himself. It must be said of him, however, that he was then what would now-a-days be called an Advanced Liberal. Under his guidance the Morning Chronicle' advocated bolder and broader views of political questions than it had done under the mild and jovial-tempered Perry. On those subjects that were purely political indeed, he never proceeded so far as to break away from the bulk of his party; and the 'Morning Chronicle remained, all through Black's management, the recognized organ of the Whig party. But in those questions of a moral and social nature which were then just beginning to force themselves upon public notice, and which may be called the neutral ground of all parties, Black became conspicuous as the advocate of the most extreme opinions. In the 'dreary science' of political economy he was a willing pupil, and a frequent exponent of the theories of Ricardo, Malthus, and the other sages of that branch of science; and there can be no doubt that the circulation of the paper was somewhat checked, though its influence among the thinkers of society was heightened by the often-repeated exposition of those opinions which were 'caviare to the million,' and which, as far as they were understood, were rather distasteful to the ordinary class of readers. It is said that much of this was due to the influence which James Mill, the historian of India, exercised upon the mind of the editor. The two Scotchmen lived in the same quarter of the town, and were in the frequent habit of meeting and of walking together. Congenial tastes rendered them intimate, and the higher and harder nature of Mill soon asserted its predominance over Black. The editor became the pupil of the philosopher; and these sworn and sincere friends of the people conversed together on principles and adopted views of society, in which, as rendered in the editorial columns, the mass of the people had no sympathy. The days of the popularity of free trade had not come; the artisans had no objection to the free importation of food, but they resented the application of the same principles to articles of in

dustry-which were then equally protected-as freely as we have seen the Coventry ribbon weavers resent the French treaty in our own days. The Malthusian theory was unpopular from the beginning, never had the ghost of a chance of obtaining popularity, and in our days of extended commerce and wide-spread emigration has died a natural death. But the most unpopular topic of the day was to attack the old poor law. That law was regarded as the palladium of the labouring man's liberties; and as the daring speculations of the new school of philosophy had ventured to call in question its economy and wisdom, it was natural that the opponents of the law should be stigmatised as hardhearted, unfeeling men, sycophants of the rich, grinders of the faces of the poor, men whom it behoved every Englishman with a heart in his bosom to oppose, persecute, and put down. Those who remember with what an insane vehemence the alteration in the law was assailed by the 'Times,' under the inspiration of the late Mr. Walter, may imagine how fiercely the battle was fought at an earlier stage of the controversy; those who do not, will find some amusing specimens of it in the publications of William Cobbett. Cobbett was as ardent a friend of the people as either Black or Mill, but his friendship started from a different point, and led to a very different result. He cared little for their elevation in the moral scale; his advocacy was mainly directed to an increase in their material comforts: that the labourer should have his jug of beer and his hunch of bread and cheese, with a joint of meat now and then, and, over and above all things, that he should be saved from the miserable doom of eating potatoes-that was the labourer's paradise as it appeared to the eyes of William Cobbett; and we need not add, that such a vision readily commended itself to the bulk of the labourers themselves. With these views, it may easily be conceived how he would regard the more austere, but, as we now believe, the higher vision of the labourer's future, set forth in the columns of the Morning

Chronicle.' Cobbett's pen has rarely been matched in the power and passion of scolding. We believe passages might be picked out of his writings which would bear a comparison with Timon's celebrated curse of Athens; and the whole venom and vitriol of his style was concentrated on the head of the 'Scotch feelosopher,' Dr. John Black. He is never weary of holding him up to reproach and ridicule. The Register,' 'Twopenny Trash,' the 'Evening Post,' in fact, all the publications he started during this period, are filled with the same subjec t-abuse of the man's erroneous principles, and their exposition in the Whig organ. The image of Dr. Black, indeed, seems to have haunted him; for whatever topic he may have begun to write about, it is rare indeed but that in some way or other, he contrives to introduce a fling at the Scotch editor. This is amusingly illustrated in one of his best known and still popular works, his Rural Rides.' The work contains many a sweet bit of description, many a piece of vivid wordpainting, setting bodily before the eye the rich English landscape of our southern and south-western counties. But the best of these descriptions are often disfigured by a sudden and savage attack upon the bugbear of his thoughts. Is he describing a state of comparative comfort in which he found the labouring population Now, Dr. Black, this is the condition of the people that your hardhearted system would break up.' Or has he stumbled upon a village remarkable for its ignorance and wretchedness

