press. The booksellers are in the habit of sending early copies of their new publications to the papers, and the editors in return are usually very prompt in making their public acknowledgments, by way of encouraging so agreeable a practice. At some offices, indeed, the proprietors reserve to themselves the right of retaining the presentation copies of new books; in which case the critics, having no longer the same inducement to attend to "the literature" of the paper, the books are either neglected, or slightly noticed. So well are some of the booksellers aware of this, that many of them carefully endeavour to find out the names of the gentlemen at the different offices to whom the "literature" is usually confided, and to them personally address their presentation copies. Impartiality in these reviews is not to be hoped for. If either the editor, or the reporter to whom the book is confided, happen to be a friend of the author, the critic as a matter of course "will look to like," and favour will often be shown to a publisher, where the author is entirely unknown. The object which all parties have in view is nevertheless obtained. The attention of the public is called to the new publication; and though the collector, who takes his newspaper for a guide, is often perhaps deluded into the purchase of a dull book, on the other hand many a good book would remain entirely unknown but for the publicity which the newspaper affords.

The bookseller is not the only man to whom the assistance of the newspaper press is of vital importance. Theatrical managers and theatrical stars are to be kept alive only by the puff of the broad sheet. Merit of a high order, indeed, is sure to command newspaper support, for editors, though they may sometimes lead, are more often hurried away by public opinion. But merit of a secondary order is not unfrequently puffed into a sickly notoriety by a system, against which it is not easy for the most conscientious conductor of a newspaper to be always on his guard.

A man of no little importance in a newspaper office is the printer, and where this post is badly filled, matters are sure to get into confusion. Some portion of the sub-editor's duties necessarily devolve upon him, and, at all establishments, the editors are anxious to get home to bed as early as possible, relying upon the intelligence of the printer to prevent any thing from going wrong. The printer, as a matter of course, can never leave the office till the paper is ready for press, which is seldom the case before five or six in the morning. A stranger, who has never seen any but a private printing-office, can form but a faint idea of the life and activity that prevail in that of a London morning paper, or of the care and method required in the superintendant. The copy of editors and reporters is all written on small slips of paper, for the greater convenience of distributing them to several compositors at the same time. Of these slips, forty, or even more, go to a column, so that to fill the forty-eight columns of such a paper as the Times or double Chronicle, it is probable that no less than 1600 slips have passed through the printer's hands in the course of the night. The marvel is, that a misplacement of type so seldom occurs, when so vast a mass of letterpress has to be arranged within so short a period of time. The head printer, of course, cannot take any part in the manual labour of his office; the superintendence of his men, and the distribution of fresh copy to the compositors, form a task that occupies nearly his undivided attention. In proportion as the copy is composed the type is arranged in "galleys," each of which contains about as much as will fill one column. As soon as the galley is full, a proof is struck off and sent to the reader's room. This proof has then to be carefully read, and after all the typographical errors have

been marked, the proof returns to the compositors' room, where the corrections of the reader are made one by one; and when this is done, a second proof, or "revise," is sent to the reader, whose business it is to ascertain that the faults marked in the proof have disappeared from the revise. If the article happen to be an original composition of one of the gentlemen of the editorial department, a copy of the revise is likewise sent to him, when it is very likely that he may think many of his arguments and elucidations susceptible of improvement, extension, or abridgment, alterations which necessarily entail very considerable trouble upon the compositor. A copy of the revise of all original matter is likewise sent to the editor's room, that he may have an opportunity of striking out any paragraph or expression not consistent with his views or the interests of the paper. The discharge of this part of his duties requires extreme delicacy, for it is difficult to curtail or alter arguments without offending the self-love of a contributor; and yet, without some superintendence of this kind, contradictions and discrepancies would be continually occurring. The reporter has no opportunity of revising his composition. His slips, as fast as His slips, as fast as they are written, are snatched up by the printer's boy, and the writer never sees any part of them again, until he reads their contents in the next morning's paper. But at one office, and, perhaps, a similar practice may exist at others, a gentleman is engaged for the express purpose of revising the debates, in order that any accidental fault of style may be corrected before the paper goes to press.

