To return again to educational works, we find that in Mangnall's Questions a property had been acquired that fully rivalled Murray's Mrs. Markham. A type now of a hideously painful and parrot-like system of teaching (what negations of talent our sisters and mothers owe to this encyclopædic volume we shudder to sum up!) it was imitated and printed in every direction. Poor Miss Mangnall! who recollects now-a-days that in 1806 she commenced her literary life with a volume of poems? A very similar book, but on scientific questions, was Mrs. Marcet's Conversations, which was not only profitable to Longman, but American booksellers, up to the year 1853, had reaped an abundant harvest from the sale of 160,000 copies.
The attempts already made by Constable and Murray to promote the sale of cheap and yet excellent books, led Longman to establish his Cabinet Encyclopædia. The management was given to Dr. Lardner, then a professor at the London University,
years ago, by Jeremy Bentham, who was succeeded in editorship by Sir John Browning, in conjunction with General Perronet Thompson, whose labours in the cause of radical reform gave him considerable notoriety at the time. They made way for the accomplished statesman Sir William Molesworth, the editor of Hobbes. A profounder thinker still, Mr. John Stuart Mill, followed. Most of his philosophical essays appeared in its pages, at a time when Grote and Mr. Carlyle were both contributing. For more than twenty years now the Review has been in the hands of Dr. Chapman, who, beginning life as a bookseller in Newgate Street, was the first English publisher to recognise the value of Emerson's writings. Under Dr. Chapman, what is now the great feature — the Quarterly Summary of Contemporary Literature — was introduced. The Review has lately attracted much attention by the bold manner in which the "Social Evil" and the "Contagious Diseases Acts" have been discussed in its columns, and these articles are generally attributed to the able pen of the editor himself.
