rican Irish; and the _Irish Independent_, the first half-penny
Dublin morning paper, and the most widely circulated of Irish
journals. If Swift did not write for the _Dublin News Letter_, he
certainly wrote for the _Examiner_, a weekly miscellany published in
the Irish capital from 1710 to 1713, and the first journal that
endeavored to create public opinion in Ireland. It was at Swift's
instigation that this paper was started, and he was doubtless
encouraged to suggest it by the success that attended his articles in
the contemporary London publication of the same name, the Tory
_Examiner_, in which his journalistic genius was fully revealed. As
it has been expressively put, he wrote his friends, Harley and St.
John, into a firm grip of power, and thus, as in other ways,
contributed his share to the inauguration and maintenance of that
policy which in the last four years of Queen Anne so materially
recast the whole European situation. About the same time there
appeared in London the earliest forms of the periodical essay in the
_Tatler_ and the _Spectator_, which exhibit the comprehensiveness of
the Irish temperament in writing by affording a contrast between the
Irish force and vehemence of Swift and the Irish play of kindly wit
and tender pathos in the deft and dainty periods of Richard Steele.

Dr. Charles Lucas was, even more than Swift perhaps, the precursor of
that type of Irish publicist and journalist, of which there have been
many splendid examples since then in Ireland, England, and America.
Lucas first started the _Censor_, a weekly journal, in 1748. Within
two years his paper was suppressed for exciting discontent with the
government, and to avoid a prosecution he fled to England. In 1763
the _Freeman's Journal_ was established by three Dublin merchants.
Lucas, who had returned from a long exile and was a member of the
Irish parliament, contributed to it, sometimes anonymously but
generally over the signature of "A Citizen" or "Civis." The editor
was Henry Brooks, novelist, poet, and playwright. His novel, _The
Fool of Quality_, is still read. His tragedy, _The Earl of Essex_,
was, wrongly, supposed to contain a precept, "Who rules o'er freemen
should himself be free," which led to the more famous parody of Dr.
Samuel Johnson, "Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat." The
object of Lucas and Brooke, as journalists, was to awaken national
sentiment, by teaching that Ireland had an individuality of her own