Nevertheless, standing in a New York library, and reckoning up the immense number of newspapers published in America, one might suppose that a more literary country did not exist on the globe's surface. But those publishers do but reprint, in a compact form, and at the lowest possible price, the _feuilletons_ of France, and the elegant octavos of England. Alexander Dumas gives employment to more printing-presses, papermakers, and stitchers here than in France. As to the two thousand four hundred newspapers of which the United States boast, as of a sign of the diffusion of enlightenment, it is impossible, until one has held them in one's hand, and read them with one's own eyes, to form an idea of such a mass of personal diatribes, coarse chronicles, puerile anecdotes--of such a confused medley of political and commercial notices, mingled with shopkeepers' puffs in prose and verse, and smothered in an ocean of advertisements. Nothing that you see in France can give you an idea of these advertisements. They are a daily inventory of all imaginable merchandise, heaped up, _pêle-mêle_, as in an immense arena--a register of all the inventions possible, and of every conceivable trade.... With the exception of the New Orleans _Bee_, and of the _Courier of the United States_, (both published in the French language,) I do not know an American paper--not even the best of all, that of a distinguished poet, Mr Bryant--which can be compared, for the order of its contents, and its general getting-up, to the most unpretending of our provincial newspapers. As every considerable city publishes at least a dozen papers, and every little town two or three, the consequence is, that none attain sufficient circulation to afford fair remuneration to a body of able writers. Some are sustained by the funds of partymen, whose organs they are; and the majority exist only by the proceeds of their advertisements."