We see no reason why, when so much is written at the commencement of a New Year upon the interests of politics, commerce, why when there are so many sermons reviewing the spiritual state of believers from the pulpit, so many harangues and prophecies of the coming Administration from Editors, and so many well-braced statistical money articles from Wall-street a word should not be said in the same fashion and with equal zeal on the prospects of Literature. It is not because the latter is of less consequence, that it should be so neglected; the spiritual and eternal are at least worth as much as the bodily and fugitive. It is of quite as much importance to a man that he preserve his self-respect by one new and generous thought per diem, as to notice the fractional advance of cotton or exchange. The opening of a new department of literature by native authors may be as well worth talking about as the acquisition of Texas-with this little difference in the subject matter of the two, that while one is an enlargment of the freedom of the mind, the other is a question of the slavery of the body. There are sumptuous East India products of the Imagination, rare and costly as any thing to be obtained from within the secret walls of China. Shall there be great celebration and triumph over the new Treaty, with not a thought of the better alliances by which the man may bind himself in a league longer than life, and the dim Chinese history itself, to the Spiritual?

There are various reasons why we hear less of literature than of the markets and the tariff and they are not all equally dishonorable. The business of literature, though it is incomplete without the interest the world takes in the matter, is carried on by the true student and author in quiet. He lives at home among his family, his friends, his books, oftener, perhaps less happily, alone with himself. He can do nothing without retirement. He must be jealous of his thoughts and go from stillness to society not from society to stillness. The true author is a proud, humble man, who does not bray his affairs constantly before the world. While the quack sends his noisy nostrums through the street with trumpet

and placard at all hours, he is the invisible angel who appears only seldom, but then in great beauty, at the life-giving sacred Bethesda. We must be content, then, if we do not find every Newspaper criticism or Magazine article full of life and truth-if printed pages are constantly over-run with falsehood and foolery.

Another cause keeps the "children of light" in the back-ground. They are commonly poor and with no intrigue or cunning to supply the defects. They have not always command of the external resources by which their intellect must be made available to the public. They are low in the esteem of booksellers, who prefer gilded mediocrity.

"Let but a Lord once own the happy lines, How the wit brightens and the sense refines."

ones.

There are dollar lords as well as patented If there is one thing that a man of honor avoids more than another it is debt. And the good author being a man of the truest honor, will not sell himself to printers and booksellers.

Setting aside as nought the great brood of puffers and pretenders who write today what to-morrow destroys; who make reputations without authors, and constantly employ themselves in the child's game of putting up a pith figure on one end, which its leaden weight soon brings to the other-the world certainly hears very little of Literature.

It is quite worth while that this matter should be plainly stated, if only to give heart and confidence to the few timid, genuine writers, who continue, with reluctance and distrust, to employ their pens-especially in the department of periodical literature-lest they be driven altogether from the field. The world should know them and honor them, or the world will be the worse for it. Conscientiously pursued, there is no nobler labor than that of the man of letters who devotes his time and talents to the improvement of society through the press. He sacrifices, frequently, many of the higher honors of literature to his benevolence. He writes continually, hour after hour, pouring out his fresh perceptions, his most eager sentiments, to fur

nish thousands of readers with their daily mental entertainment, by which little pains of body are alleviated, petty bickerings and family quarrels overpowered, and an inch or two of elevation given to common men to make them at all endurable. All this is done with little fee or reward and is immediately buried, given away, generously, to yesterday's newspaper and the last month's magazine. There should be some vindication, some distinct recognition of the position of the periodical writer. He should be so established in public esteem as to say, without diffidence or apology, when called upon for his profession-that he writes "for the press, content with this reputation, without seeking the incidental worldly aids and advantages of being an Editor beside. There will soon be no contributors, but all editors-we hope not, for the sake of the occasional baskets of grapes and strawberries, and the personal attention of puff-seeking tradesmen in MSS. books and groceries. We have no exaggerated idea of the periodical writer; but where he is true and sincere, we honor him as a noble and peculiar specimen of the literary character. We are quite of the opinion of the political valet in the Vicar of Wakefield, who read all the papers, including "the seventeen magazines and the two reviews: "Though they hate each other, I love them all." Consider, of what a good magazine is capable, or a weekly review, or a newspaper. We read a passage of it in the morning, for instance, while the cloth is laid for breakfast, or in some interval that would probably be otherwise employed in impatience, and it gives tone to the mind all the day. It sets us above the low and frivolous, and if the passage is pleasantly stated, as it ought to be, imparts a relish to our words and thoughts. There is a great deal in having the soul wound up for the day-as poor Lord Ogleby says of his body and his cordials, in the play. We cannot well do a mean action with the melody of Milton or of Keats ringing in our ears; or a foolish one after a satirical rhyme or two of Hudibras or Pope; or a malevolent one after a glimpse of the Man of Feeling; or an indifferent one, stung by the earnestness of Carlyle; or a despondent one, magnetized by the humanity of Shakspeare, the all in all of the rest. These are the great reservoirs from which the miscellaneous writer, like the water-carrier of the East, draws refreshment and bears it to the

thirsty multitude of the city, who having neither time nor training to ascend to the fountain would otherwise perish. Honor, then, to the race, though they bear no higher title than the Water Carriers of Literature; but they may be original and more-they may be Jeffreys, Macaulays, Sydney Smiths, Southeys, Coleridges, Hazlitts, Charles Lambs, Leigh Hunts, Douglas Jerrolds, Thomas Hoods, Harriet Martineaus, Elizabeth B. Barrets; or in America they may write Clios, the Idle Man, Sketch Books, Croakers, Motley Books, Analysts, Pencillings by the Way, Harry Francos, John Waters, Twice Told Tales, &c.

