H PRESS.

IV.

It was in January, 1785, that there appeared, for the first time, a
journal with the title of _The Daily Universal Register_, the proprietor
and printer of which was John Walter, of Printing House Square, a quiet,
little, out-of-the-way nook, nestling under the shadow of St. Paul's,
not known to one man in a thousand of the daily wayfarers at the base of
Wren's mighty monument, but destined to become as famous and as well
known as any spot of ground in historic London. This newspaper boasted
but four pages, and was composed by a new process, with types consisting
of words and syllables instead of single letters. On New Year's day,
1788, its denomination was changed to _The Times_, a name which is
potent all the world over, whithersoever Englishmen convey themselves
and their belongings, and wherever the mighty utterances of the sturdy
Anglo-Saxon tongue are heard. It was long before the infant 'Jupiter'
began to exhibit any foreshadowing of his future greatness, and he had a
very difficult and up-hill struggle to wage. _The Morning Post_, _The
Morning Herald_, _The Morning Chronicle_, and _The General Advertiser_
amply supplied or seemed to supply the wants of the reading public, and
the new competitor for public favor did not exhibit such superior
ability as to attract any great attention or to diminish the
subscription lists of its rivals. _The Morning Herald_ had been started
in 1780 by Parson Bate, who quarrelled with his colleagues of _The
Post_. This journal, which is now the organ of mild and antiquated
conservatism, was originally started upon liberal principles. Bate
immediately ranged himself upon the side of the Prince of Wales and his
party, and thus his fortunes were secured. In 1781 his paper sustained a
prosecution, and the printer was sentenced to pay a fine of L100, and to
undergo one year's imprisonment, for a libel upon the Russian
ambassador. For this same libel the printers and publishers of _The
London Courant_, _The Noon Gazette_, _The Gazetteer_, _The Whitehall
Evening Journal_, _The St. James's Chronicle_, and _The Middlesex
Journal_ received various sentences of fine and imprisonment, together
with, in some cases, the indignity of the pillory. Prosecutions for
libel abounded in those days. Horace Walpole says that, dating from
Wilkes's famous No. 45, no less than two hundred informations had been
laid, a much larger number than during the whole thirty-three years of
the previ