Publishing then and now...

I'm currently proofing James Ford Rhodes' Historical Essays. In his essay about Samuel Rawson Gardiner, Rhodes mentions a quote attributable to either Lamb or Goldsmith--the author wasn't certain and I couldn't locate the source online--which illustrates how little the publishing field has changed in the last 100 or so years:

"The books which will live are not those by which we ourselves can live."

Rhodes says of Gardiner: "Finally success came twenty-eight years after his glorious conception, twenty years after the publication of his firstvolume. He had had a hard struggle for a living with money coming in by driblets."