Altogether, this subject is worthy of a much more extended consideration than it has yet received-provided only, that the right men and the right things get the honor.

What is 1845 to do for us in literature? It has at least good opportunities of its own. It is a fresh and youthful yearwith the excitement and noise of party politics, with all the hideous brood of liars, gamblers, false toned declaimers and other unwholesome insects swept entirely out of the atmosphere. The country has rest. Its vexatious questions of public affairs have been shaken and worried into repose. There is a new year opening of the Christian Era;-let it be so indeed, and like Boniface's ale, savor of the Anno Domini !

In Literature itself, things appear, too, to have come to something like a crisis. The old is worn out, the reign of humbug is extinct. Heaven defend us from any returning claimants to that dynasty. Old literary hacks, like the coach hacks of London, according to John Randolph, smell villainously of dead bodies. Reputations have grown, withered and died, and the field of letters, like the vegetation of the prairies, is enriched by the loam of countless fallen authors. "Sweet are the uses of adversity." The bad prepare a reception for the good. It is surely some compensation for filth and nastiness when we see their rank juices distilling in the green leaf and snowy whiteness of the rose or the camelia. the year '45 reap its triumphs. Like its predecessor, one hundred years ago, let it be a year of Rebellion, of protest against all shabbiness and unworthiness in literature-fighting not for Pretenders, but against them.

So may

We would fain hope that the literary system which has been distinguished by

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the epithet "cheap and nasty," is pretty much at an end, though we cannot quite count upon its extinction till it receives the coup de grace of the International Copyright Law," which will put an end, we hold, to its nastiness, without injury to its cheapness. This celebrated system should not be allowed to pass away into oblivion without its historian. There is many a useful lesson to be gathered from it. Lockhart once commenced a caustic review of the Ettrick Shepherd in Frazer's Magazine with the pun, "This Hogg has made a sty of English Literature"-a bon mot which might serve as a motto for the undertaking. If we would see the small literary vices rankling and festering without restraint, we may see them there. Nothing has been too mean or poor-spirited for that system to produce. It was pregnant in nauseous puffs, unworthy of a mountebank, petty inuendos, and all the corruptions of false literature from an oblique, unworthy insinuation to a gross libel. Native authors were neglected, despised, insulted; foreign authors were mutilated, pillaged and insulted, besides. Ingratitude was among the least of the current vices. Misrepresentation and falsehood were its companions. The good writers were not only taken possession of, their works altered and thrown upon the public without their just honor and responsibility, but they were made the cover for the circulation of the worst licentiousness. The whole was well characterized by an author who suffered from its injustice, but who will triumph when it will be all forgotten, as "the crimson and yellow literature." These were the colors under which it sailed-under which this vile craft went forth from the booksellers' counters-the hues of blood and the plague. It threatened, indeed, to be a moral pestilence, and was attracting the notice of the Grand Jury, lecturers and the pulpit (the Rev. Erskine Mason, of Bleecker street, made it the subject of two sermons) when it was arrested by the natural laws of trade. The cupidity of publishers had overstocked the market, and the traffic fell. Let it perish.

We are not disposed to deny that there were good books circulated through the same agencies, but the evil was not the less certain. If any good at all was sown, its fruits are to be reaped in a different manner. Doubtless a taste for reading was diffused by the cheapness of books, and books will continue to be

published at low prices; but the line will in future be more strongly drawn between honesty and fraud in publishing. Incidentally with this decline of the cheap system from over-production, one of the chief incentives of the system-the rapid publication in England of some of the most popular books of modern times, has ceased with the exhaustion of the first labors of Dickens, Lover, and the last of the Bulwer novels. Were a new race of publishers now disposed to do their worst, it is scarcely possible that they could regain their old ascendency for mischief-making with the press and the public. They cannot again get into vogue and currency. The American author is, therefore, in a measure free from a prejudicial foreign competitionnot prejudicial in itself, but in its adjuncts. The due healthy circulation of the works of Dickens and others in course of trade, would have been advantageous, strengthening and enlarging the resources of publishers, stimulating native writers, uniting the two countries by the strongest bonds, and diffusing a taste for sound literature over a widely spread reading public.

The corruption of this bad system was felt in a quarter where it was unexpected, and has not, so far as we are aware of, been hitherto traced,-in the deterioration of American literature itself. This does not, at first sight, seem quite obvious. Let us look at it in one phase. A besetting sin of our literature is the spirit of puffery which runs through it and around it. In spite of the fact, that most of the authors of the country belong to the range of minor literature; that the poets rarely exercise themselves on subjects embracing any great range of invention, but write short poems, occasional verses; and that the genius of many of the best prose writers is summed up in the character of clever essayists; that we have some good travellers, but no Humboldts; some preachers, but few divines of the great English school from Jeremy Taylor or, earlier down, to Robert Hall;-without any regard for the reality, nearly every epithet of panegyric has been wasted on American authors. There is scarcely a word left for a new Milton, a Bacon, or Shakspeare, should such be destined to arise in the Western hemisphere. sudden cacoethes laudandi seemed to have seized the press and thrown it into paroxysms of admiration from which it has, as yet hardly recovered. What Carlyle

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