-

Now, Dr. Black, how would your "feelosophy "deal with a case of this kind? Refuse them all workhouse relief, I warrant, and give them instead lectures upon the good of education and the curse of marriage.' The object of all these rabid attacks, in the mean time, went calmly on his way, not deigning to reply to the showers of abuse that were weekly discharged upon him. His own style, it must be owned, was hardly of the kind which would commend itself to the public. It was modelled upon that of his friend

Mill, than which it would be difficult to imagine anything more severely didactic, or less enlivened with the play of fancy or gleams of humour. Full of matter his leaders always were, grappling most fully with the subject on which they professed to treat; and what he gave himself in this way he scrupulously exacted from his coadjutors. His great complaint against those writers who sought for employment on his staff was, that they did not bite.' on their subjects; and if this were often repeated, employment would not long be forthcoming for them on the staff of the 'Morning Chronicle.' The consequence was, that the paper was, even in its best days, rather admired than enjoyed; it was quoted as an authority rather than adopted as a companion. During his reign the paper once or twice changed hands; but each new purchaser respected the abilities and high-hearted principles of the editor, and he was undisturbed in his position. The first of these changes occurred soon after Black had become editor, when the paper was sold for 42,000l. Some years afterwards it again changed hands, Mr. Easthope-afterwards Sir John-being one of the principal proprietors. It must be noted, to Black's credit, that though there was no trace of sentiment or fancy in his own composition, he was not slow to discern or averse to honour it in others. Dickens was a reporter on the Chronicle' while Black was editor. The genius of the young gallery man was early discerned by the hard, dry editor; and Dickens's papers the 'Sketches by Boz' -were first given to the world in the columns of the Evening Chronicle-a late reprint of the morning edition. Most, if not all, of them were written in the sub-editor's room of that establishment: and to the latest hour of the existence of that ill-starred journal, the people employed upon it used to point with pride to the table- -a plain, unwieldy machine, as all newspaper belongings are-at which Dickens was wont to sit, while his fancy revelled in the scenes portrayed in these sketches, and even his rapid pen-it is said he could transcribe

his notes of reports at the rate of a column an hour!-could scarcely keep pace with the outpourings of his vivid imagination. Another name, too early lost to literature, owed its first friendly help to Dr. Black. Angus Bethune Reach, a native of Inverness, and an alumnus of Edinburgh University, suddenly had his prospects clouded by domestic calamities, and came up to London, nearly penniless, to push his fortune. Other employment failing him, he bravely set to work in that lowest grade of literary employment a penny-a-liner. In this way he earned for some time a precarious livelihood, till the great fire of the Tower took place. It was just the occasion which afforded room for the display of Reach's vividly-descriptive powers. His account of the conflagration was accepted at the 'Chronicle,' as at most of the other papers. But Black was not content with its insertion. He was struck with the powers displayed in the narrative, and was satisfied that the writer was capable of better things. He sent for him, offered him a regular engagement on the newspaper, which Reach retained through all future changes of management till his untimely death in 1853.

The termination of Black's own connection with the Chronicle' was curious and characteristic. We have already intimated that he had not the quick, versatile, ambidextrous power which more than any other man is essential to a newspaper editor; his mind ran in one groove, and from that groove the busy world appeared to be moving away. The proprietors were beginning to be dissatisfied with his management, admitting it to be excellent in itself, indeed, but no longer that which the temper of the new age required. It was said, however, that the catastrophe was precipitated by a curious incident. It was the proud custom of the proprietors of the great Whig journal to give an annual dinner to the gentlemen engaged on their establishment, and to invite some of the leading Whig parliamentary celebrities to attend the festival. On one occasion the

