Chronicle, after a few months was discontinued. Since that time many similar undertakings have solicited the public patronage, and have gained attention and currency for a time, but have seldom protracted their existence beyond four, six, or, at most, eight years.

The influence of these miscellaneous publications has been as remarkable and extensive as their number. This influence has been in many respects advantageous. They have excited a taste for reading in many who could never have endured it under any other form than that of amusement. They have inspired many youthful minds with a spirit of literary ambition and enterprize, which was afterwards productive of the most brilliant and successful exertions. They have recorded a number of facts, hints, observations and discussions, instructive at the time they were made, and invaluable to posterity; but which would inevitably have been lost had they been presented to the public in a more evanescent form. And, finally, they have shed, in a gradual and almost insensible manner, numberless rays of knowledge among all descriptions of persons in the community, even indirectly among millions who never enjoyed the perusal of them, and have thus greatly enlarged the public understanding, and astonishingly increased the sum of popular information.

But the great popularity, and the unexampled circulation of these periodical works, have also been attended with some disadvantages. They have made thousands of light, ostentatious and superficial scholars, and have evidently operated unfavourably to sound and deep erudition. They have led many a self-sufficient pedant to content himself with shining in borrowed plumes, and to indulge in the deceitful expectation of finding short and easy paths to real scholarship. They have dis

couraged those habits of connected reading and of patient systematic thinking, which were the glory of the learned in former ages, and enabled them to accomplish those mighty labours which fix their posterity in astonishment. Accordingly it would, perhaps, be no difficult task to show that the general literary features of the period before us remarkably correspond with this unfavourable picture, and that the general diffusion of superficial reading and scraps of knowledge may be said, pre-eminently, to characterize the last age.

Such are

But this is not the whole of the evil. the effects which must result from the general circulation of works of this nature, supposing them to be, on the whole, well conducted. Many of them, however, are by no means entitled to this character. They have often given prompt and willing currency to erroneous opinions in morals and religion. They are too frequently found receptacles of such filth, obscenity and impiety, as are fit for the perusal of none but the prostitute, the thief, and the murderer. It is scarcely necessary to add that the effect of such publications on the manners, principles and happiness of society, must be in a high degree pestiferous; and that this is one among the numerous instànces in modern times, in which literature, perverted and abused under plausible forms, has been found insidiously to undermine the morals and welfare of man.

Another item in the literary history of the age falls, perhaps, more properly within the design of this chapter than any other part of the present sketch. The mode of addressing the public by short periodical Essays, though not wholly peculiar to the eighteenth century, was yet so much extended, and had such a powerful influence in this period, as to entitle it to be ranked among the remarkable circumstances of the age. "To teach

the minuter decencies and inferior duties; to regulate the practice of daily conversation; to correct those depravities which are rather ridiculous than criminal, and remove those grievances which, if they produce no lasting calamities, impress hourly vexation, was first attempted by CASA, in his book of Manners, and by CASTIGLIONE, in his Courtier, two books yet celebrated in Italy for purity and elegance; and which, if they are now less read, are neglected, only, because they have effected that reformation which their authors intended, and their precepts are no longer wanted. Their usefulness to the age in which they were written is sufficiently attested by the translations which almost all the nations of Europe were in haste to obtain. This species of instruction was continued, and, perhaps, advanced by the French, among whom LA BRUYERE'S Manners of the Age, though, as BoiLEAU remarked, it is written without connection, certainly deserves great praise for liveliness of description, and justness of observation.”d

The first series of essays devoted to common life in Great-Britain was the Tatler; the publication of which began in 1709, by Sir RICHARD STEELE, assisted by ADDISON, TICKEL, and others. It appeared three times a-week. To the Tatler, in about three months succeeded the Spectator; a series of essays of the same kind, but written with less levity, upon a more regular plan, and published daily. "The Tatler and Spectator," says Dr. JOHNSON," adjusted, like CASA, the unsettled practice of daily intercourse by propriety and politeness; and, like LA BRUYERE, exhibited the characters and manners of the age. But to say

6 CASA and CASTIGLIONE were Italian writers, who flourished in the sixteenth century.

C LA BRUYERE wrote towards the close of the seventeenth century. d JOHNSON's Life of ADDISON.

that they united the plans of two or three eminent writers, is to give them but a small part of their due praise. They superadded literature and criticism, and sometimes towered far above their predecessors, and taught, with great justness of argument, and dignity of language, the most important duties and sublime truths. All these topics were happily varied with elegant fictions and refined allegories, and illuminated with different changes of style and felicities of invention. It is said by ADDISON, in a subsequent work, that they had a perceptible influence upon the conversation of that time, and taught the frolic and the gay to unite merriment with decency; an effect which they can never wholly lose while they continue to be among the first books, by which both sexes are initiated in the elegances of knowledge.

The Spectator had not been supported more than eighteen months when it was discontinued. The year after, viz. in 1713, the Guardian was undertaken by the same Editor, .assisted by the gentlemen before mentioned, as well as by Mr. POPE, Dr. BERKLEY, and others, and continued a little more than six months, with nearly the same respectability and success which had attended its predecessor. It was natural for the excellence and the reputation of those papers to produce many imitations. Accordingly, for a number of years afterwards, periodical papers were continually announced, and pursued for a little while, under different names, and upon various plans; but they were generally feeble when compared with the noble models which had gone before them, and seldom commanded the public attention for any length of time. Among these might be enumerated the Free-Thinker, the Humourist,

Life of ADDISON.

the Observer, and a vast multitude of others that rose into view, lived their day, and sunk into forgetfulness. Cato's Letters, and the Craftsman, were executed with greater ability, and were also better received, being more devoted to political discussion, than the papers which had gone before them. In 1750 the Rambler appeared, and for the first time presented a rival to the enchanting productions of ADDISON and his contemporaries. In this work Dr. JOHNSON, the principal writer, carried the composition of moral essays, and instructive narrations, with respect to purity and dignity of sentiment, acuteness of observation, and vigour of style, to a higher degree of perfection than they had ever before reached. Next followed the Idler, also by Dr. JOHNSON, but less laboured, and more light and superficial in its character than the Rambler. These were succeeded by the Adventurer, the World, the Connoisseur, the Mirror, the Looker-On, the Lounger, the Observer, and a number of others which deserve respectful mention, which contain many papers of high merit, and will long be read with pleasure. The numerous unsuccessful attempts which have been made, within a few years past, to revive this mode of writing, seem to indicate that it is nearly exhausted; and that to renew and carry it on requires more diligence, ability and leisure, than commonly fall to the lot of those who adventure in such a field.

From the foregoing details, it appears that the eighteenth century may be emphatically called the age of periodical publications. In the number of these it so far transcends all preceding times, as to forbid comparison; and their amusing, popular form constitutes a peculiarity in the literary history of the period under consideration, equally signal. They form the principal means of diffus