of eccentricity, many-sided and mysterious. For all such whimsies and wonders there will be ample room and verge enough, even though Philosophy should rear her head in their immediate neighbourhood, looking with face severe, yet neither scornful nor ashamed, upon her frolicsome companions.
The plan, then, of Ainsworth's Magazine will comprise, as occasion serves, papers of bold and original inquiry into the great ends for which books were written—into books themselves, in their multitudinous forms—and into the mind, which they feed and fashion. It may treat of states and statesmen, though it will avoid politics and scandal. It will pass, perhaps, from a view of the general structure of society, to a ludicrous dissection of one of the atoms that compose it. It will investigate past events where it can, and shew, too, how history has reported them. These are some among the more arduous of its tasks—the constant aim will be to execute them in a popular, and never in a rigid of pedantic spirit.
Of its productions in the various fields of romance, the most conspicuous, in the earlier numbers, will be a new Tale by the Editor. This in its progress will exhibit many of those pictures of manners and of social habit in the by-gone time, by which the Magazine may become the happy instrument of introducing every young reader to his own great-grand-father. Tragic passion and comic incident will in this, as in briefer subjects, be employed, to shew how, amidst the caprice and mutability of fashion, Nature is unalterable, and Truth divinely beautiful for ever.
Of the lighter poetry, and of the humorous sketches, the plan of the Magazine, as already hinted, includes an ample variety, or what the arbiters of taste would call "an elegant assortment." It includes, also, the intention of reporting frequently upon the progress of the Drama—of noticing new features of Art, when the exhibition are open for the season—and of recording from time to time such leading points of scientific invention and discovery as may interest the general reader.
However disproportioned the price, the size and number of these pages admit of all this being attempted. It may be said, by way of suggesting the expediency of brevity in this address, that the design thus announced comprehends every subject. Not so; there are
