gether:

'WHEN England luxuriated in the novels of RICHARDSON, in eight
volumes, it drove in coaches and four, at the rate of five miles
an hour. A journey was then esteemed a family calamity; and people
abided all the year round in their cedar parlors, thankful to be
diverted by the arrival of the _Spectator_, or a few pages of the
_Pilgrim's Progress_, or a new sermon. To their incidental lives,
a book was an event. Those were the days worth writing for! The
fate of RICHARDSON'S heroines was made a national affair; and
people interceded with him by letter to 'spare Clarissa,' as they
would not now intercede with her Majesty to spare a new EFFIE
DEANS. The successive volumes of _Pope's Iliad_ were looked for
with what is called 'breathless' interest, while such political
sheets as the _Drapier's Letters_, or _Junius_, set the whole
kingdom in an uproar. And now, if POPE, or SWIFT, or FIELDING, or
JOHNSON, or STERNE, were to rise from the grave, MS. in hand, the
most adventurous publisher would pass a sleepless night before he
undertook the risk of paper and print; would advise a small
edition, and exact a sum down in ready money, to be laid out in
puffs and advertisements! 'Even then, though we may get rid of a
few copies to the circulating libraries,' he would observe, 'do
not expect, Sir, to obtain readers. A few old maids in the county
towns, and a few gouty old gentlemen at the clubs, are the only
persons of the present day who ever open a book!' And who can
wonder? _Who_ has leisure to read? _Who_ cares to sit down and
spell out accounts of travels which he can make at less cost than
the cost of the narrative? _Who_ wants to peruse fictitious
adventures, when rail-roads and steam-boats woo him to adventures
of his own? People are busy ballooning or driving; shooting like
stars along rail-roads, or migrating like swallows or wild-geese.'

In allusion to the illustrated newspapers, now vieing with each other in
enterprise and expense, in the British metropolis, the writer says: 'The
pictorial printing press is now your only wear! Every thing is
communicated by delineation. We are not _told_ but _shown_ how the world
is wagging. Views of the Holy Land are superseding even the Holy
Scriptures, and a pictorial BLACKSTONE is teaching the ideas of sucking
lawyers how to shoot. Libels are veiled in carricat