dissolution of the great houses, the king's visitors were sent to any abbey which, like St. Edmund's at Bury, was particularly rich and provokingly innocent of any offence, to visit for the purpose of confiscating "the superstitious relics." How gold and silver, to the value of five thousand marks (a sum equivalent, perhaps, to 18,000l. of our money), came to be regarded as "superstitious relics," does not appear; but the more valuable the spoil the more superstitious seems to have been its use. As Henry VIII. had been able to intimidate even the clergy in convocation into pronouncing the opinion he wanted in favour of his divorce, it is not surprising that he induced a parliament, poor, servile, and corrupt, to suppress the lesser monasteries, and to vest in him these houses, and afterwards the possessions of the greater monasteries that had been dissolved. The manner in which the abbey lands soon came to be possessed by the courtiers and statesmen who had been active in these measures for the crown, forms a significant commentary on the motive for the whole proceeding.

Henry had found parliament very compliant to his will, and ready to vote his measures acceptable to God," or " for the benefit of the realm," as the case might be. The obsequious Commons-whose learning of course had qualified them to judge of such a matter-had affirmed the invalidity of his marriage to Katharine; then, the invalidity of his marriage to Anne Boleyn; and when he wished to marry again, humbly entreated him to do so; they were ready to vote Mary and Elizabeth illegitimate, and then to vote them legitimate again, as the policy of the time should require; they had complaisantly assisted him to dispose of wives of whom he was weary and take others whom he coveted, and why should they not help him to the monastic wealth of which he likewise desired to possess himself? They had assumed to declare him Supreme Head of the English Church; and when, later in his reign, the anti-papal king turned suppressor of religious houses, separated from the communion of the Church of Rome, and was formally deprived by the Pope of the title he had conferred, the legislature assumed to confer it and annex it for ever to the crown. He did not find the clergy so compliant in 1531, and had to resort to most oppressive means before he could extort from the clerical body a recognition of his title of Head of the Church. It was pretended they had incurred the penalties of the statutes of præmunire, and they had to buy their ransom by humiliation and a subsidy of 100,000l. In the following year the impoverished clergy were sufficiently servile. They endeavoured to outbid parliament for the king's favour. They volunteered in the opposition to the Pope; and, hating a burden upon their purses more than they loved the union of Christendom, they in convocation addressed the king and offered to revolt from Rome. While the visitation was in progress, and while parliament was busy with the measures of suppression of the monasteries, the bishops were paralysed by inhibitions, and "submitted," says Mr. Froude, " in a forced conformity." Our author confesses that the Lords of Parliament, spiritual as well as temporal, "existed as an ornament rather than as a power, and, under the direction of the council, followed as the stream drew them, when, individually, they would have chosen, had they dared to do so, a different course." By the King and the Commons, through the instrumentality of Cromwell, the work of sacrilege was done, and we many a glimpse of the selfish scheming of that unscrupulous adven

have

turer;-witness, for example, the letter addressed to him by Lee, the commissioner for the northern district, in which the writer offers to promote Cromwell's desire for the stewardship of the possessions of Furness Abbey, if he will aid Lee in obtaining a grant of Holm Cultram. So, too, Mr. John Beaumont sends Cromwell a present of 201., and prays that he may be allowed to purchase the nunnery of Grace Dieu. And so, ad nauseam, the harpy courtiers contended for the possessions of the monasteries, or for the offices of stewardship created by their suppression. But Mr. Froude wishes us, nevertheless, to believe that the suppression was occasioned by the corruption of the monasteries, and was undertaken by the government as a duty which the interests of religion obliged them to perform; yet he elsewhere admits that the monasteries were "sacrificed to the policy which rendered it necessary to throw off the papal jurisdiction." Henry VIII. had no wish to abridge the papal power until its authority restrained his licentious and adulterous will. On the divorce question, the fickle tyrant, as we all know, first appealed to the Pope's dispensing powers, but when he found that he could not obtain sentence in his favour, then made it treason to assert them; and it was not until the long-suffering Katharine appealed to the Pope that Henry abolished the papal power in England. With regard to the suppression of monasteries, Protestant sympathies are in favour of the destructive reformers and against the constructive monks; but it is a mistake to view that measure as undertaken with any view to the Reformation. That change was the gradual consequence of Henry's assumption of the supremacy. Some time before the suppression of monasteries, the mass of the people, says Mr. Froude, fancied "it was possible for a national church to separate itself from the unity of Christendom, and, at the same time, to retain the power to crush or prevent innovation in doctrine; they fancied that faith in the sacramental system could still be maintained, though the priesthood should minister in gilded chains. But Wolsey saw that plain men could not and would not continue to reverence the office of the priesthood when the priests were treated as the paid officials of an earthly authority higher than their own." When, in 1534, parliament assumed to declare Heury Supreme Head of the Church of England, the government took care to disclaim any intention to decline or vary from the congregation of Christ's Church in anything concerning the articles of the Catholic faith, or anything declared by Holy Scripture and the Word of God. But no final rupture had then taken place with Rome. The political complications of the time, and the power of England, led Henry to imagine that, notwithstanding his self-willed acts of defiance and sacrilege, the nation might remain in religious communion with Rome; and the statutes against the papal power which were enacted when that expectation was given up, are to be viewed as dictated by a roused spirit of national independence and a jealousy of foreign jurisdiction, rather than by any altered convictions of Englishmen on the score of doctrine. How soon the result foreseen by Wolsey came to pass, we have no present occasion to show; and having intended to confine the present article to that part of Mr. Froude's work in which he treats of the suppression of the monasteries, we need not trace the history of the early Reformation statutes, or of their victims," whose high forms, seen in the sunset of the old faith, seem to stand on the horizon tinged with the light of its dying glory."

