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; especially 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 preparatory 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 general arrangement, which, owing to the necessary haste of preparation, these concluding pages of our work may exilir:

Gelismith was engaged nine years in the preparation ot-The Traveler," and five years in gathering and arrang. ing the incidents of his "Deserted Village," and two years in their verstication.

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

less eminent historian, from the time he began to alleet materials for his History of the United States to the date of its completion, devoted no less than Twenty-five years to the work.

Wedsin our great lexicographer, gave thirty-five years of his in bringing his Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language to the degree of accuracy and complete.

De Vila W. Mason, after ten years' labor in the accumalamnon of materia's for a Life of Alexander Hamilton, was onpad to relinquish the work on account of impaired Malth

- Vares Banks, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, who nomyälund a lecture upon the Life and Character of Fauci was eighteen years in the collection of

1

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.

I were just a deny a degree of intellectual activity he has produced a few good authors-a few

Pers, and a moderately large number of Lever nagacinisus, paragraphists, essayists and critics. Ausway then it must be conceded that the South has SHEGH may be caled a literature; it is only when Ten romparison with the North, that we say, soring expression, "The South has no The was virtually admitted by more than one Shera Convention" at Savannah.

SaSTha ser on that occasion: "It is im

So here a literature of her own,

Trampies and her rights; a sufficiently

na she has now, such a literature.

3=tly than the rounded periods

=

Let us lock at facts, then. antic so the periodical literature

these results: By the census of

TNT the entire number of periodicals,
Tekly, semi-monthly, monthly and

On the slave States, including the Dis-
even hundred and twenty-two.

semete perry circulation of ninety-two

מבורגmins and sixtyseven thousand one hundred 29. The number of periodicals,

T

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