is worn a suitable stupidity by all the sad survivors.--And such, before
the era of Periodicals, such was the life in--merry England. Oh!
dear!--oh! dear me!

We shall not enter into any historical details--for this is not a
Monologue for the Quarterly--but we simply assert, that in the times we
allude to (don't mention dates) there was little or no reading in
England. There was neither the Reading Fly nor the Reading Public. What
could this be owing to, but the non-existence of Periodicals? What
elderly-young lady could be expected to turn from house affairs, for
example, to Spenser's Fairy Queen? It is a long, long, long poem, that
Fairy Queen of Spenser's; nobody, of course, ever dreamt of getting
through it; but though you may have given up all hope of getting through
a poem or a wood, you expect to be able to find your way back again to
the spot where you unluckily got in; not so, however, with the Fairy
Queen. Beautiful it is indeed, most exquisitely and unapproachably
beautiful in many passages, especially about ladies and ladies' love
more than celestial, for Venus loses in comparison her lustre in the
sky; but still people were afraid to get into it then as now; and
"heavenly Una, with her milk-white lamb," lay buried in dust. As
to Shakspeare, we cannot find many traces of him in the domestic
occupations of the English gentry during the times alluded to; nor do we
believe that the character of Hamlet was at all relished in their halls,
though perhaps an occasional squire chuckled at the humours of Sir John
Falstaff. We have Mr. Wordsworth's authority for believing that Paradise
Lost was a dead letter, and John Milton virtually anonymous. We need say
no more. Books like these, huge heavy vols. lay with other lumber in the
garrets and libraries. As yet, Periodical Literature was not; and the
art of printing seems long to have preceded the art of reading. It did
not occur to those generations that books were intended to be read by