A portion of the sub-editor's duties, we have said, often devolves upon the printer. In some offices this is more the case than in others, but in all it is of occasional, and in some of nightly, occurrence. The sub-editor, having given into the printer's hands what he deems a sufficient quantity of copy, ventures to wend his steps homeward. He is scarcely gone, perhaps, when some penny-a-line contributor arrives, between four or five in the morning, with an account of a destructive conflagration, a horrid murder, a steamboat collision, or some equally interesting occurrence. The sub-editor having taken his departure, the printer must judge for himself whether or not he shall accept the proffered copy; and if he accept it, some of that previously placed in his hands must be withdrawn. At another time all the editorial gentlemen may have departed, when a long advertisement of great public interest is brought in by some gentleman who must not be denied a favour, and other copy must again be withdrawn to obtain the required space. The foreign express, again, may have been delayed beyond the usual time, stormy weather preventing the steamer from effecting the passage from Calais to Dover. The paper is already full, the forms made up, and the steam-engine about to be set in motion, when the tardy express makes its appearance. Editors have all been gone for upwards of an hour, and the printer is called upon to discharge a double editorial duty-to decide, firstly, what portion of the matter brought by the express he will make use of; and, secondly, what copy shall be condemned to make room for that which has just arrived.

The foreign express arrives nightly; but there are other expresses less regular in their occurrence. An important political meeting, a party dinner, an election, or a trial of more than usual interest, is often deemed of such moment, that one or more reporters are sent from each London paper. Their reports, if sent up by post, would not reach the respective offices till eight or nine in the morning, too late for that day's paper. The intelligence might thus be anticipated by the evening publications. To prevent this the copy must be sent up by express. On these occasions the reporters fre

quently write out their notes in the carriage that conveys them back to London, and when they reach their office early in the morning, the printer is perhaps again called upon to exercise the functions of a literary judge, to decide how much of the fresh copy is to be accepted, and what part of the old must be withdrawn to make room.

The making up of an evening, varies altogether from that of a morning paper. The one is essentially the work of the night, the other of the day. By the system of expresses, the morning papers anticipate so much of what formerly gave interest to their evening contemporaries, that the latter are now reduced to become little better than mere reprints of those of the morning. Not content with the advantages which their expresses afford them, the morning papers are even in the habit of publishing second editions, whenever the morning's post has brought any intelligence of importance from those regions with which no express communication has yet been organised. Nevertheless, there are some points which must remain to give interest to the evening journals. In the first place, the most practised reporters cannot guard against daily mistakes in the account they give of the proceedings in Parliament. The absurd custom of turning the reporters out of the gallery during a division (little as those gentlemen would wish to see the custom altered) makes it often impossible to do more than guess at the form in which the Speaker may have put the question. Again, many members in presenting petitions know so little how to pitch their voices to an audible key, that the most ludicrous misapprehensions are constantly occurring. The private bills, moreover, are generally disposed of in so slovenly a manner, and amidst such a din of shuffling of feet and other marks of inattention, that the reporter, if he happens not to have the order paper at hand, cannot possibly give a correct statement of what is going on. The order paper is a sort of printed bill of fare for the evening's entertainment, a kind of parliamentary play bill, to mark the succession in which the orders of the day and the notices of motion are to follow one another. But even with this guide the reporter is by no means secure. He may believe that a bill has been read a second time, when in point of fact a postponement has just been agreed upon; or two railroad bills may have changed turns, and the reporter may easily invert the truth, without any malice aforethought, by setting the first down as read a third time, and the second as withdrawn till the next session. These matters appear of little importance to the reporter, in comparison with a speech of Sir Robert Peel or Lord Brougham; but there are hundreds and thousands to whom a railroad or an enclosure bill are of greater moment than all the flowery declamation of the baronet, or the mock-radicalism of the eloquent lord. Now these inaccuracies can never be copied into an evening paper, if the sub-editor takes proper care to correct them. Early on the following morning, the votes, as they are called, of the preceding evening, are printed by order of the House of Commons, and sent round to the members, and to such strangers as choose to pay for them. These votes contain the particulars of every petition that has been presented, of every motion that has been made, of every amendment agreed to in committee, and a list of the names that occur in every division. With these votes at hand, the subeditor of an evening paper, if he be an intelligent man, can give a far more correct report of the last night's proceedings in Parliament, than it is possible for the Times or Chronicle to do, notwithstanding the valuable aid of their admirably organised corps. The parliamentary report in the evening papers has another advantage in being greatly abridged. A debate may

generally be reduced by a skilful sub-editor to less than a third of the space occupied in the morning papers, without the suppression of a single point or argument of the slightest public importance. There are few members who do not repeat the same figure or argument four or five times in the course of a speech; and though the reporters may have been very liberal in their retrenchment of superfluous ornament, there usually remains an ample field in which the sub-editor of an evening paper may exercise his censorial abilities. Where this work is well done, a debate in an evening paper is much more agreeable to read than in a morning paper; but too often, we are sorry to say, it is got through in so slovenly and careless a manner, that the reader is obliged to turn to the more voluminous report to remove doubts which the obscurity of the abridgement may have given

rise to.

