For some time after books had ceased to find a market, the periodicals retained their vogue; and even till very lately, newspapers found readers.  But the period at length arrived, when even the leisure requisite for the perusal of these lighter pages, is no longer forthcoming.  People are busy ballooning or driving; shooting like stars along railroads; or migrating like swallows or wild-geese.  It has been found, within the current year, impossible to read even a newspaper!

The march of intellect, however, luckily keeps pace with the necessities of the times; and no sooner was it ascertained, that reading-made-easy was difficult to accomplish, than a new art was invented for the more ready transmission of ideas.  The fallacy of the proverb, that “those who run may read,” being established, modern science set about the adoption of a medium, available to those sons of the century who are always on the run.  Hence, the grand secret of ILLUSTRATION.—­Hence the new art of printing!

The pictorial printing-press is now your only wear!  Every thing is communicated by delineation.  We are not told, but shown how the world is wagging.  The magazines sketch us a lively article, the newspapers vignette us, step by step, a royal tour.  The beauties of Shakspeare are imprinted on the minds of the rising generation, in woodcuts; and the poetry of Byron engraver in their hearts, by means of the graver.  Not a boy in his teens has read a line of Don Quixote or Gil Blas, though all have their adventures by heart; while Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village” has been committed to memory by our daughters and wives, in a series of exquisite illustrations.  Every body has La Fontaine by heart, thanks to the pencil of Granville, which requires neither grammar nor dictionary to aid its interpretations; and even Defoe—­even the unparalleled Robinson Crusoe—­is devoured by our ingenuous youth in cuts and come again.

At present, indeed, the new art of printing is in its infancy, but it is progressing so rapidly, that the devils of the old will soon have a cold birth of it!  Views of the Holy Land are superseding even the Holy Scriptures; and a pictorial Blackstone is teaching the ideas of the sucking lawyers how to shoot.  Nay, Buchan’s “Domestic Medicine” has (proh pudor!) its illustrated edition.

The time saved to an active public by all this, is beyond computation.  All the world is now instructed by symbols, as formerly the deaf and dumb; and instead of having to peruse a tedious penny-a-line account of the postilion of the King of the French misdriving his Majesty, and his Majesty’s august family, over a draw-bridge into a moat at Treport, a single glance at a single woodcut places the whole disaster graphically before us; leaving us nine minutes and a half of the time we must otherwise have devoted to the study of the case, to dispose of at our own will and pleasure; to start, for instance, for Chelsea, and be back again by the steam-boat, before our mother knows we are out.