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The Knickerbocker Gallery/Preface

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4674053The Knickerbocker Gallery — Preface1855John Wakefield Francis, George Pope Morris, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, Richard Burleigh Kimball and Frederick William Shelton

PREFACE.


The Knickerbocker Magazine has been established for nearly a quarter of a century, and it is the oldest monthly of its class now or ever in America. It has been conducted with uniform ability and industry, and among its contributors have been a large proportion of our best contemporary writers. Our periodical literature has not been eminently successful, and the friends of the veteran and popular editor of the Knickerbocker have known without surprise, but with regret, that his pecuniary recompense has been altogether disproportioned to his long-continued labors, so that only a loving devotion to the work, which he has led from its infancy up to a famous maturity, could have induced him to persevere in those toils which, otherwise applied, would have brought a suitable reward of fortune.

The popular actor on the stage receives from the public substantial "benefits," and the painter or sculptor whose productions have been more celebrated than profitable, not unfrequently collects them in an exhibition which the lovers of art gladly support for his sake as well as for its attractive merits; but the editor has no such resort, as a test of the popular good-will for him, nor any extraordinary means of making up the deficits of a season in which what the world owes him has been withheld.

It seemed appropriate, in the case of Mr. Louis Gaylord Clark, to disregard precedents of neglect, and to offer him a testimonial of the esteem in which he is held by his collaborators that should be both pleasing as a compliment and valuable as a contribution to his means of happiness. It was proposed that the surviving writers for the Knickerbocker should each furnish, gratuitously, an article, and that the collection should be issued in a volume of tasteful elegance, of which the entire avails should be appropriated in building, on the margin of the Hudson, a cottage, suitable for the home of a man of letters, who, like Mr. Clark, is also a lover of nature and of rural life.

The editorial preparation of this volume was undertaken by John W. Francis, George P. Morris, Rufus W. Griswold, Richard B. Kimball, and Frederick W. Shelton; their circular to the old contributors of the Magazine was met, in all cases, by a ready and generous response; and they submit the result in. confidence that a literary miscellany of its kind has rarely, if ever, been published of which the contents are more various or uniformly excellent.

New-York, November 7, 1854.