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What is it you want? (asks Warrington). Do you want a body of capitalists that shall be forced to purchase the works of all authors who may present themselves, manuscript in hand? Everybody who writes his epic, every driveller who can and can’t spell and produces his novel or his tragedy—are they all to come and find a bag of sovereigns in exchange for their worthless reams of paper? Who is to settle what is good, bad, saleable, or otherwise? Will you give the buyer leave in fine to purchase or not?... I may have my own ideas of the value of my Pegasus, and think him the most wonderful of animals, but the dealer has a right to his opinion, too, and may want a lady’s horse, or a cob for a heavy timid rider, or a sound hack for the road, and my beast won’t suit him.

One cannot have the Box Office principle more correctly stated than it is in that passage. Nearly all the great writers seem to be of the same opinion, and for the same reasons and without being such a ‘whole-hogger’ as Dr. Johnson, who roundly asserted that ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,’ it seems undoubted that the motives of money and recognition have produced the best work that has been done.