TO CORRESPONDENTS.

We take great pleasure in acknowledging the numerous favors of our correspondents. Our recent absence will preclude us from particularising. Suffice it to say, that there are on hand, necessarily unexamined, some fifteen packages of prose and twenty, or more, of poetry, many of which contain several effusions. Constant pressing engagements prevent us from replying to many letters; but most cordially do we thank their authors. The kindest wishes and the most flattering expressions come to us from every quarter. We take leave to publish the following extracts, from letters received during our late trip to the South. But we must first return our acknowledgments to the many generous friends, to whom that trip owes its pleasure and its profit. We found many hearts glowing with true Southern ardor, and resume our " chair" with more hope and pride than ever. In the South, we will plant a Lever to raise " ten thou sand (Subscribers) a year."

Mr. B. B. Minor :-You may think somewhat strange of my writing to you so soon after having received my subscription to your valuable periodical, through the Postmaster, at in this State. And may inquire what business

I can have with you.

My purpose in writing is two fold. In the first place, I have been a subscriber to the Southern Literary Messenger, since the beginning of the year 1838,-and the pleasure I have received from its monthly visits has continued to increase with each number. I did apprehend somewhat a "falling off," after the death of its former Editor, Mr. White, but I am happy to inform you that, in this matter, I have been disappointed; so much so, that I have determined to be the very last man to order a discontinuance, and the very first to transmit the payment of a volume. Can you, by any means, supply me with the numbers preceding 1838. I know you have them not in your office; but, can you, by any means, procure them for me, either bound or unbound? I will pay almost any price for them.

In the next place. I have recently moved from -, Georgia, to this place; and, among a population of some 8,000 persons, I find that only two or three are subscribers to your work. Now, I am willing to assist you in this matter; believing that the greater the number of subscribers, the greater and more interesting will be the work subscribed for. I am willing to become an Agent for your work, and will do my best to promote your interest, by procuring you an additional number of subscribers, "without fee or reward," and shall be sufficiently rewarded in so doing, by the reflection that I have contributed in sustaining a periodical, purely Southern and altogether worthy the patronage of the South.

T, ALABAMA, February 2nd, 1844.

The Messenger for January, is an excellent number; opening the new volume in fine style, and promising that it shall equal any of its predecessors. I trust you will soon realize your "Ten Thousand Subscribers." No man in the South, who pretends to literary taste at all, should be without the Messenger. It is not only our solitary intellectual restaurateur in this quarter of the Union, but it is the "Blackwood" of American periodicals,-and has already done more for the advancement of the true interests of our people, than any other single influence. I speak advisedly in what I say, for I have read the work from its first thin number, to its present goodly issue.

OUR EXCHANGE PAPERS and other friends of the Messenger, will greatly oblige us by inserting the following, which is much shorter than the Prospectus; or the Prospectus, if they prefer it.

TO THE WHOLE SOUTH AND WEST.

To you the Southern Literary Messenger, one of the few periodicals you have, presents its claims for support. Common consent places it in the front rank of American periodicals; and, reflecting as it does your own image, should you not feel proud to give it that wide circulation to which its aims, its success under great obstacles and its merits entitle it? It is published monthly, at only five dollars per annum in advance.

Each number contains 64 pages of valuable matter; 16 pages more than most of the three dollar magazines and twice as much as some of them. It is thus sufficiently small for a month's reading; and large enough to contain a great variety of articles and to admit those of a more important and useful character than are ever found elsewhere. Every subscriber to the Messenger obtains a large book, that will be valuable when years have passed by. It is the cheapest periodical, for its size and value, in the United States; and what true son of yours would not contribute something to THE PRINCIPLE of cherishing a Literary organ, at home; especially when you have peculiar institutions and feelings of which the Messenger has ever been and will be the able and zealous defender. It has promoted your interests, and to you confidently appeals, for your generous and determined support. We repeat, that we aim at TEN THOUSAND subscribers, a small fraction of those who can easily afford it; and we invoke the aid of every one who has the least sympathy with our efforts. This is the time for subscribers to come in, as we have just commenced the tenth volume.-Ed. Mess. RIGHMOND, VIRGINIA, December 29th, 1843.

Subscribers will please remit; as they thereby save us much, without loss to themselves.

CONDITIONS OF THE SOUTHERN LITERARY MESSENGER.

1. THE SOUTHERN LITERARY MESSENGER is published, in monthly numbers. Each number contains not less than 64 large super-royal pages, printed on good type, and in the best manner, and on paper of the most beautiful and expensive quality.

