subject.

This country is now inundated with trashes mixed of few good works: and
the people are so much enticed to buy the yet moist works from the press,
for which the standards of the libraries are neglected. On entering a
store, the first question, which a customer asks now of a bookseller, it
is for pamphlets just come out of the press. 'We heard,' they say, 'that
Johnson, Addison, Pope, and thousand others we have not read, are fine and
clever writers: but our days are going ahead; and were we reading the old
books, we would be left behind this rolling railroad.' Thus, the reading
time, which should be spent with classical works, and of taste, it is
generally given to trifling books. I saw persons reading poor descriptions
of sceneries from France or Italy, while they were running by steam,
through the most beautiful sceneries of America--american sceneries which
they had never seen before! Such kind of readers, I am inclined to
believe, read more for fashion, than for the purpose of instruction. Have
we no standard works to peruse, even such trifling things would be better
than nothing, since I have not read the most trifling book, without
deriving some instruction from it. But, if we can improve our taste by
looking at, and studying the pictures of Guido, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert
Durer, Hans Holbein, or Hogarth; why will we spend our precious time in
looking at poor pictures, or reading through very little sense?

The law of the International Copy-right, is a law of this century. Before
the colonization of America, every nation having her language, quite
different from the others, writers wanted no other protection but the
Copy-right of their own country. It is not so now between England, and the
United States. The two nations have the same language; and the worthy
writers, now benefiting the two nations with their productions, must be
protected by unanimous consent of the two nations. It is with a sorrowful
mind we are now forced to witness the american government, a government
from which we expect to derive more justice than from any other government
in the world, sustaining, and countenancing such a piratical transaction.
England, without boasting any republican law, is more republican than we,
upon this point of justice. Had the people of America granted the just
request of the british authors, trusted long ago into the hands of Mr.
Henry Clay, at this very time, as men of genius are not wanted in America,