The February Number.—Our number for the last month has been pronounced, everywhere, the very best of the Magazines for the month, and has thus far so largely increased our sales, that we shall be obliged to issue a very greatly increased edition of future numbers. The year 1849 seems to have opened with most unparalleled promises for magazine literature; and while our own sales have augmented on all sides, we have the gratification, in our good fortune, to feel that we are not impairing the prosperity of our neighbors. Indeed, the Philadelphia magazines, high as they have heretofore stood before the country, and widely as they have been circulated, seem just now to have made a bound in popular favor that savors of romance. Fifteen or twenty thousand copies of a monthly magazine was formerly regarded as the highest point of success to enterprising publishers, and ambitious editors, but the dawning of this brighter day promises such results as a simple matter of increase on the year’s business. We hope that our readers see, in the growing improvement of “Graham,” a disposition to impart a higher value to the book, as patronage increases, and a careful catering to taste, which shows no falling off in efforts to please, as well as to instruct our literary household. Our aim has been to furnish our readers with a work, in point of literary excellence, that is unsurpassable, and in pictorial beauty at once chaste and elegant. We could multiply, ad infinitum, second rate articles and engravings, but we feel that we are consulting both the reader’s taste and interest in adhering rigidly to the course we have adopted, and we certainly have sufficient evidence of its good policy, in the ample support we have received.
The March number may fairly challenge a rigid scrutiny, and we invite a comparison between the literary matter and that of the other magazines. The embellishments are all most beautifully executed; but the plate of “Christ Weeping Over Jerusalem” is a gem in the way of engraving, and we refer to it with a conscious pride that it can neither be successfully imitated nor excelled. Our eyes linger over it with something like exultation, as we present to our readers a plate of such exquisite beauty. In this effort even Tucker seems to have surpassed himself.
The Family Messenger.—This is one of the cheapest and best of the weekly newspapers. Its circulation is equal to its deserts, numbering now some sixty thousand readers. It has so long held its position before the newspaper world, and is so widely and well known, that we but endorse the general opinion, when we say that it is one of the best Family journals in the nation. How the enterprising publisher can furnish it at a dollar per annum is a wonder to us, and we have no doubt to its thousands of subscribers. A specimen copy is furnished to any person who may wish to see it, by application, post-paid, to the publisher.
OH HAVE I NOT BEEN TRUE TO THEE:
A SONG,
WRITTEN AND ADAPTED TO A BEAUTIFUL MELODY,
BY JOHN H. HEWITT.
Presented by G. Willig, No. 171 Chestnut St. Published by G. Willig Jr. Baltimore.