2. The "MESSENGER" hereafter will be mailed on or about the first day of every month in the year. Twelve numbers make a volume,--and the price of subscription is $5 per volume, payable in advance. THE YEAR COMMENCES WITH THE JANUARY NUMBER. NO SUBSCRIPTION RECEIVED FOR LESS THAN A YEAR, BUT SUBSCRIPTIONS RECEIVED ANY TIME DURING THE YEAR.

3. The risk of transmitting subscriptions by mail will be

assumed by the proprietor. But every subscriber thus transmitting payment, is requested (besides taking proper evidence of the fact and date of mailing) to retain a memorandum of the number and particular marks of the note sent. 4. If a subscription is not directed to be discontinued before the first number of a volume has been published, it will be taken as a continuance for another year.

5. Any one enclosing a $20 current bill, at one time, with the names of FIVE NEW subscribers, shall receive FIVE copies of the MESSENGER for one year.

6. No subscription will be discontinued while anything remains due thereon, unless at the option of the editor. RICHMOND, VA., Nov. 1843.

IF Active and faithful canvassers for the Messenger, will receive liberal commissions.

SOUTHERN LITERARY MESSENGER.

APRIL, 1844.

REPLY TO E. D. AND MR. SIMMS. He insinuates that those who uphold this enormity

Though our own views as to the benefits of an International Copyright coincide with those of Mr. Simms, yet we cheerfully invite attention to the following very able and gentlemanly communication, from a writer well known to our readers. The object of the Messenger is the advancement of Truth and the real interests of AMERICAN LITERATURE; and it will always promote the liberal discussion of important questions.

We regret exceedingly that we are constrained to divide the "reply;" but this will only affect the reader's impatience to peruse the whole, and not at all the force of the argument. [ED. MESS.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE SOU. LIT. MESSENGER.

have very imperfect notions of moral honesty, and, to evince his abhorrence of such monstrous offenders in still stronger terms, declares that they should be hung up (under the authority, I suppose, of the second article of war) like other pirates to the yard-arm. Not satisfied with denouncing our moral delinquency in this particular, he seems so thoroughly imbued with the prejudices of Smith, Carlyle and Dickens, that he charges a want of faith" as our national characteristic, and broadly intimates, that repudiation, breach of trust and embezzlement are looked on in this country as mere fashionable peccadillos-as the indications of superior genius, venial at least, if not laudable. These Sir:-From two articles in your last January are hard terms and bitter reproaches which E. D. number on the subject of International Copyright has applied so unsparingly to his countrymen, and, I discover, that some of your correspondents are if true, justify to the fullest extent all the ribaldry strenuous advocates of that measure, and defend its and abuse lavished on us by the scribbling tourists justice and policy by arguments similar to those of Europe. Should any American presume, herewhich have been so clamorously reiterated by in-after, to accuse these veracious travellers of caterested English authors. I should not have ven-lumny and misrepresentation, they could confitured to mingle in the controversy, had not the partizans of this legislative novelty, in a spirit of wholesale defamation, charged the American people with an obliquity of moral perception and criminal indifference to the sacred rights of property, because they have been slow to embrace a scheme fraught with the most disastrous consequences to the cause of popular education and to the interests of the American publisher. Had we been assailed only by the hungry writers and pensioned libellers of England, I should have been content to pass by such illiberal invectives as the harmless effusion of foreign ignorance, prejudice, or malice; but when a native citizen, whose accuracy and impartiality might be deemed unimpeachable, joins in the hiss of reproach, and condescends to endorse these aspersions, silence might, perhaps, be construed into an acknowledgment of guilt.

Your correspondent, E. D., does not scruple to assert, that the cheap republication of foreign books in this country is "founded in fraud and supported by injustice;" that it is a species of "robbery ;" that it is a system of piracy and plunder, a violation of the laws of national courtesy and honor."

VOL. X-25

dently appeal to this testimony of a native writer as conclusive proof of their candor-as the strongest confirmation of their vile imputations on our national character.

It is apparent that E. D. is a scholar and a gentleman; and I am the more astonished, therefore, that he should have disfigured his pages with such odious charges and "base comparisons." Yet, in justice to your correspondent, I am persuaded that he does not intend to be understood, as his language would import, to allege a general depravity of moral sentiment in the American people, and his gross vituperation should be received rather as the rhetorical declamation of an advocate striving to sustain his cause, than as the deliberate censure of a calm and dispassionate inquirer. The refusal or failure of some of the States to provide for the payment of their public debt, the frequent instances of peculation and embezzlement among us during a few past years would seem, indeed, to substantiate one part of his indictment against the honor and good faith of Americans. No one laments more than I do these disgraceful occurrences, or has beheld them with sensations of deeper mortifi

can genius, by ceding to the enemy the stronghold of a monopoly in our own literary market.

