If these remarks are well founded, we may narrow the problem to the few following terms--it being understood that the work now in question is a monthly publication, not devoted to any _one_ branch of knowledge or literature, but a magazine of whatever may be supposed to interest readers in general, not excluding the discoveries or even the speculations of science, that are generally intelligible or interesting, so that the portion devoted to any one subject or department shall be kept proportionate to the number of readers for whom it may be supposed to have a _particular_ interest. Here, however, we must not forget, that however few the actual dilettanti, or men of the fancy may be, yet, as long as the articles remain generally intelligible (in _pugilism_, for instance) Variety and Novelty communicate an attraction that interests all. _Homo sum, nihil humani a me alienum._ If to this we add the exclusion of theological controversy, which is endless, I shall have pretty accurately described the present _Edinburgh Magazine_, as to its characteristic plan and purposes; which may, I think, be comprised in three terms, as Philosophical. Philological, and Aesthetic Miscellany. The word miscellany, however, must be taken as involving a predicate in itself, in addition to the three preceding epithets, comprehending, namely, all the ephemeral births of intellectual life which add to the gaiety and variety of the work, without interfering with its express and regular objects. Having thus a sufficiently definite notion of what your Magazine is, and is intended to be, I propose to myself, as a problem to find out, _in detail_, what the _means_ would be to the most perfect attainment of this end. In other words, what the _scheme_, and of what nature, and in what order and proportion, the _contents_ should be of a monthly publication; in order for it to verify the title of a Philosophical, Philological, and Aesthetic Miscellany and Magazine. The result of my lucubrations I hope to forward in my next, under the title of _The Ideal of a Magazine_; and to mark those departments, in the filling up of which, I flatter myself with the prospect of being a fellow labourer. But since I began this scrawl, a friend reminded me of a letter I wrote him many years ago, on the improvement of the mind by the habit of commencing our inquiries with the attempt to construct the most absolute or perfect form of the object desiderated, leaving its practicability, in the first instance, undetermined. An essay, in short, _de emendatione intellectûs per ideas_--the beneficial influence of which on his mind he spoke of with warmth. The main contents of the letter, the effect of which my friend appreciated so highly, were derived from conversation with a great man now no more. And as I have reason to regard that conversation as an epoch in the history of my own mind, I feel myself encouraged to hope that its publication may not prove useless to some of