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F. K. Hunt's Fourth Estate.'

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ART. V. The Fourth Estate: Contributions towards a History of Newspapers, and of the Liberty of the Press. By F. KNIGHT HUNT. 2 vols. 8vo. London, 1850.

THE FOURTH ESTATE! It is a taking title, and worth a bookseller's two hundred pounds any day, provided always that the writer who undertakes to elucidate and apply that mystic phrase shall studiously abstain from exciting the disgust of the popular reader by teaching him aught that he does not already know, or fancy he knows. New knowledge, if it be really new knowledge, and other than the statement of new facts, which are little more than the means of new knowledge, requires thought and the exercise of discernment, than which there is nothing more abhorrent to the popular reader, unless it be the call which is occasionally made upon him by some obscure writer or other for a revisal of his supposed knowledge; against such a proposition the popular reader utterly revolts, and pronounces the proposer of it to be a quack and a transcendentalist, -terms which he holds to be well yoked, if indeed they are not synonymous. Now Mr. Hunt, as we infer from the introductory chapter of his book, is a journalist, and, as such, must be fully aware of these curious truths in natural history; nor has he neglected to use his cognizance of them in the volumes before us. He has collected all the facts of English newspaper history which are required to constitute a good general acquaintance with the subject; he has shown tact in giving the greatest prominence to those which, whether justly or unjustly, have attained the greatest notoriety; he has not forgotten that the readers to whom he chiefly addresses himself will consider a fact or a remark witty or noteworthy in proportion to the number of times they have met with it before. But when he has ventured beyond the transcription of facts and into the region of principles, it has been with cautious exclusion of novelty and of hinted doubt of the infallibility of the commonplaces concerning the might and worth of the newspaper.

We shall deviate somewhat from this method, and before presenting our readers with a summary of the useful and entertaining contents of "The Fourth Estate," we beg to enter a few queries as to the validity of certain widely diffused notions concerning the press generally, and the newspaper press in parti

cular.

If, in the course of these remarks, the true worth and moral power of the press shall seem to be less insisted upon than those qualities which appear to us to render it in some respects the

most deleterious ingredient of modern civilisation, our readers must remember that the praises of this engine have been repeatedly proclaimed to all men by the press itself, which seldom misses an opportunity of sounding its own trumpet. But before we proceed to take, for the nonce, the unpopular side of the question, let us hear what sort of affirmations are commonly made by the defendant's counsel, who are chargeable, as we believe, not so much with direct misstatement of facts as with egregious special pleading. "The newspaper," says Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, "is the chronicle of civilisation, the common reservoir into which every stream pours its living waters," (an unpleasant idea is here suggested, but let it pass,)" and at which every man may come and drink. It is the newspaper which gives to liberty practical life, its perpetual vigilance, its unwearying activity; the newspaper is a daily and sleepless watchman, which reports to you every danger which menaces the institutions of your country, and its interests at home and abroad. The newspaper informs legislation of the public opinion, and it informs the people of the acts of legislature; thus keeping up that constant sympathy and good understanding between people and legislators which conduces to the maintenance of order, and prevents the stern necessity for revolution. The newspaper is a law-book for the indolent, a sermon for the thoughtless, a library for the poor." Another famous English novelist declares that "Newspapers are a link in the great chain of miracles which prove the greatness of England." The English opium-eater, with more depth and definiteness of meaning, writes," Much already has been accomplished (by newspapers,) more than people are aware, so gradual and silent has been the advance. How voiceless is the growth of corn! Watch it night and day for a week, and you will never see it growing; but return after two months, and you will find it all whitening for the harvest. Such, and so imperceptible in the stages of their motion, are the victories of the press." Very eloquent, though we hope a little hyperbolical, are the anticipations of M. Lamartine :- "Before this century shall have run out, journalism will be the whole press, the whole human thought. Since that prodigious multiplication art has given to speech, to be multiplied a thousand fold yet, mankind will write their book day by day, hour by hour, page by page. Thoughts will spread abroad in the world with the rapidity of light-instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood at the extremities of the earth, it will speed from pole to pole. Sudden, instant, burning with the fervours of soul which made it burst forth, it will be the reign of the human word in all its plenitude, it will not have time to ripen, to accumulate into a book—the book will

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The Friendly Broadsheet.

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arrive too late; the only book possible from day to day is a newspaper." May we be kept from a consummation so devoutly to be dreaded! Finally, and with as much eloquence as, and certainly with more reason than most of the eulogists of the newspaper, Mr. Hunt writes :

"The journal gives us day by day the experience of the world as it exists round about us, ready to avouch the truth of the journalist— gives us day by day and week by week the experience of the whole world's doing for the guidance of each individual living man. It is a great mental camera, which throws a picture of the whole world upon a single sheet of paper. But though a great teacher and an allpowerful instrument of modern civilisation, there is no affectation of greatness about it. The newspaper is the familiar of all men, of all degrees, of all occupations. If it teaches, it teaches imperceptibly. It has no pompous gown or scholastic rod to abash or to control, but prepares itself, and is admitted freely and at once, to a world-wide intimacy with all kinds and conditions of people. For the idle it is a friendly gossip; to the busy it shows what business is on hand; for the politician, it reflects the feelings of the party; for the holidaymaker, it talks about new plays, new music, and the last exhibition. Its ample page is full of the romance of real life equally with the facts of real life. The types that to-day tell how a king abdicated or a good man died, tell to-morrow the price of logwood or of tallow. As they stand side by side, those tall columns of words show us the hopes of the sanguine and the sufferings of the unfortunate; they hang out the lure of the trader who would sell his wares, and of the manager who would fill his theatre; shoulder by shoulder are the reports of regal and noble festivities and lists of bankrupts and insolvents; and in as many paragraphs we find linked the three great steps of a generation-the births, marriages, and deaths. No, wonder, then, that whilst the world grows tired of orators and weary of the mimic stage, it should be more and more faithful in its reference to the intellectual familiar that drops, as De Tocqueville says, the same thought into ten thousand minds at the same minute; or more attached to the friendly broadsheet, that reflects truly and promptly the changing, but ever-exciting scenes of the great drama of real life."

