BRITISH readers are not unacquainted with the American newspaper press, as, not to mention the numerous extracts from transatlantic papers in the columns of London journals, the merits of that press formed, but a few years ago, a topic of controversy between two London Quarterlies. But of American magazines and reviews they seldom hear any thing. This is certainly in no degree owing to the scarcity of these publications, for they are as numerous, in comparison, as the newspapers, have a very respectable circulation, (in some cases nearly four thousand,) and that at the not remarkably low price of four or five dollars _per annum_. Neither is it to their insignificance at home, for their editors make a considerable figure in the literary world, and their contributors are sufficiently vain of themselves, as their practice of signing or heading articles with their names in full would alone show.[47] Indeed Willis's idea (so ridiculed by the _Edinburgh_,) of a magazine writer becoming a great lion in society, is not so very great an absurdity if applied to American society. Nor is this due to the fact that their topics are exclusively local; for there is scarcely a subject under heaven of which they do not treat, and a European might derive some very startling information from them. The _Democratic Review_, for example, has a habit of predicting twice or thrice a-year that England is on the point of exploding utterly, and going off into absolute chaos.[48] "Perhaps," interrupts an impatient non-admirer of things American generally, "it is because they are not worth hearing any thing about." And this suggestion is not so far from truth as it is from politeness. Considering the great demand for periodical literature in the New World, one is surprised to find it so bad in point of quality. Not that the monthly and quarterly press is disfigured by the violence and exaggeration that too often deform the daily. Over-spiciness is the very last fault justly chargeable upon it. In slang language, it would rather be characterised by the terms "slow," "seedy," "remarkably mild," and the like. Crude essays filled with commonplaces, truisms, verses of the true _non Di non homines_ cast, tales such as shop-boys and milliners' girls delight in, and "critical notices" all conceived in the same spirit of indiscriminating praise, make up the columns of the monthlies; while the one or two more pretending publications which now represent the quarterly press, are of a uniformly subdued and soporific character.