ABSTRACT
The young man of literary aspirations who came up to London in the days of Elizabeth and James found the companies of players his best publishers and the theatre his best field of fame. The successor of the novel, in the chief of the literary places of power, will doubtless be the family of weekly and monthly journals. It is a family of respectable antiquity. When the novel was but a humble dependant upon the romance, the periodical devoted to literary and social subjects suddenly gained a very honorable and influential position, which, to be sure, was not, in Joseph Addison's time, capable of permanent occupation. But it may be fairly questioned, if the empire of the novel is not now beginning to decline. Its life, of course, is not threatened; the question is only of the continuance of its predominance and supremacy.
