We have them every month in
some American periodicals, and our poor insular serials can get on
without them: "have no use for them."
It is a minor, though valuable scheme, to send poems on Christmas to
magazines about the beginning of December, because, in fact, the editors
have laid in their stock of that kind of thing earlier. Always insist on
_seeing_ an editor, instead of writing to him. There is nothing he hates
so much, unless you are very young and beautiful indeed, when, perhaps,
if you wish to fail you had better _not_ pay him a visit at the office.
Even if you do, even if you were as fair as the Golden Helen, he is not
likely to put in your compositions if, as is probable, they fall _much_
below the level of his magazine.
A good way of making yourself a dead failure is to go about accusing
successful people of plagiarising from books or articles of yours which
did not succeed, and, perhaps, were never published at all. By
encouraging this kind of vanity and spite you may entirely destroy any
small powers you once happened to possess, you will, besides, become a
person with a grievance, and, in the long run, will be shunned even by
your fellow failures.
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