Cincinnati daily press. [volume] (Cincinnati [Ohio]) 1860-1862, 1861-04-06
DisiFe,slpa- oondiiioa Of lho New Yo1k


The, Charleston Mercury having made q
general onFlaught on the men of letters in
New York as vagabonds, rogues and thieves,
and recommended that they 9'be put at once
on short commous-nay, put adrift alto
gether, for gruh'- Vanity Fair thus hhr-
moniously carries out the Msrcutys idea of
their condition:
II is not difficult to infer from this elegant
and refined paragraph, what the editor of
the Mercury imagines the life of literary
men OF the highest standing in New York
TO be, and sequentially what his own proba-
bly, is. As everybody knows, they are all
ragged wretches living at best on board
wages, writing leaders for 'grub," trading a
paragraph once in a while for a potato, or a
biography for a biscuit. N. P. Willis and
General Morris can be seen almost any day
selling their own Home journal in the street
and trading off single copies for small
stew" in the Fulton Market. William Cullen
Bryant has lunch of pork and onions pretty
regular, but even he hangs round the
kitchen of the Metropolitan Hotel of an
evening, for the sake of gettinga feed out
of that dish of thirty Ingredients and sew
enty. seven syllabes, described by Aristo-
phanes, in the Ecclesidzdus9, and on which
the servants of that inn are said to be fed.
Briggs is allowed Connecticut pie per diem
when industrious, but then he likes milk on
it. for which he.writes poems for stump-tail
Twenty. Second pure Orange swilLUounty
establishment.
Bayard Taylor feeds most sumptuously of
all of them, receiving from Gosling, sauer-
krdut and bologna sausages-yes -as much
as he can eat inside of fifteen minutes, twice
q day, in return for which he delivers a
monthly lecture on his Hebrew benefactors.
Bancroft has a weekly stipend of soda crack
ers and hsrd-boiled eggs from his publisher.
That is all he gets. Stoddard and Aldrich
cultivate the muse on apples and doughnuts,
which we regret 70 say they generally steal
from an inhrm old Irish woman in Nassau
street, in pilfering which they are aided by
one Fisk as cover" @. A. Dana exists by
hooking from the stables handfulls of corn
and parching it upon the Tribune Office stove.
Fitz- Hugh Ludlow lives on hash, from which
he derives the surname of Hashish Eater,
Fred Cozzens has shanty and small
garden up the river by which he is enabled
occasionally to enjoy thin Julienne, and
sometimes raw turnip, or carrot or treat
his friends to a few fresh stalks of "Sparrow-
grass" Richard Grant White is doing pretty
well at present-haVing sold out his Shak-
speare and mortgaged his daily labor for life
for an annuity Of daily feed at Buttercake
BilPs, where he generally takes it out in a
plate of pork and beans, "most all pork
with good many beans Stedman lives
on lager-beer and pretzels, which are supplied
gratis by New York publishers to all who
work above thirty hours on a stretch for
thenr And this is all he ever sees. Park
Goodwin rings into suppers at gambling
houses when be can. So on with all the rest,
of every soul OF whom it may be written, as it
was of Pantagruel of old, that "he could not
reach any thing fit to eat, but with great
pain stopped now and then little to take
with the flat of the tongue some wretched
lick, bit or morsel." ..
But since such is the life led in the best of
times by leading hterati in a community
which is not the worst in the world for them
and where they are certainly not without
honor, we shiver with compassion to think
what must be the fare and fame of rude
ungrammatical scribhler-say in South Caro-
lina-where the patronage OF literature is. to
judge by the walls and bowls sent from their
own periodicals, at a doleful discount indeed I
1t the first writers of the metropolis are ig-
norant, starved, mischievous and thieving-
and the prominent and most talented repre-
sentative journal of Secession says all this
distinctly of them-what must be the status
of the provincial penman lacking their cul-
ture, their knowledge of life, their opportu-
nities-and who, unable to make living, as
they do in the great world, has sunk down
to the level Of hack partisan scrawler in
small country cotton townl We shudder at
the thought of such abject wretchedness,
and yielding to our immense and ungov-
ernable humanity-dissolve in tears.