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PUBLISHED BY M. ARNOLD,

TAVISTOCK STREET, COVENT GARDEN;

SIMPKIN AND MARSHALL, STATIONERS' COURT; W. F. WAKEMAN, DUBLIN; AND OLIVER AND BOYD, EDINBURGH.

1832.

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PREFACE AND OBSERVATIONS.

WITH the commencement of a new year we commence a new volume, and take the opportunity of at once incorporating with our work the expression of gratitude for the favourable manner in which we have been received, with a short recapitulation of the objects we have had in view. This may appear to many a supererogatory task, after having enabled the public to judge for themselves through eleven previous Numbers, and after having in some measure already stated those objects upon several different occasions. If our readers, however, will follow us through a very few pages, they may perhaps excuse even a little repetition, as being inseparable from the statements we have to make, proving our continued anxiety and endeavour to redeem the pledges we made at the commencement of our labours.

Those who are interested in whatever relates to Art, need not be reminded that several publications similar to ours have been at different times commenced, but without receiving such sufficient encouragement from the public as to induce the proprietors to continue them. In commencing another, then, we might be thought to have exposed ourselves to the imputation of either vainly imagining that we could render such an undertaking more acceptable to the public, or of casting a degree of censure on the manner in which those works had been conducted: neither of these charges, however, would apply to us as, no periodical, upon the same plan, and at the same price, had ever been attempted, and none of any plan, or at any price, for some years. The demand for periodical literature meanwhile had considerably increased, and the taste for it improved. That which was supplied to the public during the last century would not now be tolerated by the readers of even the penny and two-penny publications which we see pouring weekly from the press; and we believed that the public mind was now even prepared VOL. III.-No. 12.

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