advertisements of the older papers dwindle away; but it by no means follows that the new experiments are successful. The expenses of daily journals are very large, and country advertisers do not care to pay high prices; so that there may be very little profit about a penny paper, which every one appears to buy. And, then, when the first excitement is over, the sale begins to drop: men become disgusted with the necessary meagreness of the general news, and the necessary frivolity and triviality of the local intelligence; and a person who can get the Times for threepence at eleven o'clock, or perhaps earlier, thinks even a penny wasted on the flimsy and illiterate production of his own town. The telegraphic news is generally the only important part of the paper; and in all large towns there are public rooms, where the telegrams are fixed up as they arrive. Those who deem the epithet "illiterate" too harsh, should try to read the leading articles of half a dozen country papers: they are generally admirable for the perfection of their bad English and false logic. There are striking exceptions, certainly; but the average quality is dreadful. Starting a newspaper appears to have for some minds a singular fascination. Just as there are men who must back race-horses, or play chicken-hazard, so there are others to whom newspaper enterprise is a necessity of life. The oftener they fail, the better they seem to like it. Doubtless there is plenty of absurd speculation in every other class of commercial enterprise; but the places in which newspapers are started, and the style of journal produced, are positively amazing. There is a fishing-village in some pleasant nook of the coast: an adventurous traveller, hating London-super-Mare and its minor rivals, spends a pleasant month there, bathing and boating; he is unwise enough to mention his discovery to his acquaintances, who come down in force; and the little village sets up for a watering-place. There will be a weekly newspaper, with a correct list of distinguished visitors, in a year or two; the local poetaster will edit it, putting copious verses of his own in one corner. The local poetaster usually begins life as assistant to a tailor, shoemaker, or schoolmaster; and it is almost as certain that he will culminate as editor of a small newspaper, as that a grub will become a butterfly. Absurd as the fishing-village journal may seem, the daily paper in a third or fourth class town is even more ridiculous, as involving harder work and greater loss. And the way in which such a speculation originates is curious, and might perhaps be treated on scientific principles by Mr. Darwin. A year or two ago a speculator, coming I know not whence, started a daily paper in a town of the north, with perhaps 90,000 inhabitants. Let him be called A. B, the proprietor of the chief weekly paper in the place, pooh-poohed the rival enterprise; but, much to his disgust, he soon discovered that it was injuring his journal. Wise enough to learn by experience, he looked about for a new field; and, travelling some hundreds of miles south-westward, he started a penny paper in an ancient city, which is proverbially slow to move. C, chief newspaper proprietor in this city, was appalled; the course he took was to start a rival daily paper. D, a literary young gentleman with some capital in a town another hundred miles farther from Town, was edified by what he saw occurring, and started a daily paper in the place of his residence. E, proprietor of a Liberal paper in that place, found himsel compelled to do likewise, and made a curious blunder in the commencement; for he published his penny paper only five times a week, expecting people to buy his exolete weekly, at three or four pence, on the other day. Between the city in which B and C held rivalry, and the town where D and E were at feud, and about equidistant from each, stood an old cathedral city, where E's brother (call him F) published a most trenchant Radical paper. It hath been written, that "Autumnal sunshine seems to fall With riper beauty, mellower, brighter, On every favoured garden-wall Whose owner wears the mystic mitre." And again, concerning a certain fortunate and indolent dean: "Calm, silent, sunny; whispereth No tone about that sleepy Deanery, Save when the mighty organ's breath Came hushed through endless aisles of greenery. No eastern breezes swung in air The great elm-boughs, or crisped the ivy; Dean Willmott's motto was Dormivi." But if the wearer of the "mystic mitre" be the sharpest pamphleteer of the day, and if there be a truculent editor lying in wait for him at every turn, it is probable that the lotos-eating calm suggested in these verses will scarcely fall to the lot of the dean and the minor ecclesiastic dignitaries. Certes, the city in which F's newspaper made so great a fuss is among the most tranquil in England to a man who does not trouble himself about episcopal pamphlets or country journals. However, when F saw himself between the fires of B and C north-eastward, of D and E south-westward, all