a committee meeting nine times, and a general
meeting once, a-year, the pay of a collector
and of a clerk.  The clerk, however, can only
be requisite in case the three registrars and the
three treasurers, and the three auditors
make themselves sinecurists.  Painters and
Engravers, who possess a fund precisely similar,
find that, although their committee meets
twelve times a-year instead of nine, and relieves
more applicants, they can do all needful
business by hiring a room at the Freemasons'
Tavern when they want it, and by causing
their mechanical work to be done through
the agency of a clerk who receives fifty
pounds for his attention to their affairs once a
month.  This results from the artists managing
their own affairs.  The managers of the
Literary Fund on the contrary, are not authors,
but potent seigneurs.  The president is an able
and venerable marquis of unblemished honor,
worthy of the highest respect in very many
capacities, but who is no more an Author
than he is the Engineer of the Tubular
Bridge, and who associates himself as much
with the Society or its proceedings as the
Emperor of France does.  Of the twenty
vice-presidents, eight only can, by the utmost
stretch of courtesy, be called literary men,
counting those noblemen who have amused
themselves by publishing a volume of stray
verse, or a book of travel.  The council we
pass over as a dummy; and, of the nineteen
members of committee, certainly not
more than four—but, as we think, only two—
are authors by profession.  There is then no
reason for feeling surprise at the necessity
imposed by this committee of obliging each
applicant for relief to hand in a certificate of
character signed by "two respectable
householders."  The certificate must be sent in
seven days before any committee meeting,
in order that there may be time to institute
inquiry over and above this vouching.  Who
can possibly wonder, if ladies of genius and
learning who have been relieved by a
committee so profoundly ignorant of the
members of the literary profession as to need
such a mode of verification, have been
afterwards committed to the treadmill as begging-
letter impostors?  or if men have been
relieved whose books are unknown equally to
authors, publishers, and the public?

There must—if only for the credit and ease
of noblemen and gentlemen, a few of whom
meet nine times a-year for an hour or so
each time—be a good house in Bloomsbury—
it is indeed going far to condescend even to
Bloomsbury—costing one hundred and ninety
pounds a-year for rent, coals, servants, and
repairs.  There must be nothing so mean
as a clerk; but there must be a gentleman
honourable enough to shake hands with a
lord—as indeed there is, and one deserving
even higher honours, if such be—who cannot
be paid less than two hundred a-year to be
a secretary, and to live in the house to take care
of it.  (Nothing whatever going on in it,
it naturally requires somebody to look after
the furniture).  Then fifty or sixty pounds
may be spent freely on printing, and a  hundred
and odd pounds at a tavern once a-year;
because a dinner makes men liberal, and
brings the light of the marquises and right
honourables to shine upon the countenances
of the authors who adore them.  Must we
grieve if it has happened that authors have
left off adoring lords as lords, and are in this
case turned out of their association by the
press of patrons whom they do not want?
The number of the fraternity has been
quadrupled during the last fifty years,
and authorship has become a prosperous
and definite profession; yet there were,
fifty years ago, four times as many periodical
subscribers to this Literary Fund as there
are now.

The result of this sort of management and
mismanagement, speaks for itself in a single
sentence.  It is ascertained that, in eleven
years, the Literary Fund spent five thousand
six hundred pounds upon the act of relieving
distress in four hundred and seventy-
seven cases; while it cost the Artists'
General Benevolent Fund in the same
time, less than one thousand pounds to
relieve a number of people larger by one
hundred and forty-seven.  The machinery
of the Literary Fund, in short, takes forty per
cent from its means of usefulness, while
those means have themselves been so
injured by it, that, instead of a progressive
increase of support, its strength has been
diminished by the general defection of the
literary body.

At the annual meeting of the members of
the fund on the fourteenth of March,
last year, these facts were pointed out.
They were, on that occasion, made the ground
of a resolution to the effect that, since such
expenses were unreasonable and enormous,
some change in the administration of affairs
was necessary.  The stagnant committee
(ceasing to be stagnant for a day, and
running in the wrong direction) bestirred
itself in opposition to this view of things;
and it was decided by a majority of four,
that the expenses were not unreasonable
and enormous, and that no change was
required.

It was next proposed to the same meeting,
that a change should be made by electing, as
officers and managers of the Literary Fund,
literary men by profession—people acquainted,
to a considerable extent, with the members
of their own body; and by no means needing
to be told by two householders who they
were; frequently, indeed, not needing to be
told by sufferers themselves that they were
in distress.  It was decided, however, that
the Literary Fund did not require literary
management, and was immensely better
without it.

It was then suggested that there surely
was an anomaly in the existence of a council