"Be assured no effort on my part will be wanting to extend the circulation of the Messenger, and nothing would give me more unfeigned pleasure than being instrumental in the promotion of so laudable an enterprise. Your periodical is truly a pioneer in the cause of southern literature; and reasoning from the general character of the southern people, no other conclusion can be legitimately drawn, than a highly enlarged, extensive and honorable patronage. That this may be the case, permit me to add an ardent hope to my unqualified belief. We have been too long tributary to the north; it is time, high time, to awake from our lethargy--to rise in the majesty of our intellectual strength, put on the panoply of talents and genius, and _strike_ for the 'prize of our high calling' in literature. If the object of your labors be attained, of which there can be no reasonable doubt, posterity will be more grateful to you than to thousands of the _political exquisites_ of the day, whose memory will last just so long as their ephemeral productions." FROM EASTERN VIRGINIA. "I shall endeavor to avail myself of the offer of your columns, and if, as you propose, your periodical shall be issued monthly, I may probably contribute my full quota to every number. In doing so, I shall try to remember that I am writing for a _literary_ work, and one which leans much on the support of light readers. I shall therefore endeavor to treat grave topics with as little gravity as the nature of the case may admit of; drawing my reasons less from authority than from common sense and the nature of things, and addressing them to the untaught feelings of the heart, rather than to what is falsely contradistinguished as reason and judgment. I say _falsely_, because when the mind is once broken in by the discipline of a spurious philosophy, it is too apt to throw out its view all considerations incapable of being established by any regular chain of reasoning. Yet these are often entitled to be regarded as first principles; and their proof is found in nature, and in the universal acquiescence of mankind, the more conclusive, because it does not rest on reason, but on a sort of moral instinct. If men wrote less for fame and more for effect, I am persuaded they would find it rarely necessary to conduct the reader through a long process of ratiocination, and that the important end (conviction) would be often best accomplished by those striking exhibitions of truth which make it manifest at a glance. Such is the case with most of those great truths on which the rights, and duties, and happiness of men depend. On such subjects truth vindicates her title to respect by her very presence. 'She walks a queen,' and the heart gives its homage, and compels the acquiescence of the understanding, without stopping to look into her patent of royalty. Does any man doubt such truths? No. Can they be proved? No; and _therefore_ they are the more certainly true. The fact