Page:A short history of social life in England.djvu/278

258 day and written by Richard Steele, contains an account of those concerned in the work and the famous Sir Roger de Coverley. These little dally sheets appeared with the morning coffee in every fashionable household, and their influence on the society of the day was enormous, though already a daily newspaper was in circulation. When Queen Anne came to the throne there were some nine or ten newspapers issued three times a week, the chief among them being the London Post, Flying Post, English Post, and Dyer's News Letter. Three days after her accession the first daily newspaper in England came out, under the name of the Daily Courant, a forerunner of that mighty press which is such a marked feature of our own day. Its size was fourteen inches by eight, a single sheet printed on one side only. It contained news from Naples, Rome, Vienna, Frankfort, Liége and Paris, and at the end in small print it justified its existence thus: "This Courant will be publish'd daily, being designed to give all the Material news as soon as every Post arrives, and is confin'd to half the Compass to save the Publick at least half the Impertinences of ordinary News Papers." The circulation of these daily papers was