whose papers reached his neighbour hood before he had his matutine bath, he thought he would start a daily paper too. He did so; it lasted either three or four days; and then, finding that the inhabitants of a cathedral town were too somnolent a race to appreciate diurnal information and instruction, he incontinently gave it up. It was the great blunder of his life. Hereupon D, the young literary gentleman already mentioned, started a daily paper in the cathedral city, which was almost an exact duplicate of the one which he already published in a certain town to the south-west. This of course failed in a month or two. Professor Huxley has stated somewhere, that the existence of humble-bees is intimately connected with the existence of cats. Field-mice eat humble-bees; cats eat fieldmice: so, where cats are abundant, humble-bees will be abundant also. Quite as unexpected an influence appears in the story (true to the letter, though algebraically stated) which is found above. A's sudden appearance, with the determination to start a daily paper in a certain carbonaceous town in the north, produced all the movements of B, C, D, E, and F, and was the initial cause of the establishment, hundreds of miles off, in one of the quietest and quaintest cathedral cities in England, of an unnecessary daily paper. It is impossible to say whence A got his primary impetus, or what F may be led to do. But we have had enough links of the catena to see how, in these days of unlimited intercourse, an incident at one end of England may produce important effects at the other end. Hitherto I have been dealing with the country newspaper in its transition state, struggling between extinction and existence as a daily journal. But the old-fashioned country newspaper, oracle of town and shire, was a far different production. The most perfect specimen of a thorough country newspaper was (perhaps is) the Stamford Mercury. Stamford is a little insignificant Lincolnshire town, far away from any important place; and in that very remoteness was the journalist's opportunity. The Stamford Mercury was essentially a bucolic journal. It did not condescend to the flippant absurdities called leading articles. It paragraphed (uncommonly well, too) all the general news of the week. It kept ample record of the borough and county news. supplied the farmer with exactly what he wanted,-a newspaper which, reaching him on Saturday, would last him till the following Saturday. Farmers are slower readers than critics; the latter will floor a threevolume novel in a less period than the former would take over a tract or a prospectus. It is some time since I was down in Lincolnshire; but I suspect that the new current of thought will be long in reaching Stamford, and that the most famous of modern bucolic journals will hold its own for some years yet. There was, long ago, a similarly successful georgic journal published at Sherborne, in Dorsetshire; but I think its reign is over. It The chief point necessary for success in journals of this class is dulness, not to say stupidity. The English farmer is a splendid specimen of the human race. He can generally ride well to hounds, and has of late years picked up some queer ideas at Cirencester and other centres of science; and he is by no means a bad comrade, if you know how to draw him out. But the sort of writing which is intelligible to ordinary men is to him a mystery. He would make nothing of a Times leader. He would find the Saturday Review as inexplicable as if it were in Sanscrit. His mind has run in other grooves; and he would have much the better of you or me, intelligent reader, if it were a question of judging a short-horn or a crop of wheat. Small blame to our agricultural friend if he ignores what you and I think excessively interesting. Men cannot do every thing. And therefore I willingly accept as very sagacious the dictum of a newspaper proprietor at Salisbury, who, when a brilliant friend of mine applied for the vacant editorship of his journal, made answer that he was too clever for the position. A stupid man was wanted. I have, however, been greatly perplexed by a similar reply which was made by the proprietors of a leading journal in Glasgow. From that great city some appreciation of intellectual capacity might be expected; yet I happen to know that a London journalist of note, highly recommended for the editorship of a leading Glasgow journal, was unsuccessful solely on account of his great reputation for cleverness. After which, with Mr. Theodore Martin, we exclaim: "Fades the great St. Rollox stalk One can pardon the little cathedral town of Sarum for setting stu pidity at a premium. Its ecclesiastical residents in the Cathedral Close are satisfied with their Times and their Guardian; and the farmers of Wilts may, for reasons already assigned, be forgiven for preferring a little crassitude. But Glasgow! And here it may be remarked, that the larger country towns of England seem incapable of supporting journals of a high class in which London abounds. Let us briefly glance