Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Cheerless Reader One of the most genial of Atlantic essayists has lamented the disappearance of the Gentle Reader. Can it be possible that the Cheerful Reader is disappearing, too? One is loath to believe it; for if the Gentle Reader and the Cheerful Reader are both to vanish, and magazines are to be edited—as Dr. Crothers hinted —for the benefit of the Intelligent Reading Public merely, the world of periodical literature will be a dismal world indeed. Yet if one were to judge from those Letters to the Editor, which the New York "Sun," for instance, prints, and the Atlantic, for another instance, does not print, the quality of cheerfulness is nowadays sadly strained. What streams of sorrowful correspondence are directed to 4 Park Street after each issue of this magazine! And so few of them seem to flow from the pen of the Cheerful Reader! Perhaps the Cheerful Readeris busy earning his living,—too busy to write. It may be that it is only the Cheerless Persons who have leisure to take their pens in hand and "write to the editor." If the Atlantic Monthly were a "repository"; if it confined itself to the discussion of Roman antiquities, or the sonnets of Wordsworth, or the planting of the colony of Massachusetts Bay, none but the specialists would concern themselves with the opinions expressed in its pages. But it happens to be particularly interested in this present world; curious about the actual condition of politics and society, of science and commerce, of art and literature. Above all, it is engrossed with the lives of the men and women who are making America what it is and is to be. The Atlantic is fortunate enough to command the services of many writers who have something to say upon these great and perplexing topics of human interest. It is not to be expected th... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.