At the moment, of course, it holds no such clear field; perhaps it has served its function and is ready for a placid old age. The thing that displaced it was the yellow magazine of the _McClure’s_ type—a variety of magazine which surpassed it in the race for circulation by exaggerating and vulgarizing all its merits. Dr. Tassin seems to think, with William Archer, that S. S. McClure was the inventor of this type, but the truth is that its real father was the unknown originator of the Sunday supplement. What McClure—a shrewd literary bagman—did was to apply the sensational methods of the cheap newspaper to a new and cheap magazine. Yellow journalism was rising and he went in on the tide. The satanic Hearst was getting on his legs at the same time, and I daresay that the muck-raking magazines, even in their palmy days, followed him a good deal more than they led him. McClure and the imitators of McClure borrowed his adept thumping of the tom-tom; Munsey and the imitators of Munsey borrowed his mush. _McClure’s_ and _Everybody’s_, even when they had the whole nation by the ears, did little save repeat in solemn, awful tones what Hearst had said before. As for _Munsey’s_, at the height of its circulation, it was little more than a Sunday “magazine section” on smooth paper, and with somewhat clearer half-tones than Hearst could print. Nearly all the genuinely original ideas of these Yankee Harmsworths of yesterday turned out badly. John Brisben Walker, with the _Cosmopolitan_, tried to make his magazine a sort of national university, and it went to pot. Ridgway, of _Everybody’s_, planned a weekly to be published in a dozen cities simultaneously, and lost a fortune trying to establish it. McClure, facing a situation to be described presently, couldn’t manage it, and his magazine got away from him. As for Munsey, there are many wrecks behind him; he is forever experimenting boldly and failing gloriously. Even his claim to have invented the all-fiction magazine is open to caveat; there were probably plenty of such things, in substance if not in name, before the _Argosy_. Hearst, the teacher of them all, now openly holds the place that belongs to him. He has galvanized the corpse of the old _Cosmopolitan_ into a great success, he has distanced all rivals with _Hearst’s_, he has beaten the English on their own ground with _Nash’s_, and he has rehabilitated various lesser magazines. More, he has forced the other magazine publishers to imitate him. A glance at _McClure’s_ to-day offers all the proof that is needed of his influence upon his inferiors.