Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ON PENSIONING WRITERS To the Editor of The Idler. Deak Sir: I observe by the daily press that the English government has just issued a list in full of such authors as have been selected for the receipt of a pension. In this list I find the names of a number of widows and orphans of authors as well as the names of living authors, and this is no doubt as it should be. I have heard certain hypercritical persons object to the late project of the "Dickens stamp" upon the ground that no man is entitled to anything which he has not earned and that literary heirs are entitled to no more consideration than monetary heirs. Now, personally, I can not understand what is so objectionable about the inheritance of money. It seems to me that a man's heirs are quite as much entitled to receive the benefits of his fortune or the fruits of his industry after his death as they are during hislife; and no one has yet gone so far as to say that a man may not, with perfect propriety, bestow upon his heirs and relatives such pecuniary gifts and benefits as he may see fit during his lifetime. It seems to me that the heirs of an author inherit as great an interest in his work as the heirs of a banker or broker. But, however this may be, there is one feature about this pensioning of authors which convinces me that the British government has gone about the matter in a very wrong fashion. I find in looking over the list that pensions have been granted because of writings upon ornithology, Elizabethan literature, poetry, socialism, philosophy and so on. While I must confess that I am unfamiliar with the majority of the names which appear upon the list, I assume from the manner in which they have been selected that the British government considers their work to have been of really great value, although ...