The sale was about three thousand a day, and the shareholders received £80 per share clear profit. The newspapers of those days paid the managers of theatres for accounts of their plays, as witness the following entries:
| £ | s. | d. | |
| Playhouses, | 100 | 0 | 0 |
| Drury Lane advertisements, | 64 | 8 | 6 |
| Covent Garden | 66 | 11 | 0 |
| —————— | |||
| £230 | 19 | 6 | |
Theatrical advertising had not reached the pitch of development which it has since attained; the competition was not so severe, and managers did not find it necessary to have recourse to ingenious methods of propitiating dramatic critics, such as producing their plays at the commencement of a new season, or paying £300 a year for the supervision of the playbills—expedients which have been now and then employed in our own times.
Among the writers in the Public Advertiser were Caleb Whitefoord, dilettante and wine merchant, Charles d'Este, who, like the popular London preacher of the present day, Bellew, first tried the stage, but not succeeding in that line, entered the pulpit; John Taylor, afterward editor of the Morning Post; Tom Syers, author of the 'Dialogues of the Dead,' and Woodfall's brother William. This last started the Morning Chronicle, in 1769, a paper whose fate it was, after lasting nearly a century, to pass into the venal hands of Sergeant Glover (who sold it to Louis Napoleon, in order that it might become sub rosâ a French organ in London), and to die in consequence in well-merited dishonor.
The Public Ledger was brought out by Newberry, the bookseller, in 1760, and is chiefly remarkable as being the vehicle through which Goldsmith's 'Citizen of the World' was first given to the public.
'Poet Goldsmith, for shortness called 'Noll,'
Who wrote like an angel, but talked like poor Poll,'
received two guineas for his first article, and afterward became a regular contributor at a guinea an article. William Radcliffe, the husband of the authoress of 'The Mysteries of Udolfo,' edited the Englishman, a paper to which Edmund Burke contributed, and subsequently the English Chronicle and the Morning Herald. Of all these he was proprietor, either altogether or in part, and it seems to have been customary for the editor to be the proprietor, or, more strictly speaking, for the proprietor to be the editor.
The prosecutions in connection with the letters of Junius were not the only attacks made upon the press at this time. Parliament again entered the lists against it. There was a certain Lord Marchmont, whose especial mission appears to have been to persecute the newspapers. Shakspeare says,
'The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones;'
and whether or no my Lord Marchmont ever did any good cannot now be ascertained. All that is known of him is that he was very pertinacious and very successful in his onslaughts upon his victims, for, whenever he saw the name of any member of the House of Peers in a journal, he used to make a motion against the printer for breach of privilege, summon him before the bar of the House, and have him heavily fined. The House of Commons followed suit. The old bone of contention, the reporting of the debates, was raked up again. There were then two giants of reporting, William Woodfall, who, from his wonderful retentive powers, was called by the sobriquet of Memory Woodfall, and William Radcliffe. It was in 1771 that the House proceeded to active measures by a majority of ninety votes to fifty-five. Orders were given to arrest the printers, publishers, and authors of the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser and the Middlesex Journal, or Chronicle of Liberty. The printers went into hiding, and a reward of £50 was offered for their apprehension. Shortly afterward, this raid was extended to the printers of the Morning Chronicle, St. James's Chronicle, General Post, London Evening Post, Whitehall Evening Post, and London Packet. Some of these appeared at the bar of the House, and actually made their submission on their knees. Miller, of the London Evening Post, declined to surrender, and was, after some difficulty, arrested under a warrant from the speaker. He was taken before the lord mayor, who was a member of the House of Commons. The city's chief magistrate—let his name, Brass Crosby, be remembered with honor—declared the warrant illegal, discharged Miller, and committed the speaker's messenger for assault. The same thing was done in the case of Wheble, of the Middlesex Journal, who was taken before John Wilkes, then sitting as alderman at Guildhall; and in that of Thompson, of the Gazetteer, who was taken before Alderman Oliver. The ground for their discharge was that the speaker's warrant had no force within the boundaries of the city, without being countersigned by a magistrate of the corporation. The House of Commons became furious, and ordered the attendance of Crosby and Oliver, but, taught by old experience, did not in the first instance think it desirable to meddle with Wilkes. The civic magistrates stood their ground manfully, and produced their charters. The House retorted by looking up the resolutions passed on various occasions against the publication of the debates. Meanwhile a mob assembled outside, and abused and hustled the members on their way to the House. After a fierce debate, Oliver was committed to the Tower. The attendance of Wilkes was then ordered for the 8th of April, but, in the mean time, the House, like Fear as represented by Collins in his Ode to the Passions,