"■82 , Literary Journals. [CilAP. XXI, 



dured it under any other form than that of amuse- 

 ment. They have inspired many youthful minds 

 with a spirit of literary aml)ition and enterprise, 

 which has been productive of the most brilliant 

 and succe^isful exertions. They have recorded 

 a number of facts, hints, observations, and dis- 

 cussions, instructive at the time they were made, 

 and invaluable to posterity, but which would ine- 

 vitably have been lost had they been presented to 

 the public in a more evanescent form. And, 

 finally, they have shed, in a gradual and almost in- 

 sensible manner, numberless rays of knowledge 

 among all descriptions of persons in the commu- 

 nity, even indirectly among millions who never 

 enjoyed the perusal of them; and have thus greatly 

 enlarged the public understanding, and astonish- 

 ingly increased the sum of popular inform.ation. 



But the great popularity and the unexampled 

 circulation of these periodical works have also 

 been attended with some disadvantages. They 

 have made tliousands of light, ostentatious, and 

 superficial scholars, and have evidently operated 

 luifavourably to sound and deep erudition. They 

 have led many a self-suflicient pedant to content 

 himself with shining in borrowed plumes, and to 

 indulge in the deceitful expectation of finding' 

 short and ea^y paths to real scholarship. They 

 have discouraged those habits of connected read- 

 ing, and of patient systematic thinking, which were 

 the glory of the learned in former ages, and en- 

 abled them to accomplish those mighty labours 

 which fix their posterity in astonishment. Ac- 

 cordingly, it would perhaps be no difficult task 

 to show that the general literary features of the 



