Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/445

Rh ENGLAND.] NEWSPAPERS 415 &quot; doubled the size and price of the book, and has brought the profit from 200 to 400 or 500 a year.&quot; l The appeal was in vain. It was resolved to suppress The Intelligencer, and to establish a court newspaper under a new title and new editorship. London At that time the great plague had driven the court to Gazette. Oxford. The first number of The Oxford Gazette was published on the 14th of November 1665. With the pub lication of the twenty-fourth number it became The London Gazette. Williamson had the general control of it. For a considerable time Charles Perrot, a member of Oriel College, was the acting editor. 2 For several years the Gazette was regularly translated into French by one Moranville. During the Stuart reigns generally, its con tents were very meagre, although in the reign of Anne some improvement is already visible. More than a century - after the establishment of the Gazette, we find Secretary Lord Weymouth addressing a circular 3 to the several secretaries of legation and the British consuls abroad, in which he says, &quot; The writer of the Gazette has represented that the reputation of that paper is greatly lessened, and the sale diminished, from the small portion of foreign news with which it is supplied.&quot; He desires that each of them will send regularly all such articles of foreign intelligence as may appear proper for that paper, &quot; taking particular care, as the Gazette is the only paper of authority printed in this country, never to send anything concerning the authenticity of which there is the smallest doubt.&quot; From such humble beginnings has arisen the great repertory of State Papers, now so valuable to the writers and to the students of English history. It has appeared twice a week, in a continuous series, for nearly two hundred and twenty years. 4 The Gazette brings to the public an income ex ceeding 20,000 a year. The editorship is of course a Government appointment, and it has a salary of 800. The office is now commonly given in reward of distin guished service upon the ordinary newspaper press. In November 1675 L Estrange not yet tired of journal ism commenced The City Mercury, or Advertisements concerning Trade. This he followed up in 1679 by DomesticJc Intelligence, published gratis for the promoting of Trade. The very day after the departure of James II. was marked by the appearance of three newspapers The Uni versal Intelligence, The English Courant, and The London Courant. Within a few days more these were followed by The London Mercury, The Orange Gazette, The London Intelligence, The Harlem Currant, and others. The Licens ing Act, which was in force at the date of the Kevolu- tion, expired in 1692, but was continued for a year, after which it finally ceased. On the appearance of a paragraph in The Flying Post of 1st April 1697, which appeared to the House of Commons to attack the credit of the Exchequer Bills, leave was given to bring in a Bill &quot;to prevent the writing, printing, or publishing of any news without licence&quot;; but the Bill was thrown out in an early stage of its progress. That Flying Post which gave occasion to this attempt was also noticeable for a new method of printing, which it thus announced to its customers, &quot; If any gentleman has a mind to oblige his country friend or correspondent with this account of public affairs, he can have it for twopence .... on a sheet of fine paper, half of which being left blank, he may thereon write his own affairs, or the material news of the day.&quot; In 1696 Edward Lloyd the virtual founder of the 1 State Papers, Domestic, Charles II., cxxxv. 24. 2 Anthony Wood, Athenie Oxonienses, sect. &quot;Perrot.&quot; 3 Calendar of Home-0ffi.ce Papers, 1766-69, p. 483 (1879). 4 A complete set exceeds four hundred volumes, with four volumes of index, and is now of extreme rarity. world-famous &quot;Lloyd s&quot; of commerce started a thrice-a- week paper, Lloyd s News, which had but a brief exist ence in its first shape, but was the precursor of the Lloyds List of the present day. No. 76 of the original paper contained a paragraph referring to the House of Lords, for the appearance of which a public apology must, the pub lisher was told, be made. He preferred to discontinue his publication (February 1697). Nearly thirty years afterwards he in part revived it, under the title of Lloyd s List, published at first weekly, afterwards twice a week. 5 This dates from 1726. It Is now published daily. It was in the reign of Queen Anne that the newspaper press first became really eminent for the amount of intel lectual power and of versatile talent which was employed upon it. It was also in that reign that the press was first fettered by the newspaper stamp. The accession of Anne was quickly followed by the appearance of the first success- First ful London daily newspaper, The Daily Courant (1703). London Seven years earlier, in 1695, The Postboy had been started dailypape as a daily paper, but only four numbers appeared. The Courant was published and edited by the well-known and learned printer Samuel Buckley, who explained to the public that &quot;the author has taken care to be duly fur nished with all that comes from abroad, in any language. .... At the beginning of each article he will quote the foreign paper from which it is taken, that the public, seeing from what country a piece of news .comes, with the allowance of that Government, may be better able to judge of the credibility and fairness of the relation. Nor will he take upon himself to give any comments, .... supposing other people to have sense enough to make reflexions for themselves.&quot; Then came, in rapid succes sion, a crowd of new competitors for public favour, of less frequent publication. The first number of one of these, The Country Gentleman s Courant (1706), was given away gratuitously, and made a special claim to public favour on the ground that &quot; here the reader is not only diverted with a faithful register of the most remarkable and momentary [i.e., momentous] transactions at home and abroad, .... but also with a geographical description of the most material places mentioned in every article of news, whereby he is freed the trouble of looking into maps.&quot; On the 19th of February 1704, whilst still imprisoned Defoe s in Newgate for a political offence, Defoe began his famous paper The Review (see DEFOE). At the outset it was pub lished weekly, afterwards twice, and at length three times a week. It continued substantially in its first form until July 29, 1712; and a complete set is of extreme rarity. From the first page to the last it is characterized by the manly boldness and persistent tenacity with which the almost unaided author utters and defends his opinions on public affairs against a host of able and bitter assailants. Some of the numbers were written during travel, some in Edinburgh. But The Review appeared regularly. When interrupted by the pressure of the Stamp Act, the writer modified the form of his paper, and began a new series (August 2, 1712, to June 11, 1713). In those early and monthly supplements of his paper which he entitled &quot; Advice from the Scandalous Club,&quot; and set apart for the discussion of questions of literature and manners, and sometimes of topics of a graver kind, Defoe to some extent anticipated the Toiler and Spectator. In 1705 he severed those supplements from his chief newspaper, and published them twice a week as The Little Review. But they soon ceased to appear. Not again to revert to Defoe as an 5 Frederick Martin, History of Lloyd s, 66-77 and 107-120. The great collection of newspapers in the British Museum contains only one number of Lloyd s News ; but sixty-nine numbers may be seen in the Bodleian Library. Of the List, also, no complete series is known to exist ; that in the library of Lloyd s begins with 1740.