THE following record of the rise and progress of an eminent London publishing-house forms a chapter of extreme interest in the history of the century, and more especially of the reign of Queen Victoria. It furnishes a typical instance of the combination of intelligence, foresight, and energy, which distinguishes that period. It exemplifies the rise, we might almost say the creation, of a new intellectual class of the people, and the prodigious progress that has been made in supplying that class, not with exciting and deleterious means of subsistence, but with the food best adapted for its solid growth. It chronicles an advance of which we may be proud in one of the highest departments of mental progress and one of the noblest of the arts—an advance which may claim a special merit among the great movements of the day, because music ministers to the imagination of man, and leaves untouched his baser faculties. This may be emphatically said of the noble music which forms the foundation of the fabric raised by the house of Novello.

Moreover, this record shows how dependent men and things are on one another, and how secure those undertakings are which rise from small beginnings.