A true relation of the strange appearance of a man-fish about three miles within the river Thames, having a musket in one hand and a petition in the other, credibly reported by six sailors who both saw and talked with the monster.
A perfect mermaid was by the last great wind driven ashore near Greenwich, with her comb in one hand and her looking-glass in the other. She seemed to be of the countenancy of a most fair and beautiful woman, with her arms crossed, weeping out many pearly drops of salt tears; and afterwards she, gently turning herself upon her back again, swam away without being seen again any more.
Later in the century the use of the news-sheet became so general as to clog the mails. Macaulay writes interestingly of the disseminating of information in those days:
In 1685 nothing like the London daily paper of our time existed or could exist. Neither the necessary capital nor the necessary skill was to be found. Freedom too was wanting, a want as fatal as that of either capital or skill. During the great battle of the Exclusion Bill, many newspapers were suffered to appear. None of them was published oftener than twice a week. None exceeded in size a single small leaf. The quantity of matter which one of them contained in a year was not more than is often found in two numbers of the Times. After the defeat of the Whigs, it was no longer necessary for the King to be sparing in the use of that which all his Judges had pronounced to be his undoubted prerogative. At the close of his reign no newspaper was suffered to appear without his allowance; and his allowance was given exclusively to the London Gazette. The London Gazette came out only on Mondays and Thursdays. The contents were generally a royal proclamation, two or three Tory addresses, notices of two or three promotions, an account of a skirmish between the imperial troops and the Janissaries on the Danube, a description of a highwayman, an announcement of a grand cockfight between two persons of honor, and an advertisement offering a reward for a strayed dog. The whole made up two pages of moderate size.... The most important parliamentary debates, the most important state trials, recorded in our history, were passed over in profound silence. In the capital the coffee houses supplied in some measure the place of a journal. Thither the Londoners flocked as the Athenians of old flocked to the market place, to hear whether there was any news. There men might learn how brutally a Whig had been treated the day before in Westminster Hall, what horrible accounts the letters from Edinburgh gave of the torturing of Covenanters, how grossly the Navy Board had cheated the crown in the victualling of the fleet, and what grave charges the Lord Privy Seal had brought against the Treasury in the matter of the hearth money. But people that lived at a distance from the great theatre of political contention could be kept informed of what was passing there only by means of news-letters. To prepare such letters became a calling in London. The news-writer rambled from coffee room to coffee room collecting reports, squeezed himself into the Sessions House of the Old Bailey if there was an interesting trial, nay perhaps obtained admission to the Gallery of Whitehall and noticed how the King and Duke looked. In this way he gathered materials for weekly epistles destined to enlighten some country town or some bench of rustic magistrates.
Such were the sources from which the inhabitants of the largest provincial cities and the great body of the gentry and clergy learned almost all they knew of the history of their own times.
We must suppose that at Cambridge there were as many persons curious to know what was passing in the world as at almost any other place in the kingdom out of London. Yet at Cambridge during a great part of the reign of Charles II, the Doctors of Laws and the Masters of Arts had no regular supply of news except the London Gazette. At length the services of one of the collectors of intelligence in the capital were employed. It was a memorable day on which the first news-letter from London was laid on the table of the only coffee house room in Cambridge.
At the seat of a man of fortune in the country the news-letter was impatiently expected. Within a week after it had arrived it had been thumbed by twenty families. It furnished the neighboring squires with matter for talk over their October, and the neighboring rectors with topics for sharp sermons against Whiggery and Popery.
It is scarcely necessary to say that there were then no provincial newspapers. Indeed except at the capital and at the two Universities there was scarcely a printer in the kingdom.
This was the condition of the newspaper business at the end of the reign of King Charles II.—a period distinguished by less interest in literature and study than any period of England’s history after the Elizabethan revival of learning. The reading of books and the search for information had been abandoned in the quest for pleasure. The people had joined in imitating the profligacy, the licentiousness and the revels of Charles’s court. They who champion the newspaper as a great uplifting influence in community might instance these profligate days in which there were no newspapers and compare them with later years.
But the opening of the eighteenth century brought fresh impetus to study and a new interest in literature. Several weekly newspapers had been set going. The first daily newspaper was started in London in 1702. It was called the Courant. It was a small single-sheet publication printed on one side only, and it gave but a meager assortment of news items. It refrained from expressing opinions, the editor saying that “he would give no comments of his own as he assumed that people had sense enough to make reflections for themselves.” Scores of editors even to the present day have launched initial numbers of their editions with this same resolution, expressed in the same way, but somehow it does not last long.
Then came the Review founded by Defoe, and Richard Steele’s Tatler and the Spectator by Steele and Joseph Addison, which publications mark the real beginnings of journalism. By this time Pope and Swift, William Walsh, whom Dryden praised as a great critic, and Arthur Maynwaring and others of the famous Kit Cat Club were writing for the periodicals.
Editorial comment, or the expression of editorial opinion seems to have had no place in newspapers until toward the close of the reign of King Charles II. Then, while the London Gazette, appearing under government direction, was printing news only, Sir Roger Lestrange was permitted to print a journal of comment without news, called the Observator. Lestrange had been a Tory pamphleteer, and for a short time had edited small news-sheets and under the government. He had been Surveyor of Printing Offices and Licensor of the Press. The Observator was ferociously against the Whigs and the Protestants. Because editorial comment was new, it focused much attention. Here was the first editor to write violent political editorial articles. He confined his subjects to politics and to religion which was then a part of the politics of the day. He inspired a host of imitators and the leading article, of which he was the parent, has been the leading feature of all journalism ever since. Great in its political use, immediately after him, were Dean Swift in his Examiner, and Daniel Defoe in the Review which he started in 1704 while in jail for political offense.
It was just at the beginning of the eighteenth century that Steele and Addison began their Tatler and Spectator. Their first impulse was to write of politics, for Steele was alive with political zeal and Addison was interested; but presently they seemingly sensed the opportunity for success in the new direction of a publication given to the elucidation and the discussion of general topics, of subjects on which politics was unlikely to produce diversion of opinion—social life, play-house criticism, literature, morals, ethics and personal conduct. The Spectator was printed daily. To the policy of minimizing politics and exalting general topics of interest it adhered.