direct. To prepare a general catalogue of the works of members. To be the agent for any member of the association respecting the printing of any work.
Such a union would naturally present other advantages; and as each author would retain the liberty of putting any price he might think fit on his productions, the public would have the advantage of reduction in price produced by competition between authors on the same subject, as well as of that arising from a cheaper mode of publishing the volumes sold to them.
(402.) Possibly, one of the consequences resulting from such an association, would be the establishment of a good and an impartial Review, a work the want of which has been felt for several years. The two long-established and celebrated Reviews, the unbending champions of the most opposite political opinions, are, from widely differing causes, exhibiting unequivocal signs of decrepitude and decay. The Quarterly advocate of despotic principles is fast receding from the advancing intelligence of the age; the new strength and new position which that intelligence has acquired, demands for its expression, new organs, equally the representatives of its intellectual power, and of its moral energies: whilst, on the other hand, the sceptre of the Northern critics has passed, from the vigorous grasp of those who established its dominion, into feebler hands.
(403.) It may be stated as a difficulty in realizing this suggestion, that those most competent to supply periodical criticism, are already engaged. But it is to be observed, that there are many who now supply literary criticisms to journals, the political principles
