Page:The Southern Literary Messenger - Minor.djvu/71

 Rh The Muse of Mrs. Ellett leads off the last number of the second volume and further on she has a long review of the "Tragedies of Silvio Pellico." There is the Address of President Dew, at the opening of William and Mary, and a number of other good things. A Mr. Edwin Saunders contributes a poem, "Universal Sympathy, a Winter's Night Thought," dated London, January, 1836. The critical notices dwindled to four pages, including some extracts from the books examined, which were the American edition of the British and Foreign Review; Mr. Z. Collins Lee's Address before several Literary Societies of Baltimore; and the "Papers of the Pickwick Club," of which it is now known that Mr. Dickens was the author, and he receives a far higher estimate than that which the Messenger first gave him.

Then it is said: "A press of business, connected with some necessary arrangements for the third volume, has prevented us from paying the usual attention to our critical department. We have many books lying by us which we propose to notice fully in our next."

This was in November and "our next" was dated January, 1837. So that there was a hiatus of a whole month during which the Messenger's force, editorial and other, had to withstand, in