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Whiting, Printer, Beaufort-house, Strand.

THE

LONDON MAGAZINE.

JANUARY 1, 1827.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE OF GERMANY.*

AN Englishman goes on the first of the month to his bookseller and orders the London, the New Monthly, Blackwood's, the Evangelical, the Ladies' Magazine, and My Grandmother's Review; and having thus laid in a stock of intellectual provision, sufficient to appease his studious cravings for four weeks, he returns home with much self-satisfaction at the thought, that he belongs to so writing and reading a nation. England, however, is not the only country in which the high road of letters is Macadamized for the convenience of the indolent and the occupied; and where a man, by the aid of this Review and that Journal, is happily enabled to form an opinion upon works that he has read, and to pronounce an opinion upon works that he has not read. Germany has its periodicals alsoits "blue spirits and grey;"-of all shapes and denominations, and treating upon all subjects; some confining themselves exclusively to particular branches of science or criticism-to the philosophy of Kant, or the no less transcendental philosophy of the fashions; others embracing the whole range of literature in all its bearings, and dispensing their censures, "de omni scibili." In mercy to the throats and foreteeth of our readers we refrain from giving a list of the "consonant dissonant" titles. Their number must nearly amount to a hundred; and if we add to them the Minervas, the Vergissmeïnnichts, and the rest of the motley group of Taschenbücher, there will be a mass of periodical literature, which, in extent and variety of matter, may safely challenge a comparison with our own treasures of the same kind.

It may perhaps be imagined that works of this class are altogether

Hermes, Leipzig. Jahrbücher der Literatur, (Aunals of Literature,) Wien. Zeitschrift für geschichtliche Rechtswissenschaft, (Journal of Historical Jurispru dence,) Berlin. Zeitung für die elegante Welt, (Gazette for the elegant World,) Leipzig. Literaturzeitung, (Literary Gazette,) Jena, &c. &c.

The readers of the Evangelical may possibly be scandalized at the above association. We beg therefore to state that our object was merely to indicate the extreme want of discrimination in the public-that public, which has been aptly compared by Swift to a fly, which, if driven from a honey-pot, will alight, and, with marvellous complacency, finish its meal upon an excrement.

JAN. 1827.

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