Byron, in the days of Burns, in the days of Cowper, in the days of Pope. It is the only magazine which takes the imagination back in a direct line of light through the brightest and richest periods of English poetry, of English eloquence, and of English learning, to the darkest and most impoverished period in English history; to that gloomy time when it was the lot of many a man of letters whose works are now to be found in all but the highest rank of English classics "to lodge in a garret up four pair of stairs, to dine in a cellar among footmen out of place, to translate ten hours a day for the wages of a ditcher, to be hunted by bailiffs from one haunt of beggary and pestilence to another, from Grub Street to St. George's Fields, and from St. George's Fields to the alleys behind St. Martin's Church, to sleep on a bulk in June and in the ashes of a glass-house in December, to die in an hospital, and to be buried in a parish vault.” What other magazine or newspaper within the four seas can take us back half as far? All its own rivals and contemporaries have vanished like shadows on the wall. The Gentleman's alone remains; and in comparison with it the Times and the Edinburgh Review are things of yesterday. The Gentleman's Magazine was historical when the Times was nothing but a sheet of advertisements and gossip. It was one of the antiquities of English literature when Francis Jeffrey was strolling about the streets of London, with a guinea in his pocket, dreaming in a hazy sort of way of making a fortune by his pen as a newspaper hack. Its contributors comprised some of the keenest wits of the days when Hazlitt in a garret was writing for the newspapers at five shillings a column; and it has assisted-critically, of course--at the publication of every work of fiction, from "Tom Jones" and "Pamela" to "Guy Mannering" and "Kenilworth;" from the first fruits of Scott to the first fruits of Dickens and Thackeray. It was the earliest of the magazines to recognise the genius of Byron, perhaps of many of Byron's contemporaries ; and yet outliving, as it has, generation after generation of novelists, of poets, of critics, I do not think the shade of Cave need blush to-day to present this latest volume of The Gentleman's Magazine to his original subscribers in Elysium. This is not egotism. It is history. And if the circulation of The Gentleman's Magazine is not equal to that of its most powerful rivals as I hope it is--the fault is not the fault of The Gentleman's. It lies with the public; and all I can say is that every Englishman with the slightest appreciation of its antiquities of literature, with the slightest pretence to what Mr. Disraeli calls an historic conscience, and to all the tastes that an historic conscience implies, ought not only to make it a point of personal pride to have The Gentleman's Magazine on his own table, but-shall I add?—to use all his influence to keep it in its natural position at the head of English periodical literature. This is the true, the rightful position of The Gentleman's Magazine; and in its new series the volume which I now present to my readers is, I hope, a sufficient guarantee that in that position it will form no unworthy representative of the qualities which preeminently distinguish English periodical literature. This in itself probably most of my critics will at once set down as an outburst of the old egotistic spirit of Cave and Johnson, of the spirit which, as I said at the outset, is apt every now and then to reappear, like gout or a Roman nose in a family, in the prefaces of The Gentleman's. But it would be a transparent piece of mock modesty to affect not to feel proud of this grand old Cromlech of English literature and of the mosses and lichens that it is gathering around it; and the best justification I can have for the expression of this pride is the great and growing goodwill of the public for The Gentleman's in its new form. The present volume of The Gentleman's Magazine contains an additional number beyond the previous volumes of the New Series. I have made this change in order that a new volume may begin with the New Year. "The Valley of Poppies," which is finished this month, will be succeeded by a new story from the deservedly popular pen of Whyte Melville. Taking leave of the old love before we are on with the new, Mr. Joseph Hatton desires to thank the journals which month after month have spoken kindly of his story, the more so, that, like "Christopher Kenrick," it was written with a firm belief in the successful revival of the domestic novel and the domestic drama. The popularity of a quiet simple story, dealing with the ordinary affairs of life, in The Gentleman's Magazine, and the fortunes of the Strand Theatre resting firmly upon the "Heir at Law," may, I hope, be taken as indicative of a speedy fulfilment of the long promised return to healthier tastes than those which seek a meretricious excitement in highly wrought complications of bigamy, adultery, murder,—and burlesque. With these remarks I commend to my indulgent readers everywhere, this new volume of what some friendly critic has happily called "the oldest and youngest of the magazines." SYLVANUS URBAN. CONTENTS. VI. A Delicate Operation, and How it Ended VII.-The Hunks VIII.-The Major at Home Balboa Seas, A Ride to the. By JOAQUIN MILLER Borderland. By ROBERT STEGGALL Bygone Celebrities. By R. H. HORNE :— III. The Kemble Family-Edmund Kean-Grimaldi-Charles IV.-Samuel Ireland, and his " Shakespeare" Manuscripts-Dr. PAGE 856 366 720 83 468 Come Down to my Mexican Seas. By JOAQUIN MILLER. Comic Writers of England, On the. By CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE :- Commune, Last Days of the. By JOHN B. MARSH 234 Cry from the Ranks, A. By F. R. SYMS 359 Dartmoor. By "BLACK Moss " 205 Desert of Sahara, The Great English. A Sporting Sketch 50 Dogs at the Crystal Palace, Amongst the 478 Drums and Trumpets. A Recollection of Lyons before the War. By Scott Centenary, The. Sir Walter at his Desk. By CHARLES PEBODY. 293 485 Sea-Waif 284 "Songs Before Sunrise," To the Author of. By ROBERT STEGGALL Story of the Hostages. Faithfully Related from the Testimony of Eye-witnesses. By PERCY FITZGERALD Summer, The Death of. By ST. 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