Page:The Southern Literary Messenger - Minor.djvu/203

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Literary Messenger
179

charge, for a new proprietor, of the Southern Quarterly Review.

With a poetical L'Envoi the editor closes his good work for 1853 and in due time puts out the inviting commencement of it for another year. But he had had a visit to the Crystal Palace with J. G. Baldwin!

The first Editor's Table for 1854 is full of thanks and congratulations and says that the list of subscribers is constantly increasing. This cheering statement is repeated later. We have also a description of Beecher's tabernacle and congregation and of one of his anathemaic sermons against the South. He even prayed that the babes, whom he had just baptized, might not become slaveholders.

The Messenger runs on very well, when in June we learn that Mr. Thompson is absent and therefore the acting editor, John Esten Cooke, has taken the liberty of publishing an address, on "Colonial Life of Virginia," which Mr. Thompson had delivered in the Richmond Athenæum. But said absence is not accounted for, until we have, in July, an editorial letter from Europe, dated London, June 2nd. This is followed by two others from London and one from Paris, dated July, 1854; and there are two others, without date, which may have been written after his return. He seems to have slipped abroad, with-