at the weekly journals of London. There is the Saturday Review, sardonic and emasculate; the Spectator, outspoken and liberal; the Examiner, also liberal, but scarcely so brilliant as of old; the Press, a journal expressly dedicated to Toryism. There are a couple of weekly periodicals devoted to criticism, and a couple more devoted to comicality. These have all their audience, some greater, and some less; but any attempt to imitate them elsewhere inevitably results in failure. There was once a Liverpool Lion, something after the fashion of Punch; there was once a Manchester Review, whose conductors intended it to be trenchant and incisive. The former disappeared when the brothers Brough, its chief supporters, were attracted by metropolitan magnetism; the latter came to an end through sheer dulness. It seems clear that Liverpool and Manchester, famous towns though they are, do not possess the power of retaining and occupying literary men of a high class. And this is more the case now than at an earlier period. More than one of our provincial cities had formerly a claim to some distinction, literary and theatrical. York and Bath are cases in point. It might, of course, be expected that the position of Edinburgh as the capital of a kingdom would have a manifest influence on its literature; and few circumstances are more singular than those connected with the literary history of "the gray metropolis of the north." When the Whig literati of that "energetic and unfragrant city," as Sidney Smith called it, started the Edinburgh Review, with its terrifying motto, Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur, a new era began in criticism. Any thing like scientific analysis was previously unknown to periodical literature. The Review was often truculent, personal, prejudiced; but it did great service in politics to the Whig party, in litera ture to the public at large. Curiously enough, the Edinburgh Tories possessed two writers, Wilson and Lockhart, able and willing to surpass even the Review in truculence and personality. Hence Blackwood's Magazine, whose first few numbers were mild and insipid, became in their hands a terror to its opponents. Mr. William Blackwood was his own editor, and often rejected the articles of his two chief contributors on account of their extreme severity. He had easy business as a driver, his sole difficulty being to "hold in” his team. His successor on the box, I suspect, would be glad to encounter such a difficulty. It is remarkable that the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood have long been London periodicals in every thing but name. Their ancient feuds are over; they have become decorous, not to say dull; and their connexion with the capital of Scotland is a thing of the past. In the same way Chambers's Journal, the excellent precursor of the cheap weekly miscel lanies now so numerous, has its home in Paternoster Row. The attractive power of London is so great, that it becomes absurd in such cases as these to maintain the pretext of provincial publication. The writers are magnetised by the great metropolitan loadstone; the reviews and magazines, if they would exist, must follow. If a country newspaper could any where resemble a London newspaper, we might expect such resemblance in the capital of Scotland. It is not found there. The journals of Edinburgh have that unpractical provincial tone which is discoverable every where save in the London press. Their editors indulge in a little personal fighting occasionally, and make reference to each other's peculiarities. This has lately been the case to a considerable extent, editorial pugnacity having for some reason been aggravated. The cause of all this doubtless is, that the chief London journals are absorbed by the great questions of the day, and cannot condescend to petty squabbles; while the country paper, whose judgment of those weightier matters is superseded by that of its metropolitan contemporaries, can only command interest by getting up a storm in its own local pond. Place of publication is not the sole cause of the difference; for journals like the City Press and the Clerkenwell News, devoted to the interests of a certain London quarter, are just as trivial in their scope and style as the most insignificant of the country newspapers. They are, in fact, designed to supply what London heretofore allowed to pass unnoticed-the mere local gossip of the town or parish or district which they represent. We have no proof that an alderman of the City is a superior being to an alderman of Lancaster or Norwich, or feels less pleasure in seeing the announcement that "Mr. Alderman and his lady entertained a select and distinguished party at dinner yesterday." And there are little parochial squabbles in Clerkenwell and St. Pancras which would never be thoroughly fought out unless there were newspapers to do it. The same provincialism is noted in the colonies. A copy of any colonial journal always astonishes a London reader by the crudeness of its style, the pugnacity about trifles which it |