s _Chips from a German
Workshop_ is a charming book, containing his miscellaneous articles in
reviews and magazines.

CHAPTER XLII.

ENGLISH JOURNALISM.

Roman News Letters. The Gazette. The Civil War. Later Divisions. The
Reviews. The Monthlies. The Dailies. The London Times. Other
Newspapers.

ROMAN NEWS LETTERS.--English serials and periodicals, from the very time
of their origin, display, in a remarkable manner, the progress both of
English literature and of English history, and form the most striking
illustration that the literature interprets the history. In using the
caption, "journalism," we include all forms of periodical
literature--reviews, magazines, weekly and daily papers. The word
journalism is, in respect to many of them, a misnomer, etymologically
considered: it is a French corruption of _diurnal_, which, from the Latin
_dies_, should mean a daily paper; but it is now generally used to include
all periodicals. The origin of newspapers is quite curious, and antedates
the invention of printing. The _acta diurna_, or journals of public
events, were the daily manuscript reports of the Roman Government during
the later commonwealth. In these, among other matters of public interest,
every birth, marriage, and divorce was entered. As an illustration of the
character of these brief entries, we have the satire of Petronius, which
he puts in the mouth of the freed man Trimalchio: "The seventh of the
Kalends of Sextilis, on the estate at Cumae, were born thirty boys, twenty
girls; were carried from the floor to the barn, 500,000 bushels of wheat;
were broke 500 oxen. The same day the slave Mithridates was crucified for
blasphemy against the Emperor's genius; the same day was placed in the
chest the sum of ten millions sesterces, which could not be put out to
use." Similar in character were the _Acta Urbana_, or city register, the
_Acta Publica_, and the _Acta Senatus_, whose names indicate their
contents. They were brief, almost tabular, and not infrequently
sensational.

THE GAZETTE.--After the downfall of Rome, and during the Dark Ages, there
are few traces of journalism. When Venice was still in her palmy days, in
1563, during a war with the Turks, printed bulletins were issued from time
to time, the price for reading which was a coin of about three farthings'
value called a _gazetta_; and so the paper soon came to be called a
gazette. Old files, to the amount of thirty volumes, of gr