TJie Penny Magazine. 34 3 



Why is it " The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Use- 

 ful Knowledge?" What "enemy" has "sowed tares" while those 

 zealots in the cause of instruction slumbered ? If we acquit, as we must 

 acquit, their understandings, we must fasten the charge upon their " easy 

 virtue." Why will they, by the sanction of their names, give currency to 

 the most vapid trash that ever stained paper ? It is dull, but it is borrowed 

 dulness : it is cold, bloodless, and heartless ; but it is cold, bloodless, and 

 heartless at second hand; the merest scraps, by the most ignorant com- 

 pilers, put together in the most tasteless manner, and impudently and 

 cruelly fired at the poor from a sixty-pounder of mere names. The books 

 w-ere bad enough : the " Useful," without use ; the " Entertaining," with- 

 out entertainment : the first not adding one idea to the mere lesson of 

 the schoolboy; and the second, as cold and heartless as the " Penny Ma- 

 gazine," and having an error in every page. 



How could it be otherwise ? What writer, even of a third rate, — of 

 any rate at all, — could stoop to such brazen quackery? Those who have 

 talents have feeling ; and what man with the least spark of that could aid 

 in butchering, in cold blood, the intellect of all the humbler classes in 

 England. When the fetters of ordinary tyranny are on the limbs, the 

 mind is free, and it " bides its time," and the fetters are burst asunder ; 

 but here is a mental bondage, under the prostituted name of " the dif- 

 fusion of knowledge," and rendered available by a muster of names 

 which no ordinary man could resist. Had there been talent in the case, 

 such a monopoly would have been cruel : there being none, it is most 

 monstrous. 



If they have any writers of name among them, why are they not heard 

 of? Is not fame — honest fame, won from the public, — the fuel that 

 feeds the lamp of genius ? Why then put the extinguisher of those names 

 upon it ? But they have it not? — The books — those dumb witnesses 



— cannot lie. Sir Richard Phillips never ushered worse compilations 

 into the world, under the names of the doctors that he had dubbed, even 

 when he had the score of drudges locked in the garret at seven shillings 

 and sixpence a week. The notion of the juggle, for it is a juggle, was 

 purloined from Sir Richard ; the modus operandi is his too ; but they 

 want even his tact. They should have taken him as their director-general ; 

 and then, though the books would not have been good, they would have 

 been much — very much — better than they are. 



The Society for the Diffusion of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, 



— where and when does it meet, and who attends it? Does Lord 

 Brougham attend ? Does Lord Althorp ? Does Lord Ashley ? Does 

 Lord Dover ? Not one of them. There are names on the covers of cer- 

 tain tracts, and there is a brass plate on a door in Lincoln's Inn Fields, 

 and these are — The Society ! Yet by these are the public deluded, 

 and the poor cheated out of their pennies; and for what? — for setting 

 forth as the fountains of knowledge and amusement those who, in their 

 own persons, had formerly, for bad verse and worse prose, been 



" Banish'd from the footstools of the gods." 



A Single Gentleman. 



Such are the opinions of our reviewer, in many of which, any more than 

 in his language, we do not concur. Nevertheless, the article having 

 come to us through the hands of a highly esteemed friend, we have given 

 it publicity. Our readers will judge for themselves. When the Society for 

 the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was first instituted, we hoped much 

 from it, thinking that its object was to spread amongst the people the most 

 useful knowledge ; viz. that by which the working classes could soonest 

 better their condition. It soon appeared, however, that the Society was 



x 4 



