William Harrison Ainsworth And His Friends - Vol II

THE first number of Ainsworths Magazine appeared in February, 1842, and the style of its Preliminary Address was amusingly . reminiscent of the nonchalant - almost - cheeky-notices penned by the same hand for The Bceotian and the other boyish productions of twenty years before - . . . In introducing Ainsworth, Magazine to the public, he whose name it bears pledges himself only upon one point-that at the end of the many volumes yet unformed, to which he confidently anticipates his new venture will extend, nobody shall be able to convict him of breakhg a single promise for he does not intend to make one. . . . The address, therefore, terminates with a phrase that usually serves for the commencement of a 4 WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH prospectus - It is an excellent saying of the younger Pliny --that Ainsworths Magazine not only surpassed all its predecessors, but eclipsed all its contemporaries The younger Pliny, if he said so, was, we hope, a prophet. But in the middle of his address he seems to have remembered that the new venture was not a boys plaything, but a reality and that he had at length attained to what in his legal days he had thought more desirable than the Lord Chancellorship-the ownership of a magazine So he proceeded to enunciate the aims of Ainsworths Magazine - Romance - Humorous Incident-Playful Satire-Notabilia of Travel- Papers of bold and original inquiry into the great ends for which books were written-into books themselves . . . and into the mind, which they feed and fashion. It may treat of states and statesmen, though it will avoid politics and scandals. . . . It will investigate past events where it can, and show, too, how history has reported them. These are some among the more arduous of its tasksthe constant aim will be to execute them in a popular, and never in a rigid or pedantic spirit...