THE PERIODICAL PRESS. 197 



fundamental creator, but the munificent distributor. You may be 

 heartily sick of politics, commerce, and the rest of the perverse pre- 

 sent ; but the newspaper claims your ear as its prey, and remorselessly 

 pursues you for ever. Dart away by the mail to escape from some 

 detested news of Bourbon or St. Nicholas, and take shipping- at the 

 Land's End, " the paper'' goes with you; hide yourself where you 

 will, it finds you out ; it is the bellman of your social existence, your 

 shadow, your familiar; in short, there is no avoiding it. The first 

 house we set our foot in, on arriving at Mexico, in 1825, in time of 

 war, trouble, and yellow fever, and before speculators and travellers 

 had ventured their lives and fortunes to work mines, or write a book, 

 there sat the vice-consul's clerk, blowing swift clouds from a 

 rnuch-excited cigar, behind a copy of the incorrigible, omnipresent 

 Times newspaper! 



It is to the Italians we are indebted for the idea of newspapers. 

 The title of their Gazzettas was, it is thought, derived from the word 

 Gazzera, a magpie or chatterrer; but much more likely from a 

 farthing coin peculiar to the city of Venice, called Gazzetta, the 

 common price of all newspapers. 



The first paper, however, was a Venetian one, and only monthly, 

 and was merely the newspaper of the government. Mr. Chalmers, 

 in his life of Ruddiman, assures us that the jealous government did 

 not allow a printed newspaper, and the Venetian Gazetta continued 

 long after the invention of printing, to the close of the 16th century, 

 to be distributed in manuscript. 



It is a remarkable fact, which history was either too idle to 

 ascertain, or too much ashamed to relate, that the arms of Cromwell 

 communicated to Scotland, with other benefits, the first newspaper 

 which had ever "illuminated" the gloom of the North. Either army 

 carried its own printer with it, expecting either to convince by its 

 reasoning, or delude by its falsehood. 



These were, however, but extraordinary Gazettes, and not regu- 

 larly published. The first newspaper in the collection at the British 

 Museum is marked No. 50, and is in Roman, not in black letter ; it 

 contains articles of news, like the present London Gazette. The 

 first daily paper was published after the abdication of James II. and 

 took for its popular title that of The Orange Intelligencer. $ 



In the reign of Queen Anne there was but one daily paper, the 

 others were weekly. Some attempted to introduce literary subjects; 

 and Sir Richard Steele then formed the plan of his Tatler ; but it 

 remained for the elegant Addison to banish the painful topic of 

 politics from his interesting pages, and from his time periodical 

 literature and newspapers became distinct works. The following 

 advertisement is copied from an old Norwich newspaper, printed by 

 Henry Crossgrove, in the year 1739. "This is to inform my friends 

 and customers, that on Saturday next this newspaper will be sold 

 for a penny, and continue at that price. The reason of my raising it 

 to a penny is, because I cannot afford to sell it under any longer, 

 and I hope none of my customers will think it dear at a penny, since 

 they shall always have the best intelligence, besides other diversions." 



At first newspapers were extremely small and limited in their ex- 



