ter in London named John Walter,
well-established in business, who was fully resolved on giving this
system a trial. At great expense and trouble he had all the commonest
words and phrases cast together. He would give his type-founder an order
like this:--

Send me a hundredweight, made up in separate pounds, of _heat_, _cold_,
_wet_, _dry_, _murder_, _fire_, _dreadful_ _robbery_, _atrocious
outrage_, _fearful calamity_, and _alarming explosion_.

This system he called logographic printing,--logographic being a
combination of two Greek words signifying word-writing. In order to give
publicity to the new system, on which he held a patent, as well as to
afford it a fuller trial, he started a newspaper, which he called the
"Daily Universal Register." The newspaper had some little success from
the beginning; but the logographic printing system would not work. Not
only did the compositors place obstacles in the way, but the system
itself presented difficulties which neither John Walter nor any
subsequent experimenter has been able to surmount.

"The whole English language," said Walter, in one of his numerous
addresses to the public, "lay before me in a confused arrangement. It
consisted of about ninety thousand words. This multitudinous mass I
reduced to about five thousand, by separating the parcels, and removing
the obsolete words, technical terms, and common terminations."

After years of labor this most resolute and tenacious of men was obliged
to give it up. It was too expensive, too cumbersome, too difficult; it
required a vast amount of space; and, in short, it was a system which
could not, and cannot, be worked to profit. But though the logographic
printing was a failure, the "Daily Universal Register" proved more and
more successful. It was a dingy little sheet, about twice as large as a
sheet of foolscap, without a word of editorial, and containing a small
number of well-selected paragraphs of news. It had also occasionally a
short notice of the plays of the night before, and a few items of what
we now call society gossip. The advertisements, after the paper had been
in existence three years, averaged about fifty a day, most of them very
short. Its price was threepence, English, equal to about twelve cents of
our present currency. The paper upon which it was printed was coarse and
cheap. In the third year of its existence, on the first of January,
1788, the name was changed to "The Times." The editor humorously