In 1682 the freedom of the Press was restored, and large numbers of _Mercuries_ and other periodicals appeared and flourished in their different fashions. Advertisements began to be a feature of the papers. In _The Jockey’s Intelligencer_ (1683) the charge is “a shilling for a horse or coach, for notification, and sixpence for renewing.” In 1702 _The Daily Courant_, the first daily newspaper, was published, and it survived until 1735. Then in the early years of the eighteenth century the fierce contests between the Whigs and the Tories brought a rapid expansion of the Press. The most famous of the issues were Defoe’s _Review_ (1704), a Whig organ whose writings brought its editor into disrepute; and its opponent _The Examiner_, the Tory paper to which men like Swift and Prior contributed regularly. These newspapers are almost entirely political, but they contain satirical work of much merit. Then in 1709 Steele published _The Tatler_. At first it was Steele’s intention to make it entirely a _news_-paper; but under the pressure of his own genius and of that of Addison its literary features were accentuated till the daily essay became the feature of leading interest. _The Spectator_, begun in March, 1711, carried the tendency still farther. The literary journal has come to stay. Steele’s _Plebeian_ (1718) is an early example of the political periodical. (_b_) _The Rise of the Essay._ Johnson defines an essay as “a loose sally of the mind, an irregular indigested piece, not a regular or orderly performance.” This definition is not quite complete, for it does not cover such an elaborate work as Locke’s _Essay concerning Human Understanding_. But for the miscellaneous prose essay, which it is our immediate business to consider here, the definition will do. An essay, therefore, must in other words be short, unmethodical, personal, and written in a style that is literary, easy, and elegant. The English essay has its roots in the Elizabethan period, in the miscellaneous work of Lodge, Lyly, and Greene, and other literary free-lances (see p. 142). Sir Philip Sidney’s _Apologie for Poetrie_, published about 1580, is a pamphlet that attains a rudimentary essay-form. But the first real essayist in English is Francis Bacon (1561–1626), who published a short series of essays in 1597, enlarged in two later editions (1612 and 1625). His work follows that of the French writer Montaigne, whose essays appeared about 1580. In Bacon we have the miscellany of theme and the brevity, but we lack the intimacy of treatment and of style. Bacon’s essays are rather the disconnected musings of the philosopher than the personal opinions of the literary executant.