In less than five years from the date of its first number, (1743,) "The American Magazine and Historical Chronicle" had ceased to exist, and in the year 1757 appeared "The American Magazine and Monthly Chronicle for the British Colonies." This was published by Mr. William Bradford in Philadelphia, under the auspices of "a Society of Gentlemen," who declare themselves to be "veritatis cultores, fraudis inimici," but who probably found themselves unequal to the difficulties of such a position, the Magazine having expired just one year after its birth. It was followed by "The New England Magazine," (1758,) "The American Magazine," (1769,) "The Royal American Magazine," (1774,) "The Pennsylvania Magazine, or American Monthly Museum," (1775,) "The Columbian Magazine," (1786,) "The Worcester Magazine," (the same year,) "The American Museum," (1787,) "The Massachusetts Magazine," (1789,) "The New-York Magazine," (1790,) "The Rural Magazine & Vermont Repository," (1796,) "The Missionary Magazine," (same year,)—and others. The premature mortality characteristic of some of our own magazine-literature was, even at this early period, painfully apparent: none of the publications we have named survived their twelfth year, most of them lived less than half that period. A great diversity in the style and quality of their contents, as well as in external appearance, is, of course, observable, and it somewhat requires the eye of faith to see within their rusty and faded covers the germ of that gigantic literary plant which, in this year of Grace, 1860, counts in the city of Boston alone nearly one hundred and fifty periodical publications, (about one-third being legitimate magazines,) perhaps as many more in the other New England cities and towns, and a progeny of unknown, but very considerable extent, throughout the Union.
Apart even from their value to the historiographer and the antiquary, few relics of the past are more suggestive or interesting than the old magazine or newspaper. The houses, furniture, plate, clothing, and decorations of the generations which have preceded us possess their intrinsic value, and serve also to link by a thousand associations the mysterious past with the actual and living present; but the old periodical brings back to us, beside all this, the bodily presence, the words, the actions, and even the very thoughts of the people of a former age. It is, in mercantile phrase, a book of original entry, showing us the transactions of the time in the light in which they were regarded by the parties engaged in them, and reflecting the state of public sentiment on innumerable topics,—moral, religious, political, philosophic, military, and scientific. Its mistakes of fact or induction are honest and palpable ones, easily corrected by contemporaneous data or subsequent discoveries, and not often posted into the ledger of history without detection. The learned and patient labors of the savant or the scholar are not expected of the pamphleteer or the periodical writer of the last century, or of the present; he does but blaze the pathway of the pains-taking engineer who is to follow him, happy enough, if he succeed in satisfying immediate and daily demands, and in capturing the kind of game spoken of by Mr. Pope in that part of his manual where he instructs us to
"shoot folly as it flies, And catch the manners living as they rise."
Among us, however, the magazine-writer, as he existed in the last century, has left few, if any, representatives. He is fading silently away into a forgotten antiquity; his works are not on the publishers' counters,—they linger only among the dust and cobwebs of old libraries, listlessly thumbed by the exploring reader or occasionally consulted by the curious antiquary. His place is occupied by those who, in the multiplication of books, the diffusion of information, and the general alteration of public taste, manners, and habits, though revolving in a similar orbit, move in quite another plane,—who have found in the pages of the periodical a theatre of special activity, a way to the entertainment and instruction of the many; and though much of what is thus produced may bear, as we have hinted, a character more or less ephemeral, we are sometimes presented also with the earlier blossoms and the fresher odors of a rich and perennial growth of genius, everywhere known and acknowledged in the realms of belles-lettres, philosophy, and science, crowded here as in a nursery, to be soon transplanted to other and more permanent abodes.
COME SI CHIAMA?
OR A LEAF FROM THE CENSUS OF 1850.
The first question asked of a "new boy" at school is, "What's your name?" In this year of Grace the eighth decennial census is to be taken, asking that same question of all new comers into the great public school where towns and cities are educated. It will hardly be effected with that marvellous perfection of organization by which Great Britain was made to stand still for a moment and be statistically photographed. For with consummate skill was planned that all-embracing machinery, so that at one and the same moment all over the United Kingdom the recording pen was catching every man's status and setting it down. The tramp on the dusty highway, the clerk in the counting-house, the sportsman upon the moor, the preacher in his pulpit, game-bird and barn-door fowl alike, all were simultaneously bagged. Unless, like the Irishman's swallow, you could be in two places at once, down you went on the recording-tablets. Christopher Sly, from the ale-house door, if caught while the Merry Duke had possession of him, must be chronicled for a peer of the realm; Bully Bottom, if the period of his translations fell in with the census-taking, must be numbered among the cadgers' "mokes"; nay, if Dogberry himself had encountered the officials at the moment of his pathetic lamentation, he were irrevocably written down "an ass."
We can hardly hope for such celerity and sure handling upon this side of the water. Nor is this the subject we have just now in view. The approaching advent of the census-taker has led us to look back at the labor of his predecessor, and the careless turning over of its pages has set us to musing upon NAMES.
William Shakspeare asks, "What's in a name?" England's other great poetical William has devoted a series of his versifyings to the naming of places. Which has the right of it, let us not undertake to pronounce without consideration. England herself has long ago determined the question. As Mr. Emerson says of English names,—"They are an atmosphere of legendary melody spread over the land; older than all epics and histories which clothe a nation, this undershirt sits close to the body." Dean Trench, who handles words as a numismatist his coins, has said substantially the same thing. And it is true not of England only; for the various lands of Europe are written over like palimpsests with the story of successive conquests and dominations chronicled in their local names. You stop and ask why a place is so called,—sure to be rewarded by a legend lurking beneath the title. Like the old crests of heraldry, with their "canting" mottoes beneath, they are history in little, a war or a revolution distilled into the powerful attar of a single phrase. The Rhineland towers of Falkenstein and Stolzenfels are the local counterparts of the Scotch borderers' "Thou shalt want ere I want," for ominous meaning.
The volume we have just laid down painfully reminds us that the poet and the historian have no such heritage in this land. We have done our best to crowd out all the beautiful significant names we found here, and to replace them by meaningless appellations. For the name of a thing is that which really has in it something of that to which it belongs, which describes and classifies it, and is its spoken representative; while the appellation is only a title conferred by act of Parliament or her Majesty's good pleasure: it cannot make a parvenu into a peer.