cious, when did it yield a richer harvest, than when bestowed on the sickly poet himself?

Bulwer, in his essay on "The Efficacy of Praise," in "Caxtoniana" observes that every actor knows how a cold house chills him, and how necessary to the full sustainment of a great part is the thunder of applause. He states that the elder Kean, when he was performing in some theater in this country, came to the manager when the play was half over and said: "I can't go on the stage again, sir, if the pit keeps its hands in its pockets. Such an audience would extinguish Etna." Upon this the manager told the audience that Mr. Kean, not being accustomed to the severe intelligence of American citizens, mistook their silent attention for courteous disappointment, and that if they did not applaud Mr. Kean as he was accustomed to be applauded, they could not see Mr. Kean act as he was accustomed to act. Of course the audience took the hint; and as their fervor rose, so rose the genius of the actor, and their applause contributed to the triumphs it rewarded.

Adam Clarke tells us that when a boy he was regarded as exceedingly dull of intellect. One day his father said to a teacher who had called at his house: "That boy is very slow at learning; I fear you will not be able to do much with him." "My heart sank," says Dr. Clarke. "I would have given the world to have been as some of the boys around me. The man spoke with kindness, gave me some directions, and laying his hand upon my head, observed: "This lad will make a good scholar yet.' I felt his kindness; it raised my spirit; the possibility of being able to learn was in this moment, and for the first time, impressed upon my mind; a ray of hope sprang up within me; in that hope I lived and labored; it seemed to create power; my lessons

were all committed to memory with ease, and I could have doubled the effort had it been required." From that moment Adam never looked back, and never loitered. The boy who had shown so little love for his books became passionately fond of them; he bounded over the fields of learning with the speed of a race-horse, and never abated his activity till the day of his death.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE.

MR.

R. LECKY, in his European Morals, calls attention 66 to a momentous intellectual revolution " which is taking place in England, and, he might have added, in this country. He points out that the work of instructing the public, which used to belong to book-makers, has been almost wholly handed over to the journalists who give us the results of their thinking in the daily and weekly press. Even touching abstruse subjects, such as philosophical and ethical theories, he maintains that the weekly English papers exercise a greater influence than any other productions of the day in "forming the ways of thinking of ordinary educated Englishmen." These statements may startle the thoughtful reader, and strike him, at first, as overcharged; but who that considers the number, variety, and ever-increasing ability of these periodicals, can doubt it? The public journal, at once the echo and the prompter of the public mind, is constantly enlarging its power and widening its scope. As a means of swaying the minds of men, which is the essence of power; as an instrument for elevating society, which is the object of goodness; in the directness, strength, and persistence of its influence, it has no equal among all the agencies of human utterance. Not only is it becoming the common people's encyclopædia,—its school, lyceum, and college,- but the educated classes are looking to it more and more as their oracle. Is this a fact to be deprecated,

or shall we rejoice at a revolution which it is evidently not in our power to stop?

There is a class of persons who talk in a very melancholy strain about the "light literature" with which they say we are deluged in these days. Some of them have even gone so far as to doubt whether newspapers are not, in one way, nuisances, and whether the habit of reading them. daily at all hours is not a kind of intellectual dram-drinking, ultimately very injurious to intellectual digestion. These persons hardly know which to regard as the more deplorable, that the American people should read so many newspapers and magazines, or that scholars should waste so much of their time in contributing to these ephemeral publications. Under their baleful influence we are losing, it is feared, all terseness, elegance, and idiomatic purity of style, and all capacity for serious thought. Skimming the surface of things, acquiring no solid, thorough information, we shall be speedily, in Dr. Johnson's phrase, like the inhabitants of a besieged town.-we shall have "a mouthful of every kind of knowledge, and a bellyful of none." But what do these croakers mean by light literature? Is not the word purely relative? May not reading which is light as chaff to one man be as weighty as grain to another? The question with the great majority of men is not whether they shall read newspapers and magazines, or solid, thoughtful books, but whether they shall read the former or nothing. Henry of Navarre longed for the time when every Frenchman should have a hen in his pot. That he deemed a better sign of a people's prosperity than occasional big feasts in the castles of the great. The newspapers and magazines bring literature into every home, just as an aqueduct and pipe bring the water of Lake Michigan into the homes of the citizens

of Chicago. It is quite true that the water tastes occasionally of iron, and wears a rusty stain,- quite true that a purer draught may be found at some lake in the shadow of the hills; but the water is flowing in every house, which is the great desideratum; and, moreover, it is often as pure in the basin of the citizen as beneath the trembling sedges which the wild duck loves.

It was with the greatest reluctance, and only because they had been republished in America, and thence smuggled into England, that Macaulay consented to the republication of his "ephemeral" essays in book-form by the Longmans; yet upward of a hundred and twenty thousand copies had been sold five or six years ago, by a single publisher, in Great Britain alone. Can any one doubt that the reading world has been as much profited by his contributions to the Edinburgh Review as by his more ambitious history?

The truth is, the "light reading" so much stigmatized is a necessary prerequisite to a taste for something more substantial. As a horse cannot live upon oats without hay, so the popular mind cannot digest its nutriment if it is too concentrated. There must be bulk as well as nutriment. Destroy our periodicals, and who believes that Bacon and Milton would have one reader a century hence where they now have a hundred? To thousands and tens of thousands the newspaper is an academy, in which they are prepared to profit by the instruction they will afterward get in the university of which Bacon, Newton, Locke, Mill, all the world's great thinkers,- are professors.

We deny, however, the propriety of the term “light” when applied in so sweeping a manner to the newspaper literature of the day. Is thought more weighty because