It is, in mercantile phrase, a book of original entry,
showing us the transactions of the time in the light in which they were
regarded by the parties engaged in them, and reflecting the state of
public sentiment on innumerable topics,--moral, religious, political,
philosophic, military, and scientific. Its mistakes of fact or
induction are honest and palpable ones, easily corrected by
contemporaneous data or subsequent discoveries, and not often posted
into the ledger of history without detection. The learned and patient
labors of the savant or the scholar are not expected of the pamphleteer
or the periodical writer of the last century, or of the present; he
does but blaze the pathway of the pains-taking engineer who is to
follow him, happy enough, if he succeed in satisfying immediate and
daily demands, and in capturing the kind of game spoken of by Mr. Pope
in that part of his manual where he instructs us to
"shoot folly as it flies,
And catch the manners living as they rise."
Among us, however, the magazine-writer, as he existed in the last
century, has left few, if any, representatives. He is fading
silently away into a forgotten antiquity; his works are not
on the publishers' counters,--they linger only among the dust and
cobwebs of old libraries, listlessly thumbed by the exploring reader or
occasionally consulted by the curious antiquary.
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