the newspapers, but the
erudition of a _savant_ reaches to the people by creating an atmospheric
change, in which task the journals may have their influence. Rightly or
wrongly, the administration in civil affairs at Washington has not
listened to the press much, but it may be different when a new election
approaches. The social, political, scientific, and military Dii Majores
all depend on the journal for a part of their daily breakfast, but all
soar above it.

A well-known and rather startling story describes a being, which seems
to have been neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, which a man made out of the
elements, by the use of his hands, and by the processes of chemistry,
and which at the last galvanic touch rushed forth from the laboratory,
and from the horrified eyes of its creator, an independent, scoffing,
remorseless, and inevitable enemy of him to whose rash ingenuity it owed
its origin.

Such a creature symbolizes some of our human arts and initiations. Once
organized by genius and consecrated by precedent, they become mighty
elements in history, revelling amid the wealthy energy of life,
exhausting the forces of the intellect, clipping the tendrils of
affection, becoming colossal in the architecture of society and dorsal
in its traditions, and tyrannizing with the heedless power of an
element, to the horror of the pious soul which called it into existence,
over all departments of human activity. Such an art, having passed a
period of tameless and extravagant dominance, at length becomes a
fossil, and is regarded only as an evidence of social upheaving in a
remote and unaccountable age.

To charge such a creature with monstrosity during the period of its
power is simply to expose one's self to popular jeers. Having immense
respect for majorities in this country, we only venture obscurely to
hint, that, of all arts, none before has ever been so threatening,
curious, and fascinating a monster as that of printing. We merely
suggest the hypothesis, novel since some centuries, that old Faustus and
Gutenberg were as much inspired by the Evil One as they have been fabled
to be, when they carved out of a mountain of ore the instrument yclept
type, to completely exhaust the possibilities of which is of late
announced as the sum of human destiny. They lived under the
hallucination of dawning literature, when printed books implied sacred
and classical perfection; and they could by no means have foreseen the
royal folios