‘The New Year.
‘The New Year finds the Times in the same situation which it has invariably enjoyed during a long period of public approbation. It still continues to maintain its character among the Morning Papers, as the most considerable in point of sale, as of general dependence with respect to information, and as proceeding on the general principles of the British Constitution. While we thus proudly declare our possession of the public favour, we beg leave to express our grateful sense of the unexampled patronage we have derived from it.’
Mr. John Walter was never conspicuous for his modesty, and its absence is fully shown in the preceding and succeeding examples (January 1, 1800):
‘It is always with satisfaction that we avail ourselves of the return of the present Season to acknowledge our sense of the obligation we lay under to the Public, for the very liberal Patronage with which they have honoured the Times, during many years; a constancy of favour, which, we believe, has never before distinguished any Newspaper, and for which the Proprietors cannot sufficiently express their most grateful thanks.
‘This Favour is too valuable and too honourable to excite no envy in contemporary Prints, whose frequent habit it is to express it by the grossest calumnies and abuse. The Public, we believe, has done them ample justice, and applauded the contempt with which it is our practice to receive them.’
As this self-gratulatory notice brings us down to the last year of the eighteenth century, I close this notice of ‘The Times and its Founder.’ John Walter died at Teddington, Middlesex, on the 26th of January, 1812.