Mr. Hunt, we see, wisely rests the chief value of the journal upon its capacity as a chronicler of outward facts; it is in this capacity that we are least inclined to quarrel with it. And yet the injury which has been done, and is now being done, to the immediate interests of society, by the avidity wherewith this chronicle, considered merely as a chronicle, is received; and the consequent distaste for sources of sound and permanently worthy information, is scarcely calculable. The newspaper is become "something to all men, and to some men all;" and the fact of the prodigious majority of those to whom it is all, is one which we may rather lament than question. Who can doubt that the present ominous

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oblivion, among the people, of truths which are the very alphabet whereby we read the mystery of life, is chargeable, in connexion with deficient means of public education, upon that "haste to be rich" which shall not be without its guilt, whether the wealth be that of lucre or of idle knowledge? What are the characteristics of the newspaper reader, he to whom the · newspaper is not only something but all? Let the ungracious portraiture be executed with as little expense of our own spleen as possible. "You must have observed," says the Spectator, "that men who frequent coffee-houses and delight in news, are pleased with everything that is matter of fact, so it be what they have not heard before. A victory, a defeat, are equally agreeable to them. The shutting of a cardinal's mouth pleases them at one post, the opening of it at another. They are glad to hear that the French Court is removed to Marli, and are afterwards delighted with its return to Versailles. They read the advertisements with the same curiosity as the articles of public news; and are as pleased to hear of a piebald horse that is strayed out of a field near Islington, as of a whole troop that have been slain in any foreign adventure. In short, they have a relish for everything that is news, let the matter of it be what it will; or, to speak more properly, they are men of a voracious appetite, but no taste." Had the writer lived in our day, when the characteristics of the class in question have been developed by an additional century of vigorous life, the sketch would have borne a more bitter air. Indeed, we find a far more serious estimate of the particular evil in point in a number of the Freeholder, at a time when the sources of the infection were as yet almost limited to the English metropolis. “There is scarce any man in England, of what denomination soever, that is not a free-thinker in politics, and hath not some particular notions of his own by which he distinguishes himself from the rest of the community. Our island, which was formerly called a nation of saints, may now be called a nation of statesmen. Almost every age, profession, and sex among us has its favourite set of ministers and scheme of government. Our children are initiated into factions before they know their right hand from their left. They no sooner begin to speak but Whig and Tory are the first words they learn. They are taught in their infancy to hate one-half of the nation; and contract all the virulence and passion of party before they come to the use of their reason. * Of all the ways

and means by which this political humour hath been propagated among the people of Great Britain, I cannot single out any so prevalent or universal as the late constant application of the press to the publishing of state matters." Nor do we lack witnesses of a yet remoter date to prove that we are raising no new

The Poet Crabbe on Sunday Newspapers.

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alarm. When Dr. John North, whose life we quote from," was at Jesus College, coffee was not of such common use as afterwards, and coffee-houses were but young. At that time, and long after, there was but one, kept by one Kirk. The trade of news also was scarcely set up; for they had only the public Gazette, till Kirk got a written New-Letter, circulated by one Muddiman. But now the case is much altered; for it is become a custom, after chapel, to repair to one or other of the coffeehouses, (for there are divers,) where hours are spent in talking, and less profitable reading of newspapers, of which swarms are continually supplied from London. And the scholars are so greedy after news (which is none of their business) that they neglect all for it; and it is become very rare for any of them to go directly to his chamber after prayers, without doing his suit at the coffee-house, which is a vast loss of time." The strong and sober muse of Crabbe, dedicated an entire poem to this most unpoetical of subjects, the Sunday paper occupying a conspicuous figure in his general censure

"No changing season makes their number less,
Nor Sunday shines a Sabbath for the press!

Then lo! the sainted monitor is born,
Whose pious face some sacred texts adorn:
As artful sinners cloak the secret sin,

To vail with seeming grace the guile within ;

So moral essays on his front appear,
But all his carnal business in the rear;
The fresh-coin'd lie, the secret whisper'd last,
And all the gleanings of the six days past.

With these retired, through half the Sabbath-day,
The London lounger yawns his hours away.

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To you all readers turn, and they can look
Pleased on a paper who abhor a book;
Those who ne'er deigned their Bible to peruse,
Would think it hard to be denied their news;
Sinners and saints, the wisest with the weak,
Here mingle tastes, and one amusement seek."

discover other these are; but

We should not have to search far in order to censures as strong and as much to the purpose as these suffice to shew that we are broaching no heresy in the foregoing and the following remarks.

Newspaper-reading in excess is so common a form of mental debauchery that sober people have almost forgotten to regard

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