ten years together, and every alehouse and every chandler's shop in every neighbourhood; defrauded and reviled all his acquaintance, and meeting and possessing universal infamy and contempt."

Fielding might indeed be well content with this character from men who thought Parson Adams "dry and unnatural;" well might he smile at being called a bookseller's and newspaper hack by such writers as Guthrie and his fellows.

The government formed a better estimate, and one which was not disappointed by the way in which he fulfilled his duties as a magistrate for Middlesex and Westminster, an office which they conferred upon him at the earnest solicitation of his old schoolfellow and faithful friend George Lyttleton, now a lord of the treasury. Of course this appointment, which, if it had been given in reward for his services (which it undoubtedly was not), would have been a very inadequate one, gave an opportunity for the ungenerous remarks of his enemies of Grub-street; but the manner in which he performed his duties, driving corruption from the bench and putting justice in its place, remains recorded as a noble reply to their calumnies. The appointment took place at the close of the year 1748, the Jacobite Journal having ceased in November of that year, from a conviction of its conductors that the Jacobite cause was entirely disarmed by the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. Old England exulted over the decease of Mr. Trottplaid in a scurrilous epitaph, which thus opens with a spiteful and personal attack:

Beneath this stone

Lies Trottplaid John,
His length of chin and nose;
His crazy brain,
Unhum'rous vein

In verse and eke in prose.*

William Guthrie, the principal writer of Old England, is the same man who afterwards, as we have already seen, made up the "Parliamentary Debates" for Cave. A needy Scotchman, sent forth from Aberdeen to seek a living from the world of letters, he fell into the hands of the booksellers, who plucked him and sold his feathers. A publisher's drudge, besides having to do with many of the newspapers, he wrote several works to order, amongst others, a history of England, which nobody ever reads, and a geographical grammar, which was at the time thought a work of merit, but is of course now obsolete. He died in 1769, in the sixty-eighth year of his age. Sir John Willes, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, was suspected to have written the attack on Murray (afterwards Lord Mansfield) in Old England of December 27th, 1746.

A hireling confederate of Fielding's certainly in the Champion, and probably in his other papers-was James Ralph, formerly a schoolmaster at Philadelphia, but who came to London about 1729, and embarked as a party writer with a capital of considerable talent. Unfortunately, it was about the only capital he possessed; of money he had little, and of principle less; and he tossed about on the troubled sea of politics, as all have done who have ventured upon it with only talent for their ballast, and got cast here and there with every change of the political current. Ralph, who aspired to the title of historian, and wrote a forgotten his

* Old England, or the Broad-Bottom Journal, November 20th, 1748.

tory of England, also tried, with the versatility to which hard necessity occasionally drove him, what he could make out of the stage, and wrote some plays and a poem, which elevated him to a place in the "Dunciad," in a note to which he is described as a low and illiterate writer. This was not true; for he was certainly a Latin, French, and Italian scholar. His connexion with the stage brought him into the acquaintance of Fielding, and they went to work together at the Champion. Poor Ralph (who wrote the pitiful "Case of Authors") was like most of his contemporary labourers, well acquainted with poverty and want, and Mr. Nichols has preserved some of his cries for bread in the ninth volume of the "Literary Anecdotes." "I am now really at my last resource till my play is finished," he writes at last, in the accents of despair, "and, unless you can relieve me, both that and I shall die together." Bubb Dodington took him up, and in his service he brought out the Remembrancer --an organ of the Dodington section of the Leicester House party, which received a gentle check from the government in 1749:

"November 24th.-Earl of Middlesex and Mr. Ralph were with me to acquaint me that the printer and publisher of the Remembrancer was taken up for his paper of last Saturday, the 18th instant, but that the messenger used them with uncommon civility, touched none of their papers, presses, or effects, and took their words for their surrendering themselves the next morning."*

We are afterwards told that the Prince of Wales agrees to indemnify them against all loss or damage.

Dodington, though he speaks of him as "honest Mr. Ralph," admits that he 66 was ready to be hired to any cause." Poor fellow! life was sweet and bread was dear, and the highest bidder had him; but in 1762 the politicians and the booksellers lost their drudge, for death outbid them all.

