■172 Viscount Burnham [Jan. 27, 



Year's Day, 17*5, John Walter the first found himself in Newgate, 

 where he was left in prison for sixteen months. " At eight o'clock," 

 he said, " I am locked up every evening in common with the felons, 

 after which time no soul is permitted to have a person with him. 

 .Indue what a man must feel who has till lately enjoyed even the 

 luxuries of life." This sentence he served for the publication of 

 certain paragraphs in criticism of the Princes of the Royal House, 

 which they richly deserved. John Walter was a citizen of high 

 reputation and great respectability. Public men and writers of less 

 degree found it was not easy to escape the pillory, from which he was 

 excused. The myrmidons of Lord Bute and the Duke of Grafton 

 would have given a great deal to discover the author of the " Letters 

 of Junius," and some of the servile judges of those days would have 

 been relied upon to deal faithfully with the scribe. Mr. Fisher, in his 

 excellent book on Napoleonic rule in Germany, relates how the petty 

 German Princes frequently had editors and other pressmen whipped 

 for attacks upon their Governments. If in England it was not quite 

 so bad as this, the proceedings under the law of libel before Fox's Aet 

 was passed made the lot of the journalist a hard one, and other 

 punishments might bring with them not less misery and starvation, 

 even if not quite the same amount of degradation. No writer wished 

 to run such a risk could he manage to avoid it, and the publisher 

 and printer were the persons responsible before the law for what 

 appeared in anything they sent out. To this day every newspaper 

 has the name and address of the man who prints and publishes the 

 issue in some part of its contents, whilst in addition, in the case of a 

 private firm as distinct from a limited liability company, the name 

 of the managing proprietor has to be registered at Somerset House 

 for the purposes of the Revenue. For the past hundred and fifty 

 years men of name and fame have been iu the habit of writing 

 anonymously in the press, principally on questions of party politics. 

 Disraeli in his early years wrote constantly in the Morning Post and 

 The Times, and was very proud of his newspaper work, but it was all 

 in the mystery of incognito, which nobody ever loved more than he. 

 Canning, whom he hugely admired, had founded and edited the 

 " Anti- Jacobin " in 1797. It may truly be said that all the great 

 political adventurers, all who did not assume the robe of office by 

 right of birth — or to use Disraeli's own phrase as belonging to the 

 "Venetian Oligarchy" — at some or another in their career wrote 

 leading articles for the daily press. Apart, however, from the legal 

 liabilities of avowed authorship there were also to be considered the 

 conventions of early Victorian respectability. The Press shared with 

 the Stage some at least of the odours of Bohemia, and to acknowledge 

 the connection was not very reputable. When Thackeray, who knew 

 that side of London life surpassingly well, introduced his scenes 

 from newspaper life near the Temple, his newspaper writers bring in 

 their proprietor by the back door, so that he may not run against 



