THE INTERNATIONAL MONTHLY MAGAZINE

Of Literature, Science, and Art.

VOLUME IV

AUGUST TO DECEMBER, 1851.

NEW-YORK:
STRINGER & TOWNSEND, 222 BROADWAY.
FOR SALE BY ALL BOOKSELLERS.
BY THE NUMBER, 25 Cts.; THE VOLUME, $1; THE YEAR, $3.

Transcriber's note: Contents for entire volume 4 in this text. However this text contains only issue Vol. 4, No. 1. Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved to the end of the article.


PREFACE TO THE FOURTH VOLUME.

The conclusion of the Fourth Volume of a periodical may be accepted as a sign of its permanent establishment. The proprietors of the International Magazine have the satisfaction of believing that, while there has been a steady increase of sales, ever since the publication of the first number of this work, there has likewise been as regular an augmentation of its interest, value, and adaptation to the wants of the reading portion of our community. While essentially an Eclectic, relying very much for success on a reproduction of judiciously selected and fairly acknowledged Foreign Literature, it has contained from month to month such an amount of New Articles as justified its claim to consideration as an Original Miscellany. And in choosing from European publications, articles to reprint or to translate for these pages, care has been taken not only to avoid that vein of licentiousness in morals, and skepticism in religion, which in so lamentable a degree characterize a large portion of the popular literature of this age, but also to extract from foreign periodicals that American element with which the rising importance of our country has caused so many of them to be infused; so that, notwithstanding the fact that more than half the contents of the International are from the minds of Europeans, the Magazine is essentially more American than any other now published.