f not also his genius and
ambition--to supply, the book is in all probability pretty safe. In the
forms and varieties of this periodical publication we have seen some
interesting changes. As might have been expected, the tendency has been
for the intervals of publication to be shortened--for the quarterly to
give way as the fashionable form to the monthly, the monthly to the
weekly, the weekly to the daily. Many years ago Macaulay, in a mild
protest against having his articles altered by Macvey Napier, suggested
in effect that the bloom might be left on poor things destined to be
read only for a month or so. The duration of an article now may be
measured rather by hours than by weeks. Still many of these changes are
more apparent than real; and just as the institution of the graver
monthly reviews twenty years ago simply reintroduced the quarterly
article in a scarcely altered form after it had been pushed out of
favour by the slighter magazine, so other introductions have been in
fact reintroductions.

One point, however, of real importance in literary history remains to be
noticed, and that is the conflict between signed and anonymous writing.
Partly from the causes above enumerated as having conduced to the
keeping of journalism in a condition of discredit and danger, partly
owing to national idiosyncrasies, the habit of anonymous writing was
almost universal in the English press at the beginning of the century.
It may have been perfectly well known that such and such an article in
the _Quarterly_ was by Southey or Croker, such another in the
_Edinburgh_ by Sydney Smith or Macaulay, but the knowledge was, so to
speak, unofficial. The question of the identity of "Zeta" in _Blackwood_
cost a man's life; and the system resulted (in daily papers especially)
in so much editorial inter-mixture and refashioning, that sometimes it
would really have been impossible to assign a single and authentic
paternity. Even about the editorship of the great periodicals a sort of
coquetry of veiling was preserved, and editors' names, though in most
cases perfectly well known, seldom or never appeared.

It is difficult to say exactly when or how this system began to be
infringed. But there is no doubt that the prominence given in _Household
Words_ to the name and personality of Dickens, who was not unfriendly to
self-advertisement, had a good deal to do with it; and when, a little
later, the cheap shilling magazines appeared, writing wit