Page:The Royal Lady's Magazine (Volume 1, 1831).djvu/21
ADDRESS.
Ladies!—We profess ourselves your Champions. Deign to accept our services. It is the only reward to which we aspire.
It has hitherto been the opprobrium of our periodical literature, that in works professedly published for your perusal, no attempt has been made to consult either the extent of your intellectual capacity, or to adapt them for the advancement of your knowledge. When a series of frivolous articles is prepared, alike destitute of mind in their conception, and of talent in their execution, the crude mass is sent forth as a fit offering to your taste and discernment.
What has been the consequence? A species of writing, infinitely below the ordinary standard of nursery lucubrations, has been manufactured, lingered awhile in an obscure existence, and finally disappeared.
And what do these facts demonstrate? Not, surely, that you are incapable of relishing works of a superior character. Were those we have described equal to your wants, they would have enjoyed your patronage. They were not so, and they have perished or are perishing.
The only approach that has been attempted to such a work as could be worthy of your approbation, was in a publication of last year, which commenced with giant promises, but dwindled into pigmy performances; because the presiding genius, whose fiat was potential, as to the means by which alone these promises could be redeemed, had made the discovery that figs, and grapes, and olives might spring from rocks and brambles. Under such tillage what but a corresponding harvest was to be expected? Its success, however, in spite of all these obstacles, in spite, too, of the incubus of gratuitous mediocrity (which is only another name, sometimes, for the furor scribendi of very small writers with very large notions of self-excellence), is a cheering prognostic of what may be looked for from the vigorous application of the same principles, unparalyzed by the same fatuity. There are various kinds of blushes which may tinge the female cheek. Two of these shall never rebuke our labours. The blush of offended modesty shall never be summoned from its sanctuary—woman's purity of thought: nor the blush of shame, from her reason, at the reflection of having devoted even an idle hour to pages of so worthless a character, that idleness itself could not be an apology for reading them.
The Royal Lady's Magazine takes high ground. It has no fear of maintaining it. In the spirit of honourable enterprise, it solicits nothing