Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 1.djvu/136

130 of the Newspaper Press,' vol. ii. pp. 414-15, states that Gordon Bennett calculated that "by these means his infant paper [The New York Herald] would be brought into notice. So fierce were Bennett's attacks on other editors that there was nothing for them to do but to thrash their assailant. General Webb, editor of The New York Courier, was the first who resorted to this method of reply. The following day Bennett's own paper came out with a contents bill printed in the largest type the office could produce, announcing "Mr. James Gordon Bennett Publicly Horsewhipped." Passers-by could hardly believe the evidence of their own eyes, and they were obliged to buy the paper to get convinced. In a few days another contents bill appeared: "Mr. James Gordon Bennett Horsewhipped a Second Time." Bennett's contention in what he wrote of the affair was that the editorial world of New York were jealous of his high position, &c.

As an instance of a specially sensational poster the following from America would be difficult to beat:—

Was it not a fact that The Times, The Morning Post, and The Morning Advertiser did not issue contents bills until many years after other papers had done so regularly?

Among my books, I have a paper-covered volume for which I paid a penny at a second-hand stall. It is called 'Progress of British Newspapers in the Nineteenth Century.' On p. 195 of this book there is a passage, in the final lines of which I think may be detected the origin of the contents bill as we now know it:—

 (12 S. i. 67).—It is rather surprising to meet with the false quantity Vasconia in the verse of so famous a scholar. His son would hardly have been guilty of forgetting his Juvenal in this way. I have somewhere seen the saying "Apud Biscayos bibere et vivere idem est" attributed to an emperor. This looks like the original of Scaliger's epigram, but I cannot remember where I found it. Can any one furnish the reference?

(11 S. xii. 221, 289, 308).—A thin volume, I think 8vo, is published on the history of this family. I presented a copy to one of the name twenty or twenty-five years ago, but cannot recall author or publisher. Second-hand booksellers will readily do so.

(11 S. xii. 501; 12 S. i. 36, 57, 96).—In The Genealogical Magazine, vol. vii. p. 259, will be found reproduced, from 'The Blood Royal of Britain,' a picture of Frances, Duchess of Suffolk, elder daughter of the Princess Mary (Tudor) by Charles (Brandon), Duke of Suffolk, with her second husband, Adrian Stokes. Nicolas's 'Synopsis' relates that her husband, Henry Grey, Marquis of Dorset and Duke of Suffolk, was attainted and beheaded in 1554, when all his honours became forfeited.