Notwithstanding the violence of the papers and the character of their writers, we only find them in one instance brought into collision with the government by the events of 1745-6, and that was in the case of the National Journal, or Country Gazette, an evening paper started on March 22nd, 1746, and attacking the government so intemperately that on the 12th of June the printer was committed to prison, and not released until February, 1747, on the expiration of the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act.

Of the next ten years of newspaper history we have but little to record. Among the writers of the various periodical papers which flourished in that interval were Mrs. Heywood, who wrote the Parrot in 1746; Lords Chesterfield and Lyttleton, contributors to Common Sense, the former writing occasionally in Old England; Sir John Hill, who wrote "The Inspector" for two years in the Daily Advertiser, commencing in March, 1751; Arthur Murphy, the writer of the Gray's Inn Journal, under the name of "Charles Ranger, Esq.," October 21st, 1752; Edward Moore, the author of the "Gamester," who commenced the World January 4th, 1753, and was assisted by the Earl of Chesterfield, and some thirty contributors of eminence; Bonnell Thornton, who wrote the Drury Lane Journal (in opposition to Fielding's Covent Garden

Journal, started on the 4th of January, 1752, by "Sir Alexander Drawcansir, Knight"), and who afterwards united himself with George Colman in the Connoisseur, commenced January 31st, 1754, "by Mr. Town Critic and Censor General;" Dr. William King, of the Dreamer, in 1754; and the much-belauded Alderman Beckford, the City patriot, who projected the Monitor in 1755. Most of these were only essay-papers, treading, at a very respectful distance, in the footsteps of the Tatler, but a few copied it in publishing brief items of news. On the 6th November, 1756, the Test first appeared in opposition to Pitt; it was edited by Arthur Murphy, but only ran to the 9th of July, 1757, having had a formidable antagonist in the Cow-Test.

It seems strange that men accustomed to reflection, exercising themselves in the daily study of mankind, and practised in the tracing of its actions to their motives, and its feelings to their sources, should so often have been moved by surprise at the growth of an affection for news among the inhabitants of the most important city of the world. Strange would it have been, indeed, if, on the contrary, the citizens of London had exhibited an indifference to what was going on abroad, and an apathy to events which must influence their prosperity-strange if they, so jealous of their rights and privileges, should have turned a deaf ear to those who were the organs of asserting them-strange, too, surveying the subject from lower ground, if gossip, or even scandal, appealed to the attention of the town in vain. Yet we have found men at different periods of the growth of the newspaper press-shrewd, reflective, and thinking menapparently staggered and puzzled by the phenomenon of its increase in numbers and importance. Ben Jonson, Burton, and Addison have all in turn been quoted as astonished at the "thirst for news," and, as late as 1758, we find Dr. Johnson still mentioning the fact with a tone of surprise :

"No species of literary men has lately been so much multiplied as the writers of news. Not many years ago the nation was content with one Gazette, but now we have not only in the metropolis papers for every morning and every evening, but almost every large town has its weekly historian, who regularly circulates his periodical intelligence, and fills the villages of his district with conjectures on the events of the war, and with debates on the true interests of Europe."* He accounts for it, somewhat clumsily, we think, by the presumption that idleness finds an easy employment in the perusal of the papers-"reading without the fatigue of close attention ;" and the world, therefore, swarms with writers, "whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read." If so, the state of things had very much and very rapidly changed, for we have all along heard of the earnestness with which men read the newspapers, and entered into their arguments. The hot and angry politicians of the coffee-house, who were ready to support the views of their favourite writers, either with tongue or sword; the tradesman, who ran out from his shop to get an early sight of the paper, and made himself master of geographical knowledge with great pains and labour, in order to follow the march of an army; the statesman, who thought it worth his while to scatter gold broad-cast among the newspaper writers, seem to tell a different tale. In a previous number† he

* Idler, No. 30, November 11th, 1758.

† Ibid. No. 7, May 27th, 1758.

had had his sneer at the newspaper writers, who, bad as they undoubtedly were at this time, seem to have been the pegs on which every satirist and writer hung his ridicule, but he grudgingly yields the admission that newspapers may be of service in the state:

"All foreigners remark that the knowledge of the common people of England is greater than that of any other vulgar. This superiority we undoubtedly owe to the rivulets of intelligence which are continually trickling among us, which every one may catch, and of which every one partakes." Still, he never has any enlarged foreshadowing of what newspapers may become, or be made; it seems singularly to have escaped him that the press might in time obtain a leverage upon the nation's mind.

