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PREFACE.

A PREFACE to the Second Volume of THE LITERARY MAGNET! What a delightful sentence ! How it must charm the eyes of our publisher! How it must warm the hearts of our readers! How it refreshes our own soul! We had once felt the frost of age slightly obstructing the genial current in our veins; but the sentence which we have just put to paper is like the first sun of a new summer we are all over in a thaw. We shall positively get younger every day we continue to live. A Preface to the Second Volume of THE LITERARY MAGNET! 'Tis a renewal of the lease of our existence; and you, dear Public, are the lessor. Oh! most amiable, most generous, most discriminating Public, how much, and how sincerely, do we thank you.

We look back upon our career with the most pleasurable feelings. A twelvemonth ago, our publication was not even in existence; now we have beheld the completion of its Second Volume. At first it was a delicate unpresuming weekly magazine: now it is a sturdy pugnacious monthly. We positively fear it will run into corpulency, and ultimately become a bulky quarterly.

Now to business-a word of which we have as great a dread as Falstaff had of the word security. We beg to assure our readers that our exertions will be unabated. Success shall not make us relax in

our duty. We may have done much; we know we have much more

to do. The improvements which we purpose to effect in our next volume, are such as will, we trust, give satisfaction to those who are so much deserving of it. In the typographical and more mechanical parts of our magazine, there will be many considerable alterations: in the literary department we shall be assisted by some of the most celebrated writers in the country. All that we have further to say on this subject, will it not be written in our January number?

For the kindness we have already experienced, our friends have our sincerest acknowledgements; and of the encouragement we may continue to receive, we shall prove ourselves fully sensible by the increased energies which will be brought to bear upon our Third Volume.

65, Paternoster Row,

1824, Dec. 1.