Text: Edgar Allan Poe (?), Literary, Broadway Journal (New York), November 29, 1845, vol. 2, no. 21, p. ???, col. ?

[page 325, column 2, continued:]

Editorial Miscellany.

THE FROG-POND seems to be dried up — and the Frogs are, beyond doubt, all dead — as we hear no more croaking from that quarter.

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WE COPY the subjoined passage from “Wilmer & Smith's European Times.” The observations are so plainly just as to need not a word in the way of comment:

A Boston publication, called ‘Littell's Living Age,’ has found its way to this city, and is advertised in our newspapers, though it consists of nothing but pilfering from the English magazines and reviews. It may also be met with in one or two cabinets de lecture, frequented by the English and Americans. Pirated editions, or if you prefer the phrase, reprints, of the works of Scott, Bulwer, Dickens, and other eminent authors, are imported into France in great numbers from America, and, from the lowness of their price, meet with a ready sale. There are one or two English circulating libraries in this city entirely stocked with American reprints. The injury this causes to the authors and proprietors of the works is incalculable. At one time a brace of publishers here carried on a roaring trade by reprinting all the works that issued from the English press, and smuggling them into England for the circulating libraries; one of these honest men actually became enriched from his wholesale piracies on Walter Scott alone.

But a law lately passed, directing the immediate destruction of every pirated work, has put a considerable check on their conscientious trade; and it now appears that they find it more profitable to import from the United States than to reprint. Belgium preys with a voracious audacity on French literature, — not a work can be published here that is not brought out there, and sold all over the Continent infinitely cheaper than French publishers, who have authors to pay, can afford. The publishers of M. Thiers’ Histore du Consulat et de l’ Empire has been cruelly victimized by those Belgian pirates. He has paid somewhere about £20,000 for the copyright of the work, and has sold some 30,000 copies. The Belgians have not paid one single farthing for copyright, and have sold 100,000 copies. It is a burning and scandalous shame to governments of such enlightened countries as America, England, France and Belgium, that a law of literary copyright is not established.

THE MIRROR says:

AMERICANS. — An address delivered before the Eucleian Society of the New-York University, June 30, 1845, by Cornelius Mathews. We published the address in the Mirror soon after its delivery. We could not understand it then, and cannot now.

Mr. Mathews, we should judge, punctuates his manuscript with a pepper-box. We like his thoughts better than the idiosyncrasies of his style. He should reform it altogether.

Whatever, in the opinion of the worshippers of Britain and everything British, may be objectionable in the matter of Mr. Mathews’ address, its manner, at least, is simple and unaffected, and we are quite at a loss to discover anything incomprehensible in any portion of the essay. There is a good saying of Dr. Johnson's, about the extreme unfairness of requiring an author to supply at once thought and brains for its comprehension.

WE DO NOT intend to claim the honor of originating in the Journal the exquisite poem, by Halleck, now published. [page 326:] It is not included, however, in any edition of his poems. Independently of the high intrinsic merit of the piece, there is a tale about it — a romantic tale — which we could unfold, if we thought proper, and which to certain readers will give it additional interest.

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ITEMS FROM FOREIGN SOURCES.

In these days of peace and political fusion, the Revolution and the Empire in France are, as we have seen, gradually comcompleting their unfinished monuments. Fifty years after the first proposal of the project by the celebrated painter David, and its adoption by the Convention, the city of Lille has been celebrating the anniversary of the memorable siege which it sustained in 1792, by the inauguration of a monument, consisting of a granite column, surmounted by a bronze statue represnting the city of Lille. The spirit of the occasion, and of its proceedings, our readers know enough of their gallant neighbours the French to have no difficulty in conceiving. Thirty-nine towns and communes of the northern part of France were represented by deputations of their national guard; St. Cyr and the Polytechnic Schools sent representatives; and the army contributed a delegate of each rank from every regiment. An old gunner of 1792, caught amongst them in the midst of their excitement, had the dangerous honours of an ovation on the shoulders of his fellow-citizens: and Louis Phillippe, who knows his countrymen better than any of us, or of themselves, contrived with his matchless tact, to sympathise in the feeling of the hour, after a fashion identifying his own royal attributes with its republican bias. In his name, the Mayor of Lille, amid the tumultous acclamations of the crowd, presented to M. Scheppers, the sole surviving member of the municipality of Lille, at the period of the siege, the “Star of the Brave,” as the latter called it in the figurative mood of the occasion — “one of the finest episodes of the day,” say the highly excited journals of the department. — London Athenaum.

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It is an amusing sight, and enlivening withal, to look at the rows of white tents, the beautiful girls and their elegant dresses, the crowds of spectators, each sheltered by a bright coloured umbrella, and some thirty or forty ladies and gentlmen [[gentlemen]], fat and thin, tall and short, old and young, in the water together, dipping and spluttering, shouting and shrieking, as the white-crested wave rolls towards them — some attempting to swim, others, fearful of being caried out to sea, clinging to their attendants’ arms, and endeavoring to make their escape to terra firma. Here an old woman bearing aloft a little cherub, independent of any costume, to dip it a due number of times — there a bathing girl encouraging a stout old gentleman to venture into the water, after he has received the first souse on the head from the contents of a bason, to prevent his feeling the effect of the shock to his feet. Sometimes three or four young ladies will go in together, or a gentleman may be seen leading gallantly some fair one of his acquaintance: but everything is conducted with the strictest propriety and decorum; so that however extraordinary the style may appear at first to a stranger, he soon becomes accustomed to it.

The most amusing scenes have passed, never to recur, when the friars came down to bathe. Some years ago there was an enormously fat friar, who was ordered to take a certain number of baths at a certain hour in the morning, and it was the general amusement to go down and see him perform the ceremony. He had ten persons to attend him, six men who stood on the shore holding ropes attached to his waist (for he had conscious of his own floating qualities, a most pious horror of being washed away), and four women who accompanied him into the water. When they got him there with a proper solicitude for his health, they took good care to make him perform his ablutions abundantly. While the men slackened the rope, they used to dip him and duck him most unmercifully, pressing his head down with their hands, like the merry wives of Windsor packing Sir John Falstaff into the clothes-basket. He dared not resist, for fear they should leave him to his fate, and they would not let him out till he had taken the prescribed number of dips — he spluttering, and crying, and praying and swearing all the time. Now and then, though seldom, the same scene is enacted with a stout artizan, or a country farmer. — Lusitawan Sketches. [column 2:]

Dr. Balfour, of Glasgow, has been appointed Professor of Botany, at Edinburgh University, vice Dr. Graham deceased.

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In Paris there are 396 newspapers, with 700,000 subscribers, and in the departments of France 898, with about 350,000 subscribers.