We have little doubt of shortly seeing announcements—­standing like tombstones in those literary cemeteries, the Saturday papers—­of “A new work upon America, from the graver of George Cruickshank;” or “A new fashionable novel, (diamond edition,) from the accomplished pencil of H.B.”  Kenny Meadows will become the Byron of the day, Leech the Scott, Forrester the Marryatt, Phiz the Trollope; Stanfield and Turner will be epic poets, Landseer preside over the belles-lettres, and Webster and Stone become the epigrammatists and madrigalists of the press.

All this will, doubtless, throw a number of deserving persons out of employ.  The writers, whose stock in trade consists of words rather than ideas, will find their way to Basinghall Street, prose will be at a discount, and long-windedness be accounted a distemper.  A great variety of small Sapphos must turn seamstresses*, at three-halfpence a shirt instead of a penny a line; while the minor poets will have to earn a livelihood by writing invoice, instead of in verse.  But this transposition of talent, and transition of gain, is no more than arose from the substitution of railroads for turnpike roads.  By that innovation thousands of hard-working post-horses were left without rack or manger; and by the present arrangement, Clowes, Spottiswoode, and the authors who have served to afford matter for their types, will be driven from the field.

    Transcriber’s Note:  Original “semstresses”

But the world (no longer to be called of letters, but of emblems) will be the gainer.  It will be no longer a form of speech to talk of having “glanced at the morning papers,” whose city article will, of course, be composed by artists skilled in drawing figures.  The biographies of contemporary or deceased statesmen will be limned, not by Lord Brougham or Macaulay, but by the impartial hand of the Royal Academy; and the catacombs at Kensal Green, like those discovered by Belzoni on the banks of the Nile, exhibit their eulogistic inscriptions in hieroglyphics.  By this new species of shorthand we might have embodied this very article in half a dozen sprightly etchings!  But as the hapless inventor of the first great art of printing incurred, among his astounded contemporaries, the opprobrium of being in compact with the evil one, (whence, probably, the familiar appellation of printers’ devils,) it behoves the early practitioners of the new art to look to their reputations!  By economizing the time of the public, they may squander their own good repute.  It is not every printer who can afford, like Benjamin Franklin, to be a reformer; and pending the momentum when (the schoolmasters being all abroad) the grand causeway of the metropolis shall become, as it were, a moving diorama, inflicting knowledge upon the million whether it will or no—­let us content ourselves with birds’-eye views of passing events, by way of exhibiting the first rudiments of THE NEW ART OF PRINTING!