We said in our advertisement, that prospectuses were merely humbug, and in that faith will we die. Take up the prospectus of any periodical work, great or small, and, after comparing its performances with its promises, ask yourself honestly, if we have not spoken the truth. Begin with the bulky Encyclopædia, with its hundred parts, and travel down to the dirtiest two-penny which serves to light your pipe, through all the realms, or, if it so please you, reams of magazines, reviews, gazettes, council of ten, album, athenæum, museum, et omne quod exit in hum. There, for instance, to begin with the beginning, honest Abraham Rees's Cyclopædia, which, at starting, confessed, what every body knew would be the case, that an alphabetical Cyclopædia of Arts, Sciences, History, Geography, Theology, and omnia scibilia, must of necessity be a heterogeneous hotch-potch, as it is, without order, arrangement, sense, or meaning; but, at the time of confession, promised in his prospectus, to make all clear and clean by an index, which promise, the worthy and venerable editor forgot to perform, thereby rendering his worshipful work a mess, like the old miser's soup in Old Mortality, where, after fishing for half an-hour, you might have the good luck to fasten on a lump of something solid, lurking in the vast profundity of trash floating about it.

In like manner, Frank Jeffery, when he first started his concern in the North countrie, vowed, in his prospectus, that he would make his Review a perfect

VOL. I.

picture of all the extant literature of the kingdom. How has Francis, the little, redeemed his pledge? Why, by bringing out every quarter of a year a bundle of heavy essays, principally on politics, without at all minding what the reading and writing public are operating on; or else a handful of puffs on the volumes vented by Archibald Constable and Co., utterly regardless of the books imprinted by their brethren of the bookvending generation.

But we should fill our magazine chuckfull on this one subject, were we to proceed in this enumeration of the utter humbuggism of prospectuses, particularly of the Magazine people. They all promise vast erudition, agreeable information, unquestioned originality, decided impartiality; in place of all which, in nine cases out of ten, they display intense ignorance, gross stupidity, unlimited pillaging, and a fixed determination to vilify their personal enemies, and bedaub with puffery their personal friends. They are all to be conducted by men of eminent character, both in a literary and moral point of view, and, no matter how they may start, you may be pretty certain that, before the end of six months, they fall into the hands of some obtuse plebeian, who cannot write three lines, and who has taken up that trade out of confessed inability to conduct any other. Now we, on the contrary, have promised nothing—absolutely nothing-therefore,reader, whether thou beest gentle or ungentle, you cannot accuse us of unduly raising your

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