W. S. G.

The first Sunday Paper-Goldsmith's Character of the Newspapers in 1780Foundation of the Morning Herald-Sir Bate Dudley-Hugh Boyd-Libel again!-The Jesuit-Richard Brinsley Sheridan-The first Editor's Box, and its inventor, Crisp-Foundation of the Times-John Walter the First-Fines and Imprisonments-The First Evening Paper and Peter Stuart-James PerryThe Argus-Louis Goldsmid-Sampson Perry-Sales of Newspaper PropertyEngagement of Coleridge and Lamb-Stephen Jones-Transmission of Papers through the Post-Circulation of Newspapers-Close of the Century.

THERE were now seventeen papers published in London of these, in 1777, seven came out every morning, eight thrice a week, one twice, and one only once, a week. There had as yet been no Sunday papers, but the citizens could fast from politics and news on the seventh day no longer, and, in 1778, Johnson's Sunday Monitor appeared. The information which they hungered after was political gossip, conjectures, guesses, anticipations, pure inventions-all supposed to be genuine until contradicted next day-mysterious whisperings as from some great authority whom it would compromise, perhaps lead to the block, to name, but which were the crumbs of information which had been dropped from the great man's table, picked up by his footman, and spiced for the news-collector-perhaps greedily swallowed at last by Hugh Kelly himself, and disgorged into the newspaper office for five-and-twenty shillings a week, as per his contract with the Gazetteer; or, by a less conscientious mind than poor Hugh's, fabricated entirely, as Goldsmith, who knew something of these matters himself, suggests:

"The universal passion for politics is gratified by daily gazettes, as with us in China. But, as in ours, the emperor endeavours to instruct his people, in theirs, the people endeavour to instruct the administration. You must not, however, imagine that they who compile these papers have any actual knowledge of the politics or the government of a state; they only collect their materials from the oracle of some coffee-house, which oracle has himself gathered them the night before from a beau at a gaming-table, who has pillaged his knowledge from a great man's porter, who has had his information from the great man's gentleman, who has invented the whole story for his own amusement the night preceding."

It was in this year that the Rev. Henry Bate quarrelled with his colleagues of the Morning Post and set up the Morning Herald on his own account, the first number of which appeared on Wednesday, the 1st of November, "to be conducted," as he promises in his address to the public, "upon liberal principles." Bate, whose previous fortunes we have traced when speaking of the foundation of the Post, still continued a fast parson; he wrote plays and fought duels, took the name of Dudley, together with a large estate, under the will of a friend, and immediately bought the reversion to the living of Bradwell-juxta-Mare, eleven miles

* Citizen of the World.

from Maldon, where he laid out twenty-eight thousand pounds in restoring the church, schools, and rectory-house, now known as Bradwell Lodge, on the roof of which may be seen this magnificent editor's observatory, ornamented with Ionic columns, which form the chimneys of the whole building. The rector, on whose life the reversion depended, died, as even rectors with fat livings must, but the Bishop of London refused to induct into his place the Rev. Bate Dudley. This gave rise to a lawsuit, which lasted seven years, ended in a compromise at last, and left Dudley a poorer man by some two-and-twenty thousand pounds. But the Herald had espoused the cause of the Prince of Wales; and while Sheridan defended him in the House of Commons, the Prince and the Duke of Clarence befriended him in private; in 1805 he got the rich rectory of Kilcoran, and was made chancellor of the diocese of Ferns, and a justice of the peace, and in 1812 he obtained a baronetcy. Sir Henry Bate Dudley died at Cheltenham in 1824.

