Almanac_, and the _Companion to the Almanac_--a wonderful change for the better after the “Poor Robins” and “Old Moores” of the past. In 1832, Mr. Knight was offered an official position at the Board of Trade, but fortunately for the education and interests of the people he had the courage to refuse it, having the pleasure, however, of being asked to recommend some one else to the post. In the March of this year appeared the first number of the _Penny Magazine_, subsequent by only a very few weeks to _Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal_. The new periodical had been suggested by Mr. Hill in a conversation about the wretched character of the cheap prints of the period. “Let us,” he exclaimed, “see what something cheap and good can accomplish! Let us have a penny magazine!” “And what shall be the title?” asked Knight. “The _Penny Magazine_.” At once they went to the Lord Chancellor, who entered cordially into the project, and though a few old Whig gentlemen on the committee urged that the proposed price was below the dignity of the Society, and muttered, “It is very awkward, very awkward,” Mr. Knight undertook the risk, and was immediately appointed editor. The success of the magazine was amazing even to the sanguine editor; at the close of 1832 it reached a sale of 200,000 in weekly and monthly parts--representing probably a million readers, and Burke had only forty years previous estimated the number of readers in this country at 80,000! Among the contributors it will be sufficient to mention Long, De Morgan, Creswick, Allan Cunningham, and Thomas Pringle, whilom editor of the Whiggish _Blackwood_. One writer, however, stands out from the rest, both by his misfortunes and his attainments--coming not only under the “curse of poverty’s unconquerable ban,” but being completely deaf and almost dumb. Recommended to Mr. Knight as an extraordinary, though unknown genius, who had been brought up in a charity school, stricken with a sudden and melancholy affliction, who had worked his way to St. Petersburg, and thence through Russia to Moscow, and on to Persia and the Desert; who knew French and Italian perfectly; the kind-hearted publisher, from the very first, took a liking to Kitto--soon to be known as an eminent traveller, Orientalist, and Biblical commentator. After the first trial article of “The Deaf Traveller,” Kitto was regularly engaged to assist Mr. Knight personally in his own room; and here in his spare time he managed to acquire German. In spite of the somewhat scurrilous attacks made upon the _Penny Magazine_ by Colburn in his _New Monthly_ it was a continuous success, and ultimately paved the way to a work infinitely more important--the “Penny Encyclopædia.” It will be essential here to understand the position of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.