feast was graced with some of the statesmen who had held office in the Cabinet before Sir Robert Peel cut short the thread of Whig official existence. When their hearts were merry with wine, one of these magnates proposed the health of the proprietors, making sundry graceful allusions to the important place they filled in society, and the importance of their property as an enlightener and guide of public opinion. One of the firm-not Sir John Easthopeacknowledged the toast, expressed himself duly grateful for the compliments which he evidently thought, however, were not undeserved, and then wound up by proposing the health of the editor. It is possible that Black was nettled at the order in which his health had been placed

possible, too, that he fancied the proprietor took more credit to himself for the influence of the paper than was properly his due; at all events, he astonished the company by following up the proprietor's remarks on the importance of newspaper property, by an ad hominem illustration, which was felt to be singularly out of place. 'Yes,' said the Doctor, there is no doubt of the importance of the newspaper press, or the advantage which a connection with it brings. For instance, there are you and I, Mr. — (turning to the proprietor who was panting with the effort of delivering his speech): we both came out of Scotland about the same time, with barely a sixpence in our pockets; the only difference between us was, that I had shoes on my feet, and you had none; and yet our connection with the newspaper press has helped us into the worshipful society of Lords and Cabinet Ministers.' It was about the only joke the man ever made and the dearest. Very soon afterwards the world was informed that Dr. Black had ceased to be editor of the 'Morning Chronicle.' He lived in the enjoyment of learned and well-earned leisure for several years afterwards.

A minor newspaper writer, but one who made some noise in the earlier career of Black, and Sterling, and Barnes, was William Jerdan. He has taken care that the world,

or at least that portion of it which devours all the issue of the circulating libraries, should know a good deal about him, his character, and his adventures; for after the fashion of sundry other second and third class authors, after all other sources of literary interest failed, he coined his own life into money, and published his autobiography. Queer, rambling, gossiping, egotistical books the most of them are, in which a good story, or a curious bit of local history, or some half-forgotten incident of parliamentary warfare is found overlaid with heaps of rubbish. Jerdan's is no exception to the general class; but in the earlier volumes there is a good deal of information about newspaper men, and newspaper work, over which the reader skims pleasant enough, if only he can at the outset surrender himself to the illusion that of all the men there described, Jerdan was foremost-of all the scenes he was the hero.

William Jerdan was born at Kelso, in Roxburghshire, where his father, a local magnate, established a newspaper for the purpose of upholding the good old cause of Church and King. The journal still survives, and is, we believe, still the property of the family. William Jerdan may therefore be said to have been born in the midst of newspaper work; and after some abortive attempts to begin life, both as a merchant and as a lawyer, first in London and afterwards in Edinburgh, he finally found his way up to London again, and gravitated towards the press. One of his earliest engagements was upon the 'Aurora, a daily newspaper that was started about the beginning of the century by the hotel-keepers of the West End. These gentlemen had observed the success which attended the establishment by the licensed victuallers of the Morning Advertiser,' and they aimed at the establishment of a journal which should be as much superior to the Radical paper, as their own showy and pretentious hotels were to the dingy publichouses in the City. But they must have had strange notions of newspaper management. Their first VOL. V.-NO. XXVIII.

blunder was in the choice of an editor, whom they seemed to have selected more on account of his familiarity with their bar-parlour than his literary qualifications. He is thus described by Jerdan: 'Our editor was originally intended for the kirk, and was a well-informed person; but to see him at or after midnight in his official chair, when writing his leader, was a trial for a philosopher. With the slips of paper before him, a pot of porter close at hand, and a pipe of tobacco in his mouth, or newly laid down, he proceeded secundum artem. The head hung with the chin on his collar-bone as in deep thought-a whiff-another-a tug at the beerand a line and a half or two lines committed to the blotting-paper. By this process, repeated with singular rapidity, he would contrive, between the hours of twelve and three, to produce as decent a column as the ignorant public required.'

