century, which used to be sold in big volumes? On the contrary, it is decidedly better. There is more of worth, more of intellect, more of genius, more even of accuracy and industry in many of the little sheets than there used to be, or even still is, in many of the big volumes. For who are the servants and functionaries of cheap literature? Are they a class apart-Grub-street hacks-Pariahs of letters-book-cobblers, dismissed by respectable masters on account of pure incompetence? Not they. They are literary men indiscriminately; the whole literary caste lend this cause their willing services. The very men that are at the top of the profession, and that write the best books, are found in the ranks of the contributors to cheap periodicals. Go into the office of Punch, and you will there find Jerrold and Thackeray; take up the newest twopenny sheet, and it bears the name of Dickens. And were the proprietors of the most noted of the popular periodicals to publish lists of their contributors, it would be found also that men of the highest reputation in the world of science make use of this channel of communication with the public. Nor is it the left hand only that they lend for such service. A man of original views, or of fine and peculiar faculty, will of course prefer, when it is possible, to pursue a career of authorship on his own responsibility and in his own name; but the common state of the case is, that the so-called "cheap" literature, really cheap as it is to the public, affords a better remuneration to all connected with it professionally than the dear literature it has in so far superseded. The true objection, therefore, lies not against this particular form of modern literature so much as against the tendencies of modern literature universally.

We do not suppose that the Messrs. Chambers hold, for their part, any exaggerated notions of the functions of that system of cheap literature which they have done so much to establish and to perfect. And with regard, at least, to their own exertions in this field, their claim is modest enough. They do not pretend to have invented cheap literature, but only to have given cheap literature a wholesome and beneficial direction. They have sometimes, indeed, been accused of not taking so high a social flight as

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they might have taken, and of insisting too much on the cultivation of the merely worldly, utilitarian, or prudential qualities of human nature. We cannot say that we sympathise with this complaint. Without holding in any undue estimation that kind of moral teaching which appeals to worldly success as a motive and a standard (of which the prosaic literature of the godless Chinese, with its perpetual stories of poor boys who, by dint of honesty and prudence, came in time to be great Mandarins, is perhaps the most flagrant and repulsive example), we can yet see in the present state of our own country in particular, most honourable place and room for many more literary missionaries of the economic and the prudential than we are likely to have. And though we firmly believe that no soul is noble that is not alive to those higher thoughts and generalities involved in the words God, Duty, the Infinite, the Unseen, the Eternal, the Supernatural; and that, if these generalities were even left in abeyance, all human society, even in its homeliest interests, would grow rotten and decay; yet we have great faith also in the essential nobility of that mode of viewing things, which, detaining the contemplation tightly down upon the domestic, the neighbourly, and the terrestrial, asserts that in the maxim, that " a man should live within his income," there is expressed a very considerable portion of all subsolar morality. The Messrs. Chambers have certainly addressed themselves largely to this side of things; for which, we think, they deserve thanks rather than blame. But they have by no means confined themselves to it. Science, even in its deeper and more abstract branches, has always been fully represented in their publications; the Journal, for instance, often taking the lead in communicating to the public the results of recent scientific inquiries. To the poetic and the graceful they have not been indifferent, while studying the solid; nor have even their illustrations of the economic been destitute of the proper amount of reference to higher views of man and his destiny. Their principle, it is true, has always been to avoid every approach to sectarianism, whether in religion or politics. To deviate from that rule, so distinctly announced in the programme of the Journal, would have been to