“ALL things earthly,” said the wit, “have an end—except Upper Wimpole Street.” And the end of the Press has been cheerfully foretold by the Jeremiahs of Fleet Street. So obvious, I have been recently informed, have become the symptoms of disintegration and decay in the institution known under the style and title of “The Daily Press” that the publicist who would call attention to the fact must be prepared to hold himself rather cheap. Now, it is almost a truism to say that there is in the older members of any profession an intuition which compels them to regard their own early days in a calling as indicating the high-water mark of that vocation, whatever it may have been. The reason for this curious attitude of the human mind is not very far to seek. To parody Lytton, “the youthful and the beautiful are one.” And a profession regarded by one who is young, ardent, impressionable, and credulous, will not appear the same thing to him when he views it, in its new developments, with old eyes and in a spirit of detachment. That which differs in the new constitution from the conditions of the old he will regard as bad or puerile or reactionary. The old things he sees through a golden haze; the new he regards with the rheumy eyes of the valetudinarian. In the old newspaper man this instinct to depreciate the present I have found very strong. His pose is invariably that of the _laudator temporis acti_. In all its departments and through all its methods he observes what Wegg calls “the Decline-and-Fall-Off” of the daily paper. Old actors are very much like old pressmen in this respect. Their early days were always “the palmy days.” And as there have always been living old actors to impress this fact on the minds of successive generations, it is obvious that all time, past and present, was and is that blessed period known as “the palmy days.” But while I do not note in the newspaper Press, as it exists to-day, those signs of disintegration and wasting—that “old familiar declining and falling off”—which have been diagnosed by aged professors, I do observe the passing of certain stages of the evolution of the newspaper; and I can even read in those indications the foretaste of a time when the newspaper, as we know it now, will have ceased altogether to exist. I will endeavour to explain.