Perhaps it was to Mr. Jerdan a conclusive proof of the ignorance of the public, that when he became editor of the 'Aurora,' the public perversely refused to admit that that made any difference, and deserted the journal in such numbers that the proprietors dropped it altogether. Neither Mr. Jerdan nor any one else, however, could have made head against such insane management of the committee, as he describes in the following sketch:

Our Aurorian establishment went on very well for a while, but as the great morning paper recently observed, "If you want anything spoiled or ruined, you cannot do better than confide it to the management of a committee." The truth was exemplified in the present case, and proof afforded of what I have always seen since that period, namely, that there must be a despotic power at the head of a periodical publication, or it must fall to pieces. Now, our rulers of the hotel dynasties, though intelligent and sensible men, were neither literary nor conversant with journalism: thus, under any circumstances, their interference would have been injurious; but it was rendered still

R

more fatal by their differences in political opinion, and two or three of their number setting up to write "leaders" themselves. The clashing, and want of ensemble, was speedily obvious and detrimental; our readers became perfect weathercocks, and could not reconcile themselves to themselves from day to day. They wished, of course, to be led, as all well-informed citizens are, by their newspaper; and they

would not blow hot and cold in the manner prescribed, for all the coffeeroom politicians in London. In the interior, the hubbub and confusion of the republic of letters was meanwhile exceedingly amusing to the looker-on. We were of all parties and shades of opinion; the proprietor of the "King's Head" was an ultra-Tory, and swore by George III. as the best of sovereigns. The "Crown Hotel" was very loyal, but more moderate. The "Bell Inn" would give a strong pull for the Church, while the "Cross Keys" was infected with Romish predilections. The "Cockpit" was warlike -the "Olive Tree pacific; the 'Royal Oak" patriotic; the "Rummer" democratic; the "Hole in the Wall" seditious. Many a dolorous pull at the porter-pot, and sapientious declination of his head, had the perplexed and bemused editor, before he could effect any tolerable compromise of contradictions for the morning's issue; at the best, the sheet appeared full of signs and wonders.

" I Public vacillation and internal discord soon produced their inevitable effects. "Aurora," "the pride of the day," passed her meridian and began to get low in the horizon. Her gold scattering turned out to be rather an artistic fancy in painting her than a substantial reality. I had succeeded to the uneasy post of editor on the exhaustion of the pot and pipe; but vain were my efforts, and the darkness of night overtook the bright divinity of the morning.'

Mr. Jerdan afterwards found his way to the Morning Post,' and was for some years employed on that establishment. It was while engaged as a reporter on this journal,

we believe, that he witnessed the tragic fate of the Prime Minister, Mr. Spencer Perceval. At that time there was one entrance from the street for members and strangers, and Mr. Jerdan, who, of course, does not fail to communicate the fullest details of what he witnessed, relates how he was in the act of pushing open the swing door that opened into the lobby, when he observed the Prime Minister coming up the steps immediately behind him. To give precedence to the minister, holding open the door to allow him to pass, was a natural act of courtesy, repaid by a smile and a cheery nod from the man who was stepping forward to his doom. While in the act of turning round to close the door, Jerdan heard the report of a pistol, and turning sharply round, he saw the man who had passed him in high health the instant before, stagger into the arms of a bystander. He never spoke more. Jerdan, with another man, seized the assassin, and he secured the pistol, which he retained till it was given up at the coroner's inquest. But the newspaper work on the Morning Post,' on which Mr. Jerdan most prided himself, was the part he took in the trial of the Duke of York, at the instance of Colonel Wardle, for the illegal sale of army commissions. We need not revive the details of that scandal; it is enough to say, that the general impression on the public mind was that the duke was guilty. impression the 'Morning Post,' as the court and fashionable paper, set itself to dispel; and they employed Mr. Jerdan as the most efficient writer for the purpose-with what success may best be told in his own words:

That

'Of 'my writings in the "Morning Post," the most effective, in one sense, were a continuation of "leaders". '-as editorial comments are designated-pending the memorable charges brought by Colonel Wardle against the Duke of York, and sustained by the evidence of Mary Ann Clarke. In these I made an abstract of the parliamentary proceedings, from night to night, and earnestly maintained the cause