In times of great commercial excitement, the evening paper becomes an object of much interest, more particularly in the country and abroad, as the movements of the stock exchange, the corn exchange, and the different colonial markets of the day, may be reported to a tolerably late hour. In Tory times the ministerial evening paper had a peculiar faculty of guessing at all times what the contents of that evening's Gazette would be, but the Whigs are far too impartial to encourage any such prescience in their friends, and the Globe now a days rarely knows any thing more than the Standard of the appointments or other official announcements likely to appear in the only recognised Government journal.

Of late years some of the evening papers have been in the habit of publishing second editions of the proceedings in the two Houses of Parliament, till six or half-past six o'clock. The Sun has at times performed wonders in this way, but since the discontinuance of the True Sun, less pains have been taken with this department of the paper, and the second editions of the Sun have greatly fallen off. While the rival luminary struggled for ascendancy in the political firmament, the elder orb put forth all its rays till it succeeded in extinguishing the light of its younger rival; but with the motive for competition, the incentive to zeal appears to have died. The reporters on morning papers were wont to trust to the second edition of the Sun to relieve them of the labour of their early turns; but they have learned of late, that such reliance is attended with danger.

The hasty sketch here given may afford some insight into the machinery by the aid of which our colossal newspapers are daily manufactured in the course of a few hours. With the best inclination, however, to make ourselves intelligible, we are quite aware that much of what we have endeavoured to describe will still remain obscure to those to whom the details are new. We have shown that the evening papers are chiefly made up from the morning papers, and the same remark applies even with greater strength to the whole weekly and provincial press. The five morning papers published in London may, therefore, be said to give in a great measure the key-note to the whole press of the country, and, we must say, we think it is deeply to be regretted that a power so tremendous as that exercised, directly and indirectly, by these guides and representatives of public opinion, should have become a commercial monopoly to be exercised chiefly for the promotion of factious and anti-national views. We entered fully into this subject in our February number, but it is one to which we shall return again and again, until we succeed in arousing the Liberal party from the unaccountable supineness into which it has allowed itself to sink. We boldly affirm, that it is owing to the activity of the Tory party, in buy

ing up the shares of the existing daily papers, that the Melbourne ministry has had such formidable obstacles to contend against, and that revolutionary principles have been gaining strength.

With all the faults of omission that may be charged upon the Government, it cannot be denied that Lord Melbourne has ably directed the counsels of his country, that he has greatly increased the influence of England among foreign nations, that he has lightened the public burthens, abolished many useless offices, and has even succeeded in wresting from an unwilling legislature many measures of practical reform, the value and importance of which will become manifest, whenever the apathy that now prevails is succeeded by the excitement which will follow, as assuredly as the night will be followed by the day. Lord Melbourne has not done for the people all that the people had a right to expect from him; but he has done quite enough to ensure to himself the undying hatred of the enemies of the people; and had he been seconded, instead of being thwarted, by the press, we should ere this have been nearer, by many years, to that consolidation of our reform institutions, from which alone we can look for the destruction of those widespreading abuses which grew up under Tory domination, which alone can extinguish wild and visionary schemes that owe their popularity to public disappointment, schemes the realisation of which would lead to anarchy and, perhaps, terminate in despotism.

No minister has ever been so feebly supported by the press as Lord Melbourne; none but a minister possessed of a strong hold on public favour could so long have struggled against the organised hostility of a powerful aristocracy, a packed press, and the accumulating embarrassments occasioned by the profligate expenditure of the war, and the crushing influence of a ruinous corn-law. If, however, the Liberals wish to preserve the present Government, or to destroy the power of negative controul now exercised by the Tory party, they must unite their efforts to wrest the newspaper press from Tory hands. This can only be done by the establishment of one or two new Liberal morning papers, which, if well conducted, will be come valuable sources of income to those who originate them. The London daily press is at present a close monopoly, and one exercised, as most monopolies are, for the furtherance of oppression, the maintenance of injustice, and the prevention of public improvement. How long is this state of things to continue, before the Liberal party make an effort to terminate it?