White Pater Noster, St. Peter's Brother,
What hast thou in one hand? White-Book Leaves.
What hast i'th' to'ther? Heaven Gate Keys.
Open Heaven Gates, and steike (shut) Hell Gates,
And let every crysom Child creep to its own mother:
White Pater Noster, Amen!
We do not think that the poets of the anti-shaving movement have as yet
succeeded in producing anything worthy to be set off against a series
of spirited stanzas under the heading of "The Razor, a Poem," which we
commend to the immediate and careful attention of the "Razor-strop
Man." The following are the concluding verses:--
"But, above all, thou grand Catholicon,
Or by what useful Name so'er thou'rt call'd,
Thou Sweet Composer of the tortur'd Mind!
When all the Wheels of Life are heavy clogg'd
With Cares or Pain, and nought but Horror dire
Before us stalks with dreadful Majesty,
Embittering all the Pleasures we enjoy;
To thee, distressed, we call; thy gentle Touch
Consigns to balmy Sleep our troubled Breasts."
Evidently the production of a philosopher and an economist of time: for
who else would have thought of shaving before going to bed, instead of
at the matutinal toilet?
In less than five years from the date of its first number, (1743,) "The
American Magazine and Historical Chronicle" had ceased to exist, and in
the year 1757 appeared "The American Magazine and Monthly Chronicle for
the British Colonies." This was published by Mr. William Bradford in
Philadelphia, under the auspices of "a Society of Gentlemen," who
declare themselves to be "_veritatis cultores, fraudis inimici_," but
who probably found themselves unequal to the difficulties of such a
position, the Magazine having expired just one year after its birth. It
was followed by "The New England Magazine," (1758,) "The American
Magazine," (1769,) "The Royal American Magazine," (1774,) "The
Pennsylvania Magazine, or American Monthly Museum," (1775,) "The
Columbian Magazine," (1786,) "The Worcester Magazine," (the same year,)
"The American Museum," (1787,) "The Massachusetts Magazine," (1789,)
"The New-York Magazine," (1790,) "The Rural Magazine & Vermont
Repository," (1796,) "The Missionary Magazine," (same year,)--and
others. The premature mortality characteristic of some of our own
magazine-literature was, even at this early period, painfully apparent:
none of the publications we have named survived their twelfth year,
most of them lived less than half that period. A great diversity in the
style and quality of their contents, as well as in external appearance,
is, of course, observable, and it somewhat requires the eye of faith to
see within their rusty and faded covers the germ of that gigantic
literary plant which, in this year of Grace, 1860, counts in the city
of Boston alone nearly one hundred and fifty periodical publications,
(about one-third being legitimate magazines,) perhaps as many more in
the other New England cities and towns, and a progeny of unknown, but
very considerable extent, throughout the Union.
Apart even from their value to the historiographer and the antiquary,
few relics of the past are more suggestive or interesting than the old
magazine or newspaper. The houses, furniture, plate, clothing, and
decorations of the generations which have preceded us possess their
intrinsic value, and serve also to link by a thousand associations the
mysterious past with the actual and living present; but the old
periodical brings back to us, beside all this, the bodily presence, the
words, the actions, and even the very thoughts of the people of a
former age. It is, in mercantile phrase, a book of original entry,
showing us the transactions of the time in the light in which they were
regarded by the parties engaged in them, and reflecting the state of
public sentiment on innumerable topics,--moral, religious, political,
philosophic, military, and scientific. Its mistakes of fact or
induction are honest and palpable ones, easily corrected by
contemporaneous data or subsequent discoveries, and not often posted
into the ledger of history without detection. The learned and patient
labors of the savant or the scholar are not expected of the pamphleteer
or the periodical writer of the last century, or of the present; he
does but blaze the pathway of the pains-taking engineer who is to
follow him, happy enough, if he succeed in satisfying immediate and
daily demands, and in capturing the kind of game spoken of by Mr. Pope
in that part of his manual where he instructs us to
"shoot folly as it flies,
And catch the manners living as they rise."
Among us, however, the magazine-writer, as he existed in the last
century, has left few, if any, representatives. He is fading
silently away into a forgotten antiquity; his works are not
on the publishers' counters,--they linger only among the dust and
cobwebs of old libraries, listlessly thumbed by the exploring reader or
occasionally consulted by the curious antiquary. His place is occupied
by those who, in the multiplication of books, the diffusion of
information, and the general alteration of public taste, manners, and
habits, though revolving in a similar orbit, move in quite another
plane,--who have found in the pages of the periodical a theatre of
special activity, a way to the entertainment and instruction of the
many; and though much of what is thus produced may bear, as we have
hinted, a character more or less ephemeral, we are sometimes presented
also with the earlier blossoms and the fresher odors of a rich and
perennial growth of genius, everywhere known and acknowledged in the
realms of belles-lettres, philosophy, and science, crowded here as in a
nursery, to be soon transplanted to other and more permanent abodes.