For this reason, possibly, he felt no pride in his own connexion with the press; in fact, it was a connexion not calculated to awaken agreeable feelings, for it was one of necessity, not choice; and the series of papers which we have been quoting was itself written and sold to garnish a newspaper-appearing in the Universal Chronicle, or Weekly Gazette, a paper projected by Newberry, of St. Paul's Churchyard, in 1758, of which the "occurrences of the week were not sufficient to fill the columns."

In the previous year, too, he had written the preliminary discourse to the London Chronicle, of Dodsley, for the "humble reward" of a guinea.

AN ITALIAN SKETCH-1855.

BY FLORENTIA.

III.

PERUGIA is a wonderful old place: scarcely one street is level, and all the houses look as if not a brick had been touched since the middle ages. It is the most consistently ancient city I ever saw; more So even than quaint Verona, a modern capital compared with the frowning, tumble-down aspect of Perugia. The very latest fashions date back three hundred years, and one feels quite relieved while contemplating something light in the gothic palaces, after seeing the stupendous antiquity of the Etruscan walls, which certainly must have been raised by the Titans themselves long before their disgrace, somewhere in the time of Deucalion or Nox.

I proceeded from the hotel into the grand piazza, where stands the Duomo, a bold, grand pile of gothic splendour, raised majestically on a flight of marble steps. In the centre is a beautiful fountain of exquisite

*Note by Murphy. (Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.)

workmanship, where a little river gushes forth to descend into the spacious basin beneath. Opposite is the Palazzo Comunale-an immense doublefronted gothic pile, partly standing in the Piazza, and partly in the great street that opens from it. Here is an abundance of all the elaborate tracery and luxuriant fancy of that picturesque age. Heavily groined arched windows, solid, yet graceful, occupy the grand story; while below, a vast portal, ornamented with every elaboration of medieval grotesqueness, opens into gloomy halls and staircases. At the far end of the Piazza there is a dark old archway, and a descending flight of steps going Heaven knows where-down to unknown depths in the lower town. What a brave old square it is! Not an object but is in keeping.

I ascended the steps and entered the Duomo, where the coup d'œil is very imposing, the pervading colour being of that warm yellow tint so charming to the eye. The pillars of the nave, and, in fact, the whole interior, struck me as very graceful. It is one of those buildings one can neither call large nor small, from the admirable proportions of the whole, where no inequality betrays the precise scale. Frescoes there are all over the roof, and a few choice pictures; one in particular, a deposition by Baroccio, in a chapel near the door, painted, it is said, while he was suffering from poison given him, out of envy, at Rome. This picture has the usual visiting-card, common to all good paintings, of having made the journey to Paris.

Here, too, in a chapel, is preserved the veritable wedding-ring of the Virgin, which came, I suppose, flying through the air like her house at Loretto, and various other relics, all more or less fond of locomotion. In the sacristy, or winter choir, is a lovely picture, a Sposalizio by Luca Signorelli; in front of the figures is a tumbler of water with some carnations, painted with that delicacy of which only the old masters were capable.

The more I walked about, the more I became charmed with Perugia; up and down we went, under old archways, and through narrow streets, each more quaint than the other. Whenever there was any opening, such views appeared-mountains tossed as if by an earthquake, deep valleys, great walls built on rocky heights, massive fortifications-all romantic beyond expression. We reached at last a distant spot, called the Frontone, planted with trees, situated at the very edge of a stupendous cliff. The sun was just dissipating the morning mist over one of the grandest views on which the eye ever rested. Mountains, hills, rocks there were, of every shape and size, piled one over the other, terrace-like ; while to the right lay the blue lake of Thrasimene, spreading like a glassy plain in the midst of the chaotic confusion around. High mountains shut in the view behind; in front, the rays of the sun were condensed into a golden mist, obscuring all nearer objects in its brilliant vapour. To the left lay a vast plain, fat and fertile, a land flowing with milk and honey, where uprose the city of Assisi, sparkling in the sunshine, seated on a height, also backed by the lofty Apennines.

Close by this glorious panorama stands the curious church of San Pietro, desolate and lonely, yet full of interesting pictures. Its form is the perfect Basilica; the space over the columned nave is covered with frescoes. In the sacristy are some most interesting pictures-delicate Sassoferratos, elegant Pinturiccios (an artist, by the way, one learns to