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LONDON:

CASSELL, PETIER, & GALPIN, BELLE SAUVAGE WORKS,

LUDGATE HILL, F.C.

PREFACE.

WE have the satisfaction of presenting to our readers this month the last number of the Seventy-fifth Volume of this Magazine.

We have laboured assiduously, with the kind and efficient aid of our helpers in the work, to furnish matter from month to month which might sustain the reputation of the Magazine, and secure its efficiency for the purposes for which it is published. How far we have succeeded must be left to the judgment of our readers.

It cannot but be known that every year the task of the Editor becomes, more exacting. The severe competition with which all such publications as ours have to contend; the great and almost astonishing change of taste which has come over readers in the last ten years, fostered as it is by the light reading with which many of our professedly religious serials abound; and the immense preoccupation of mind in politics and business everywhere prevalent, make the work of an Editor of such a Magazine as this more perplexing and less encouraging from month to month. Everything of this kind now has to stand on its merits; and on the one hand we are expected to compete, in price and otherwise, with those who have a hundredfold wider market than we have, and on the other restrictions are imposed by a denominational name and use, and a religions aim and theological tone, which shut us out from access to classes other than that for which we labour. Criticism, even from this class, becomes more imperious and unmanageable, and the best an Editor can do is only an approximation to his own sense of what is reasonably or unreasonably expected of him. The Magazine of thirty years ago

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