duced them to their present unenviable situation. In the whole South there is scarcely a publication of any kind devoted to their interests. They are now completely under the domination of the oligarchy, and it is madness to suppose that they will ever be able to rise to a position of true manhood, until after the slave power shall have been utterly overthrown.

CHAPTER XI.

SOUTHERN LITERATURE.

Ir is with some degree of hesitation that we add a chapter on Southern Literature-not that the theme is inappropriate to this work; still less, that it is an unfruitful one; but our hesitation results from our conscious inability, in the limited time and space at our command, to do the subject justice, Few, except those whose experience has taught them, have any adequate idea of the amount of preparatory labor requisite to the production of a work into which the statistical element largely enters; espe cially is this so, when the statistics desired are not readily accessible through public and official documents. The author who honestly aims at entire accuracy in his statements, may find himself baffled for weeks in his pursuit of a single item of information, not of much importance in itself perhaps, when separately considered, but necessary in its connection with others, to the completion of a harmonious whole. Not unfrequently, during the preparation of the preceding pages, have we been subjected to this delay and annoyance.

The following brief references to the protracted prepar atory labors and inevitable delays to which authors are

SOUTHERN LITERATURE.

subjected may interest our readers, and induce them to regard with charity any deficiencies, either in detail or in guneral arrangement, which, owing to the necessary haste of preparation, these concluding pages of our work may exhibit:

Goldsmith was engaged nine years in the preparation cf - The Traveller and five years in gathering and arranging the incidents of his "Deserted Village," and two years their versificativa

the American Historian, has been more than alty years engaged upon his History of the United States, from his projection of the work to the present date; and that Hist ry is not yet completed.

Ehita no less eminent historian, from the time he began as a Dect materials for his History of the United States to the date of its completion, devoted no less than Treaty-ive years to the work.

Weisen or great lexicographer, gave thirty-five years of his life in bringing his Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language to the degree of accuracy and complete

De Vida W. Misen, after ten years' labor in the accu#LADOR of materials for a Life of Alexander Hamilton, was compiled to relinquish the work on account of im paired beata

1- James Backs of Faretteville, North Carolina, who no roy ålvund a lecture upon the Life and Character of Pa McDad was eighteen years in the collection of

Oulibicheff, a distinguished Russian author, spent twentyfive years in writing the Life of Mozart.

Examples of this kind might be multiplied to an almost indefinite extent. Indeed, almost all the poets, prosewriters, painters, sculptors, composers, and other devotees of Art, who have won undying fame for themselves, have done so through long years of earnest and almost unremitted toil.

We are quite conscious that the fullness and accuracy of statement which are desirable in this chapter cannot be attained in the brief time allowed us for its completion; but, though much will necessarily be omitted that ought to be said, we shall endeavor to make no statement of facts which are not well authenticated, and no inferences from the same which are not logically true. We can only promise to do the best in our power, with the materials at our command, to exhibit the inevitable influence of slavery upon Southern Literature, and to demonstrate that the accursed institution so cherished by the oligarchy, is no less prejudicial to our advancement in letters, than it is destructive of our material prosperity.

What is the actual condition of Literature at the South? Our question includes more than simple authorship in the various departments of letters, from the compilation of a primary reader to the production of a Scientific or Theological Treatise. We comprehend in it all the activities engaged in the creation, publication, and sale of books and periodicals, from the penny primer to the heavy folio, and from the dingy, coarse-typed weekly paper, to the large, well-filled daily.

just deny a degree of intellectual activity

has produced a few good authors-a few

rs, and a moderately large number of naginists, paragraphists, essayists and critics. ise hennast be conceded that the South has sening na may be called a literature; it is only when fermparison with the North, that we say,

string expression, "The South has no This was virtually admitted by more than one reader in de lace Southern Convention at Savannah. Sala rape on that occasion: "It is imthe Send here a literature of her own, apples and her rights a sufficiently

that she has ort, Dow, such a literature. Ce endcantly than the rounded periods Let s bok at facts, then. Frantica to the periodical literature Sve do these results: By the census of ran dude entire number of periodicals,

ky, semimathly, monthly and

slave States, including the Dis

A ser bandred and twenty-two. imte ery circulation of ninety-two rm and sixty-seven thousand one hundred

19. The number of periodicals, of every class, published in the non-slaveholding States (exclusive of California) was one thousand eight hundred and ninety-three, with an aggregate yearly circulation of three hundred and thirty-three million three hundred and eighty-six thousand and eighty-one. (333,386,081).