Similar, in more than one respect, were the character and career of a contemporary, Hugh Boyd, on whom John Almon has so laboriously tried to fit the cloak of Junius. His father was Alexander Macaulay, Esq., of Glenville, in the county of Antrim, who had been a friend of Swift's, and his mother a daughter of Hugh Boyd, Esq., of Ballycastle. The second son by this marriage, and born in 1746, he became the heir of Mr. Boyd by will, and on his death he, like Bate, assumed the name as well as the wealth of his benefactor. But he had only just left Trinity College, and was, perhaps, more extravagant than the editor of the Morning Herald. In 1766, he was called to the bar in Dublin, and soon after came over to London, and entered himself of the Temple-also entering the temple of Hymen with a richly endowed bride. But his estate and her dower were soon expended; in 1776, he became a political writer as the author of the Freeholder, and in 1779 and 1780 was associated with Almon's London Courant, for which he wrote the series of articles called the Whig. His interest, like Dudley's, was good; and, in 1781, he went in the suite of the Earl of Macartney to India, and in 1782 was sent ambassador to the King of Candy. Ön his return from this mission he started the Indian Observer at Madras, where he died in 1794.

Both the Herald, which Dudley edited, and the London Courant, for which Boyd wrote, suffered prosecution in the next year (1781). On the 4th of July, "the late printers of the London Courant and the Noon Gazette, the publisher of the Morning Herald, and the printer of the Gazetteer, received sentence in the Court of King's Bench for a libel on the Russian ambassador; the printer of the London Courant, as the original publisher, to be imprisoned one year, and stand for one hour in the pillory at the Royal Exchange; the printer of the Noon Gazette to pay a fine of one hundred pounds, and to be imprisoned one year, and, for an aggravated paragraph, to be imprisoned six months after the expiration of the first imprisonment, and pay a second fine of one hundred pounds; the publisher of the Morning Herald to pay a fine of one hundred pounds, and be imprisoned one year; and the printer of the Gazetteer (being a female) to pay a fine of fifty pounds, and be imprisoned for six months.”* On the next day, and for the same

* Gentleman's Magazine for August, 1781.

offence, the printers of the Whitehall Evening Post and Middlesex Journal were also sentenced to pay a fine of one hundred pounds each, and be each imprisoned one year; and the printer of the St. James's Chronicle to pay the fine without suffering the imprisonment.

Truly, the Russian ambassador must have had full revenge!.

The year 1782, as far as we can trace, saw the first connexion with the press of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who was shortly to shed such immortal lustre on his name by his eloquent defence of its liberties, and who now appears to have been united with others in bringing out the Jesuit. It is not very agreeable to have to add that, on its party afterwards coming into power, a prosecution which the fallen government had brought against its printer was allowed to proceed, and he was left to suffer the full term of the year's imprisonment to which he was sentenced.

From Brinsley Sheridan to Samuel Crisp! Well, there is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous, and while we record when the one came into newspaper life, let us not omit to tell when the other went out of it. In January, 1784, then, died Samuel Crisp, who first introduced the "editor's box" at newspaper offices!

A more important event took place in January, 1785, on the thirteenth day of which there appeared No. 1 of the Daily Universal Register, a paper of four pages, principally designed, it would seem, to introduce to the public a new invention of printing with types representing words and syllables instead of only letters-a patent process, conceived by one Henry Johnson, a compositor, and which was to save time, trouble, expense, and errors. The price of the first number was twopence-halfpenny, and the printer and proprietor was John Walter, of Printing-house-square, who appears to have suffered great annoyances and losses in his attempts to introduce his logographical hobby into universal practice; but in three years afterwards he found the title of his new paper inconvenient, and on the 1st of January, 1788, forged that iron name which every morning knocks at the door of a sleeping world, and bids, in a voice of thunder, wake!

THE TIMES!

The reasons for this change Walter thus describes: "The Universal Register, from the day of its first appearance to the day of its confirmation, has, like Tristram (Shandy), suffered from unusual casualties, both laughable and serious, arising from its name, which, on its introduction, was immediately curtailed of its fair proportion by all who called for itthe word universal being universally omitted, and the word register being only retained. 'Boy, bring me the Register.' The waiter answers, 'Sir, we have not a library, but you may see it at the New Exchange Coffee-house.' Then I'll see it there,' answers the disappointed politician, and he goes to the New Exchange and calls for the Register; upon which the waiter tells him that he cannot have it, as he is not a subscriber, and presents him with the Court and City Register, the Old Annual Register, or the New Annual Register, or, if the coffee-house be within the purlieus of Covent Garden, or the hundreds of Drury, slips into the politician's hand Harris's Register of ladies. For these and other reasons, the parents of the Universal Register have added to its original name that of the Times, which, being a monosyllable, bids defiance to corruptors and mutilators of the language."