The Greek character will now become easy to decipher; and the evening
papers may take King Otho both off the throne and on. The designs of
Russia have long been proverbial; but the exercise of the new art of
printing may assign them new features. The representations of
impartial periodicals will cut out, or out-cut De Custine; and while
contemplating the well-favoured presentment of Nicholas I., we shall
exclaim--"Is this a tyrant that I see before me?" Nothing will be
easier then to throw the Poles into the shade of the picture, or to
occupy the foreground with a brilliant review.
As to Germany, to embody her in the hieroglyphics of the new press,
might be a study for Retsch; and who will care for the lumbering pages
of Von Raumer, or the wishy-washy details of Kohl, when able, in an
_augenblick_, to bring Berlin and Vienna before him; to study the
Zollverein in the copy of the King of Prussia's cogitative
countenance, and ascertain the views of Metternich concerning the
elder branch of the Bourbons, by a _cul de lampe_ in the _Morning
Chronicle_!
We have little doubt of shortly seeing announcements--standing like
tombstones in those literary cemeteries, the Saturday papers--of "A
new work upon America, from the graver of George Cruickshank;" or "A
new fashionable novel, (diamond edition,) from the accomplished pencil
of H.B." Kenny Meadows will become the Byron of the day, Leech the
Scott, Forrester the Marryatt, Phiz the Trollope; Stanfield and Turner
will be epic poets, Landseer preside over the belles-lettres, and
Webster and Stone become the epigrammatists and madrigalists of the
press.
All this will, doubtless, throw a number of deserving persons out of
employ. The writers, whose stock in trade consists of words rather
than ideas, will find their way to Basinghall Street, prose will be at
a discount, and long-windedness be accounted a distemper. A great
variety of small Sapphos must turn seamstresses*, at three-halfpence
a shirt instead of a penny a line; while the minor poets will have to
earn a livelihood by writing invoice, instead of in verse. But this
transposition of talent, and transition of gain, is no more than arose
from the substitution of railroads for turnpike roads. By that
innovation thousands of hard-working post-horses were left without
rack or manger; and by the present arrangement, Clowes, Spottiswoode,
and the authors who have served to afford matter for their types, will
be driven from the field.
*Transcriber's Note: Original "semstresses"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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