"The Nottingham Journal," began 1714, (printed on two octavo leaves,) which still lives, and without knowing or caring about its politics, for, like all others, it has changed with the times. Agreeable to the following quotation of De Toque ville, I say, long may it live. "A newspaper can drop the same thought into a thousand minds at the same moment; it is an adviser who does not require to be sought, but who comes to you of its own accord, and talks briefly every day, without distracting your private affairs. Newspapers, therefore, become more necessary in proportion as men become more equal, and individuals more to be feared; to suppose that they only serve to protect freedom would be to diminish their importance; they maintain civilization."

The oldest London newspaper now in existence, is the "Morning Herald," which is only 76 years old. "The Times," which has the largest circulation, has only existed 57 years; this paper first began to be printed by steam power, 29th November, 1814, but it was not until after a series of experiments, continuedly carried on till the 3d December, 1824, that they considered the experiment completed; at first the machine only threw off 1100 in one hour, but at the latter period, the machine (invented by Messrs. Konig and Bauer) was so far improved as to throw off 2000 per hour. For a long time the writer had a paper of each trial by him, but he regrets they are now lost.

The following extraordinary instance of steam navigation, steam travelling, and steam printing, is one of the wonderful instances of this mechanical age.

In December, 1841, the steam ship Great Western fired her gun ten miles from Bristol, at half past ten o'clock, on Monday night, thirteen days from New York. The reporter of the Times newspaper went on board, left her again before eleven, he reached London in the mail train at half past five; the intelligence which she brought was printed, and a copy was put into her cabin window, as she was still in the roadstead, by one o'clock, all having been accomplished in fifteen hours."

Such is the effect of that scientific combination of powers which has been well described in the following quartrain:

Perhaps the following anecdote, which the writer heard related by Sir Richard Phillips, will be amusing to newspaper printers, to them there is a moral in it: "While I was at Not

tingham, I fell in with a plain elderly man, an ancient reader of the Leicester Herald,' a paper which I published for some years in the halcyon days of my youth. Its reputation secured me many a hearty shake by the hand, as I passed through the midland counties. I abandoned it, in 1795, for the Monthly Magazine, and exchanged Leicester for London.

This ancient reader, hearing that I was in Nottingham, came to me with a certain paper in his hand, to call me to an account, for the wearisome hours which an article in it had cost him, and his friends. I looked at it, and saw it headed Dutch Mail, and it professed to be a column of original Dutch, which this honest man had been labouring to translate, for he said he had not met with any other such specimen of Dutch. The sight of it brought the following circumstances to my recollection. On the evening before one of our publications, my men and boys were frolicing in the printing office, and they overturned two or three colums of the paper. The chief point was to get ready, in some way or other, for the Nottingham and Derby coaches, which, at four in the morning, required 4 or 500 papers. After every exertion, we were short nearly a column, but there stood in the gallies, a tempting column of pie. Now, unlettered reader, mark: pie is a jumble of odd letters, gathered from the floor, &c. of a printing office, but set on end, in any manner, to be distributed at leisure in their proper places. Some letters are topsy turvy, often ten or twelve consonants come together, and then so many vowels, with as whimsical a juxtaposition of stops. I suddenly bethought me, that this might be called Dutch, and after writing a head, "Dutch Mail," I subjoined a statement, that "just as our paper was going to press, the Dutch Mail had arrived, but that as we had not time to make a translation, we had inserted its intelligence in the original." I then overcame the scruples of my overseer, and the pie was made up to the extent wanted, and off it went as original Dutch, into Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. In a few hours, other matter in plain English, supplied its place for our local publication. Of course, all the linguists, schoolmasters, high bred village politicians, and correspondents of the Ladies' Diary, set their wits to work to translate my Dutch; and I once had a collection of letters, containing speculations on the subject, or demanding a literal translation of that which appeared to be so intricate. How the Dutch could read it, was incomprehensible! My Nottingham quidnunc was one of the number, and it appears that at times, for above four and thirty years, he had bestowed on it his anxious attention. I told him the story, and he left me, 'vowing, that as I had deceived him once, he never would believe a newspaper again.""

Lords

The tax on newspapers began 1714. "The attacks on the ministry generally appeared in short pamphlets, newspapers, and loose sheets, which were sold at a penny each. Oxford and Bolinbrook, laid a tax of a halfpenny on these cheap publications; but they failed in their object of suppressing them: Swift sorely complains, that while the tories were discouraged by the sum, and left of buying the loose sheets of their party, the whig papers continued to flourish, a proof of the superior wealth, popularity, or wit, of the opposition." History of Europe.

This tax, in the shape of a stamp, still continues, and, by some small talking people, is called "a tax on knowledge." But if we look closely into this affair, perhaps we shall discover the contrary. In consequence of their being stamped, they go free all over the country; positively free of any cost by post, and so have they gone, I believe, from the beginning. In Pope's day he wrote

"Gazettes, sent gratis down and frank'd,

For which my patron's freely thank'd."

Hit was not for this stamp, the postage would have to be paid by somebody, in some shape or other, if out of London. But by having the stamp, which the printer has already paid to the government, this arrangement greatly facilitates the delivery; the postman hands in the newspaper as directed, and is off in an instant.