The conspiracy of English authors against our mental independence, which your correspondent professes to have detected, is, I am sure, a mere figment of the imagination. Mr. Simms is a poet, and exercises the usual license of his craft in "giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name." In the prosecution of such a design as he imputes to the writers of England, concerted action among so great a multitude would be totally impracticable, and that very difficulty must demonstrate, that a scheme so preposterous would never be undertaken. It were a strange method, indeed, "to suppress thinking, to paralyze the original energies of American genius" by supplying us with the best

cation. They have been the consequence of a forcibly depicted by your eloquent correspondent, period of unbridled speculation and unexampled would, on the contrary, place British writers on the pecuniary pressure, which, in all countries, have vantage-ground in their fancied warfare on Ameribeen the fruitful parents of fraud and crime. Witness the relaxation of morals which pervaded England after the South Sea scheme, and France after the explosion of Law's Mississippi project. On such occasions the designing are unmasked and the weak perverted by the force of strong temptation, while the great mass of society remains untouched by the prevailing contagion. The corruption is only superficial and temporary, and will be speedily cleansed and healed by the native vigor of our moral constitution. Your correspondent will surely allow, that the great body of our people are sound and detest, as much as he does, these shameful examples of public and private profligacy. In the sequel we shall see whether E. D. is warranted, either by reason or justice, in denouncing the people of the United States as false to the treatises on every possible subject, with the finest claims of honor and good faith, because they have not surrendered to the taunts and importunities of English writers the boon of International Copyright. For myself, I shall not be deterred by the "argument of epithet" from vindicating our government in its determination to be neither bullied nor cajoled into the adoption of a system, the policy of which, to say the best of it, is problematical.

specimens of poetry and fiction, with the purest models of human composition. Such a plan could only succeed on the hypothesis, that education weakens the understanding; that cultivation corrupts the taste; that the most effectual mode of destroying thought is to supply abundant materials for thinking. We can conceive of no motive for so singular a project but to establish a political The temper of E. D. and your other correspon- ascendancy, and for such purposes it would be ut dent, Mr. Simms, in their animadversions on the terly futile. As well tie Sampson with a thread, conduct of our people towards foreign authors, as hope to fetter the infant giant of America with though they evidently coincide in their general these slender and fantastic ligaments. Our history, conclusions, is widely different. Indeed the latter, since the revolution, exhibits no indication of an in his elegant essay, manifests a spirit so exclu- abject reverence for British maxims. Instead of sively national, that he deems our political enfran- halting with cautious timidity in the rear of Eurochisement but half accomplished so long as we pean precedent, we have advanced with a daring are dependent on Britain for our literary nourish- and confident step in the career of improvement, ment, and insists that we shall remain in a state of acknowledging no guide but reason, and discussing mental vassalage, scarcely less galling than colo- the lessons of past times as well as the example of nial subjection, until we succeed in building up a other nations in a spirit of bold and liberal inquiry. domestic literature, peculiar and distinctive. He Let this phantom then, which, if it were real, is seems to apprehend, that British books will cor- powerless for mischief, no longer haunt Mr. Simms' rupt our taste and poison the fountains of public imagination. The American mind is not of that sentiment to imagine, that the constant dissemina- texture to be daunted, or subdued by mere paper tion of her numerous publications among us is the artillery. That a gentleman of Mr. Simms' sagaresult of a systematic scheme in the mother coun- city should have been betrayed into so wild a theory try to "make us a subject people, to suppress think- is a fact, which I can only account for by the proing, to throw every impediment in the way of know- pensity of all speculative minds to disdain what is ledge, and to perpetuate her tyranny over Ameri- obvious, and to refer to some deep and recondite can industry by paralyzing the original energies of cause the solution of the most ordinary phenomena. American genius." I confess I cannot perceive When Mr. Simms insists so strenuously on the

what bearing these propositions, admitting their importance of native literature as a means of effecttruth, or the other facts and reasonings advanced ing our complete intellectual emancipation, I infer by Mr. Simms, have upon the question of Interna- from the tenor of his remarks, that he desires it to tional Copyright; though their connexion with assume a peculiar anomalous character, specifically that subject will, probably, be explained in his pro-distinguished from that of every other nation. If mised inquiry into the causes of the present lan- this be his meaning, I must be permitted to dissent guishing state of our literature. On the first im- from such a view of the subject. Is there not pression I would conclude, that International Copy- danger, should we venture upon a new and untried right, so far from being a panacea for the evils so path, that, as we deviate from the great English