MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS OF THE PERIOD
From Musical instruments, Historic, Rare, and Unique (A. & C. Black, 1888).
Lely of course belongs to the first Restoration period. So also do Hayls, Michael Wright, Henry Anderton, the two Vandeveldes, and many others. Grinling Gibbons belongs to the latter years of the seventeenth and the first quarter of the eighteenth century.
The greatest invention of the century was, without doubt, the newspaper. As far as this country is concerned, setting aside the apocryphal history of the English Mercury, its first newspaper was started in London by Nathaniel Butter, with whom were associated Nicholas Bonner, Thomas Archer, Nathaniel Newberry, William Sheppard, Bartholomew Dounes, and Edward Allor. The sheet was called the Weekly News, and it is believed to have begun on May 23, 1622. In the same year the London Weekly Courant also began. Twenty years later the Mercurius Clericus (1641) was started in the interests of the clergy; the Mercurius Britannicus (1642), the Mercurius Civicus (1643), the Mercurius Politicus, a Parliamentary paper, and Mercurius Pragmaticus, a Royalist paper.
About the year 1663 the Kingdom’s Intelligence was started, and this was incorporated with the London Gazette when that was founded in 1665.
Of course it was not long before the power of the Press was discovered. The Government began to subsidise the papers; private persons began to pay for notices in them; and trade advertisements began to appear. All these papers were weekly. In 1695, however, the Post Boy appeared—the first daily paper.
CHAPTER VI
SPORTS AND AMUSEMENTS
A list of sports in 1600 is quoted in Furnivall’s notes to Stubbes (Part I. Series vi. No. 6, p. 316).