The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851

this text contains only issue Vol. 3, No. 1. Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved to the end of the article. PREFACE TO THE THIRD VOLUME. The International Magazine has now been published one year, with a constantly increasing sale, and, it is believed, with a constantly increasing good reputation. The publishers are satisfied with its success, and will apply all the means at their disposal to increase its value and preserve its position. They have recently made such arrangements in London as will insure to the editor the use of advance sheets of the most important new English publications, and besides all the leading miscellanies of literature printed on the continent, have engaged eminent persons as correspondents, in Paris, Berlin, and other cities, so that The International will more fully than hitherto reflect the literary movement of the world. In wit and humor and romance, the most legitimate and necessary components of the popular magazine, as great a variety will be furnished as can be gleaned from the best contemporary foreign publications, and at the same time several conspicuous writers will contribute original papers. In the last year The International has been enriched with new articles by Mr. G. P. R. James, Henry Austen Layard, LL.D., Bishop Spencer, Mr. Bayard Taylor, Mr. R. H. Stoddard, Mr. Parke Godwin, Mr. John R. Thompson, Mr. Alfred B. Street, Mr. W. C. Richards, Dr. Starbuck Mayo, Mr. John E. Warren, Mr. George Ripley, Mr. A. O. Hall, Mr. Richard B. Kimball, Mrs. E. Oakes Smith, Mrs. Mary E. Hewitt, Miss Alice Carey, Miss Cooper (the author of "Rural Hours"), and many others, constituting a list hardly less distinguished than the most celebrated magazines in the language have boasted in their best days; this list of contributors will be worthily enlarged hereafter, and the Historical Review, the Record of Scientific Discovery, the monthly Biographical Notices of eminent Persons deceased, will be continued, with a degree of care that will render The International of the highest value as a repository of contemporary facts. When it is considered that periodical literature now absorbs the best compositions of the great lights of learning and literary art throughout the world,—that Bulwer, Dickens, James, Thackeray, Macaulay, Talfourd, Tennyson, Browning, and persons of corresponding rank in France, Germany, and other countries, address the public through reviews, magazines, and newspapers—the value of such an "abstract and brief