Sir," said DR. JOHNSON, "let us take a walk down Fleet Street." TEMPLE BAR A London Magazine FOR TOWN AND COUNTRY READERS. CONDUCTED BY GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA, AUTHOR OF "TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK,” GASLIGHT AND VOL. I. MARCH 1861. LONDON: OFFICE OF "TEMPLE BAR," 122 FLEET STREET. WARD AND LOCK, 158 FLEET STREET. NEW YORK: WILLMER AND ROGERS. The rights of translation are reserved. PREFACE. TIME passes so rapidly, and our monthly issue is of so considerable a bulk, that with the publication of our fourth Number it has been found expedient to put forth a book of nearly six hundred pages, being the FIRST VOLUME OF "TEMPLE BAR." At this, the first halting-place in a career which has already been most encouraging, and which bids fair to be permanently prosperous, it may not be out of place to usher in the volume with a few prefatory remarks, bearing a little on the past, lightly touching on the present, and just adverting to the future. TEMPLE BAR has been a great success. This simple piece of information cannot fail to be gratifying to the many thousands of good friends, who, since December last, have hastened, month after month, to invest their shillings in purchasing the Magazine, and to read what our fellow labourers and the Conductor have had to say. Nor will the plain intimation of a plain fact be, perhaps, uninteresting to the few ladies and gentlemen who were good enough to predict at the very outset that "TEMPLE BAR Wouldn't last," and "couldn't pay." We mean to make it last and so far as its being, up to the present moment, a profitable undertaking, neither the Editor, nor the Proprietor, nor (I hope) the Contributors, have seen any reason to doubt that TEMPLE BAR is paying very well indeed. Looking back at the prospectus, I ask myself how far I have been enabled to carry out the promises therein made either directly or indirectly to the public. I have done my best to give my readers every month an ample shillingsworth. I would give them pictorial illustrations; but when the dimensions of the first Number had to be agreed upon, we hesitated long as to which was the better course,—to furnish an etching, and a certain number of woodcuts in illustration of our stories and essays, or to give the public sixteen pages of letter-press in addition to the complement of matter we had at first contemplated. It was impossible (unless we had discovered the mines of Golconda underneath Temple Bar) to carry out both courses with what we believed to be a due regard for the interests of our subscribers, we elected to pursue the latter. I still, however, keep the door for illustration open. I am sharpening my own amateur |