4th.  The debasing character of the light and popular literature which is coming into vogue, is happily alluded to in a casual letter from Dr. A.W.  Ives, of New York.  “I regret,” he says, “that the well directed labors of the excellent Otwin cannot be made available, but the truth is, there is such an unspeakable mass of matter written for the press at the present day, that all of it cannot be printed, much less be read.  I think it one of the great toils of the age.  Indolence is a natural attribute of man, and he dislikes intellectual even more than physical toil.  Most men read, therefore, only such things as require no thought, and consequently there is a bounty offered for the most frivolous literary productions....

“Your isolated position prevents your realizing, to its greatest extent, the evil of this superfluity of books; but if you were constantly receiving from thirty to forty daily, weekly, and monthly periodicals, besides one or more ponderous volumes, every week, I cannot but think that, with all your ambition and thirst for knowledge, you would wish rather for an Alexandrian conflagration than an increase of books.

“Every man who thinks he has a new thought, or striking thought, thinks himself justified in writing a volume.  Of this I would not complain if he would have the ingenuousness to inform the reader, in a nota bene, on what page the new idea could be found, so that, if he paid for the book, he should be spared the trouble of hunting for the kernel in the bushel of compiled and often incongruous chaff, in which the author has dexterously hid it.

“But the labor and expense of new publications are the least of their evils.  You cannot imagine what an influence is exerted, in this city, at the present time, by ‘penny newspapers.’  There are from fifteen to twenty, I believe, published daily, and not less on an average, I presume, than 5000 copies of each.  A number of them strike off from 10,000 to 20,000 every day.  They have no regular subscribers, or at least, they do not depend upon subscribers for a support.  They are hawked about the streets, the steamboats and taverns by boys, and are, for the most part, extravagant stories, caricature descriptions, police reports, infidel vulgarity and profanity, and, in short, of just such matter as unprincipled, selfish, and bad men know to be best fitted to pamper the appetites and passions of the populace, and so uproot and destroy all that is valuable and sacred in our literary, civil, and religious institutions.

“A spirit of ultraism seems to pervade the whole community.  The language of Milton’s archdevil ‘Evil, be thou my good,’ is the creed of modern reformers, or, in other words—­anything for a change.  What is to come of all this, I have not wisdom even to guess.  It is an age of transition, and whether you and I live to see the elements of the moral and political world at rest, is, I think, extremely doubtful.  But our consolation should be that the Lord reigns—­that he loves good order and truth better than we do—­and, blessed be his name, he is able to establish and maintain them.