Shenstone, the poet (who died 1763,) divided the readers of newspapers into seven classes, viz: 1. The ill-natured to look at the list of bankrupts; 2. The poor to the price of bread; 3. The stock jobber to the lies of the day; 4. The old maids to the marriages; 5. The prodigals to the deaths; 6. The monopolizers to the hopes of a bad harvest; 7. The boarding school, and all other young misses, to all matters relative to Gretna Green.

The writer has often made enquiries, why the farmers take a country newspaper? and has invariably been informed: The master to know the state of the London markets, in corn and cattle; the mistress to read the horrible accounts of fires, accidents, and murders; the sons to know where the hounds throw off, and other sporting subjects; the daughters to know who are married and dead.

“There is a marked difference between the newspapers of France and England: in France, every journal has its party; in England, every party has its journal; in France, the people are made by the journal; in England, they are edited by mer,

who write similar opinions to those to whom they are addressed."

"There are 525 newspapers in Great Britain, 130 of which are issued from London." Sheffield Mercury, 29th July, 1843. What an interesting series of volumes the history of all these "folio sheets of four pages," which ever were issued, would make? what a view of human nature would they unfold? Talk of novels, romances, tragedies, comedies, and farces, these would vanish into insignificance; talk of poetry, from pastoral to epic, nothing would be equal to this history. The various trickery, bribery, threatenings, both by the government and individuals, the various motives which influenced all the parties engaged; the pullers of the wires of this momentous machinery, of these most interesting and momentous periods. What species of writing could equal this? Nothing that as yet has gone before us! If the spirit of the whole could be all condensed, distilled, and rectified, then steamified, gasified, and electro-magnetised into a book, it would surpass every curious object that has as yet presented itself to man's wondrous and inquisitive mind. But we shall never have it. It can now be only enjoyed in imagination; and, reader, if this part of the enjoyment is pleasant to you, I heartily wish you health and long life to revel upon it.

There is one part, however, which the English cockney might have, that part of it which is now in existence, viz: to see the whole of the present elite drawn out in groups, in one of the London squares, each standing under the banner of its own establishment, from the gin-swilling, porter-guzzling, draggled-tail reporters and compositors, up to the claret-sipping, nicely dressed editor, accompanied by the queen's ministers, the whipper-in of the house of commons, and all the owners, publishers, and proprietors. But unfortunately the mere sight would instantly dissolve the benumbing charm, on which at present so much stress is laid, in the oracular announcements, beginning with the big plural WE!

This sight would be as astonishing as curious, and as wonderful as the sight of the bristles and scales on the backs of the tiny insects alluded to in the following couplet :

"Great fleas, have lesser fleas, and these were made to bite them,
And these fleas, have lesser fleas, and so on ad infinitum.”

Or the hidden treasures which are in the bowels of the Himalayan mountains, from their verdant podium to their snowy apex, if lashed up and scattered by the tail of an overbearing comet, while it

"Backward and forward switched its train,
As a gentleman switches his cane."

LITERATURE.

"The tree of knowledge, blasted by disputes,

Produces sapless leaves instead of fruits." DENHAM.

"THE edition of The Holy Scripture, which is, I believe, the fourth alteration in matter and doctrine, in regard to translation, cannot be considered as the actual state of the English language of the time of King James. It was made on the model of Parker's, or 'The Bishops' Bible,' which was forty years earlier. Hallam says, 'It may be better English, but it is not the English of Daniel, Raliegh, or Bacon." "

THE HEBREW.-"Who can describe the stately and giant-built Hebrew ? the most simple, the most philosophical, and the most ancient of written tongues: with letters like blocks of marble, with words like king's palaces, with sentences like cities walled up to heaven; though robed in the beauties of holiness, yet rugged as the mountains about Jerusalem; unchangeable in its idiom, unvarying and solemn in its tone, from generation to generation the language of rigour and of judgment, of adoration and obedience, spoken first in the garden of Eden, or by the builders of Babel, written first on tables of stone by the finger of Jehovah-for ever preserving its awful dignity, whether sung by the seraphim above, or by the choirs of the temple, whether carried to the highest heavens of sublimity by Isaiah, or brought down to play among the roses of Sharon and the lilies of the valley of Solomon, and destitute alike of the elasticity of the Greek, and the natural prowess of the Latin, unable to soar with the one or change with the other-but ever marching with the slow and measured tread of an ancient army of elephants."

Sir D. K. Sandford writes, "That any one who has studied the poetry, the history, and philosophy of the Hebrew, even as specimens of composition, should lightly esteem them, is impossible In lyric flow and fire, in crushing force, in majesty

that seems still to echo the awful sounds once heard beneath the thunderclouds of Sinai, the poetry of the ancient scriptures is the most superb that ever burned within the breast of man. The picturesque simplicity of their narration gives an equal charm to the historic books; vigour, beauty, sententiousness, and variety, enrich and adorn the ethical parts of the collection; nor is that seeming carelessness, which constitutes a principal charm of these writings, either naturally incompatible with the observance of certain rules, or actually uncontrolled by such as denote an intimate acquaintance with the management of style."