tching terrier, says my informant,
ever pounces upon his Norwegian with half the gusto with which such an
official snubs such an intruder. A health, I say, to the fury of this
sort of Iconoclasts!

Our friend's unusual caution has saved you the excitement of the scene I
have imagined, but it puts me to the necessity of substituting a hurried
description for the ocular satisfaction I had proposed to send you. Who
would have supposed, thirty years since, that one Maga would not be
enough for the world, and that New York would be the seat of its
flourishing double! Yet it is now twelve years since its twin started up
on this side the water, and has been battening and fattening on the
rewards of successful illegitimacy. Nay--for a portion of that period,
Maga has been "three gentlemen at once." The very pirates were pirated,
and undersold; and two reprints of Maga, both professing to be
fac-similes, were at one time supported in America, in addition to
countless republications of particular articles; such, for instance, as
the tales of "Ten Thousand a-Year," and "Caleb Stukeley"! I think I hear
you exclaim at such wholesale grand-larceny; but though not inclined to
take up the cudgels for Reprint and Co., it is but justice to tell you
what they would say in self-defence. The truth is, they would not have
known what you meant, had you told them, when their republication was
established, that there was any question as to the ethics of such a
business. The laws not only permitted, but even encouraged the
enterprise; and they do so still. The most respectable booksellers were
engaged in a similar seizure of every new novel of Bulwer's, and every
new work whatever, that had stood the experiment of success in England.
Original copies of the Magazine were rarely imported, as the importer's
charges and duties nearly doubled the first cost of each number; and
besides, it was already virtually republished, its leading articles
being constantly appropriated, in different ways, by editors of literary
periodicals, and often by the daily newspapers. Then, it must be
remembered, that England was nearly twice as far from America before the
era of steamers; and that the matter of copyright was only just
beginning to excite the attention of Parliament. As yet Lord Mahon had
not stirred up the ministry to move foreign countries to international
justice, and England was not, as now, prepared to invest their authors
with all the rights she conc