THE NORTH DEVON MAGAZINE; CONTAINING The Cave and Lundy Review. VOL. II. BARNSTAPLE: PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY W. SEARLE, BOUTPORT-STREET. Extract of a Letter from a Friend in London to the Editor. .I think your bantling thrives-you seem to get on very well. I, for one, care little for your generalizing your title;-I have just recollection enough of your neighbourhood to feel interested, and not to be quite ignorant of your points of local allusion; and as to a magazine in the abstract, see how little London can do, and don't despair.—I like the idea of local history and a print; and as you don't care about the profit, I should think your sale would warrant it. Extract of a Letter from a Friend in the County of MY DEAR FEllow, I HAVE been long in your debt, and am somewhat ashamed to write after six months' silence. I have never even acknowledged the receipt of your letter in January, accompanying the first No. of the Cave; but although I have never written to you, I have followed your hint, and our village bookseller has duly procured the following numbers from your correspondent in London-nay more, your old acquaintance * *, of Maudlin, has * unbent, and ordered a copy; but what comfort can you hope for from him? (your theological efforts have been bounded by a hymn,) or from me? while you totally decline politics. Besides, don't I know the Land of Fogs as well as you do? an't we Arcades ambo? that is, haven't I sojourned in VOL. II. B Boeotia? depend upon't there are people in your little world who would pine to see any thing of the kind prosper. They fear, and they hate the thing; those who could be amused will not be so. Those who like you, if they suspect your editorship, will shun the subject; those who dislike you will steal a look at a borrowed number, and abuse you. You always say I am visionary, a political reveur, a pearl-to-swinecasting spendthrift; but now I retort. Go back to your metaphysics, your quietism, your optimism, your abuse of Hume, or any other folly you ever dreamt of; but don't throw away time, and printer's ink, and good paper (by the bye your last numbers are not good paper) upon Barnstaple, the place will never support a Periodical of any description. Reader, dost thou remember the fable of the country fellow and the satyr? NORTH DEVON JOURNAL, No. 1, 2, and 3. Bravo! another attempt, at any rate, well! if wishing were ensuring, the North Devon Journal would have to thank us for its success. We have expressed our opinion against a newspaper in Barnstaple; but what then? we are not like some of our soi disant friends, who, having expressed an opinion, loose their temper if they are mistaken, and would ruin their neighbour with their own hands, rather than have his schemes prosper, in spite of their prophecies. Good luck to the Journal say we, and we've a great mind to send them an advertisement ourselves. We observe a shocking instance of death from arsenic, in an honest and industrious farmer's family, recorded in one of the numbers; but we hope it is only a half crown article; if it be founded in fact, we really never heard of any thing so shocking, and we seriously think that some member of the House of Commons would do well to bring the subject of the sale and employment of arsenic before the House. Here is the eldest son of a family just at an age to be the support of his father's declining strength, and the breadwinner, to use an emphatic Scottish phrase, for the younger part of the family, snatched from among living men, in the most appalling way conceivable; the hand of death upon him before a feeling of danger had alarmed him: surely ONE such occurrence would dearly purchase the destruction of all the rats in England. How slight an evil in this poor farmer's eye would the murrain, or mildew have been! Whether near us or at a distance, we never can read these dismal tales as Dutchmen |