Other Tales" (Scribners)-Mr. Andrew Lang makes a contemptuous allusion to an American version of the titular story "in which Romuald does not go to bed, but retires, and in which nothing begins but everything commences." The version to which he alludes is evidently Lefcadio Hearn's. The Reviewer must acknowledge that only in a half-hearted way can he join in the crusade against the word " commence." As a rule, "begin" is the better word, just as "tweedledee" is on the whole a homelier, simpler, and less affected locution than 66 tweedledum," with its suspiciously Latin termination. Nathless a man is not ostracized from respectable literary society because he chooses to make his hero commence rather than begin. And as to the Americanism "to retire,”that might well sound gauche and mock-modest to unaccustomed ears. But, on the other hand, is not going to bed a humdrum and prosaic vocation? Perhaps Cæsar and Alexander did not retire; neither did they go to bed,-or not without a loss of personal dignity. Dropping mere verbal criticism, however, it must be said that, though Lang is more natural, gayer, more debonair, Hearn has succeeded better in reproducing the languorous and sensuous effect, "the faint archaism, the perfume, the poetry, of Gautier's prose." With Mérimée, About, and the others who are included in this little volume Mr. Lang succeeds better. The stories are admirable examples of a form of literature in which Frenchmen have always excelled.

This is a form in which Germans, especially, are held to be deficient. Even their novels, it is complained, are long, cumbrous, awkward; they lack the artistic touch which gives a paragraph in a sentence, a sentence in a word. Yet the Germans have produced at least five writers of contes worthy to rank with the best in any literature,-Fouqué, Hoffmann, Tieck, Heyse, and Zschokke. Perhaps Goethe might be added as a sixth on the strength of his exquisite "New Melusina," but he certainly would be ruled out if his adherents sought to press the claims of that chaotic Märchen which Germans ambitiously style The Tale. This tale of tales is a wondrous allegorical poem if you will, it is, properly speaking, no conte. As to the five authors already mentioned, the Reviewer owns himself a captive to their various charms, and there are moods when he would prefer the least of them, Zschokke himself, to his more famous rivals. "The Journal of a Poor Vicar,"-founded, it is said, on the same original as Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield,"—"The Adventures of a New-Year's Night," and "The Broken Pitcher," are little masterpieces of their kind. He is glad to see that the Messrs. Putnam have republished in the favorite Knickerbocker Nuggets a selection from the translations of these and other tales which Mr. Parke Godwin gave to the public some forty years ago. William S. Walsh.