Salmasius glories that Milton lost his health and his eyes in answering his apology for King Charles! He does not now reproach him with natural deformities; but he malignantly sympathises with him, that he now no more is in possession of that beauty which rendered him so amiable during his residence in _Italy_. He speaks more plainly in a following page; and, in a word, would blacken the austere virtue of Milton with a crime infamous to name. Impartiality of criticism obliges us to confess that Milton was not destitute of rancour. When he was told that his adversary boasted he had occasioned the loss of his eyes, he answered, with ferocity--"_And I shall cost him his life!_" A prediction which was soon after verified; for Christina, Queen of Sweden, withdrew her patronage from Salmasius, and sided with Milton. The universal neglect the proud scholar felt hastened his death in the course of a twelve-month. The greatness of Milton's mind was degraded! He actually condescended to enter into a correspondence in Holland, to obtain little scandalous anecdotes of his miserable adversary, Morus; and deigned to adulate the unworthy Christina of Sweden, because she had expressed herself favourably on his "Defence." Of late years, we have had too many instances of this worst of passions, the antipathies of politics! ORIGIN OF NEWSPAPERS. We are indebted to the Italians for the idea of newspapers. The title of their _gazettas_ was, perhaps, derived from _gazzera_, a magpie or chatterer; or, more probably, from a farthing coin, peculiar to the city of Venice, called _gazetta_, which was the common price of the newspapers. Another etymologist is for deriving it from the Latin _gaza_, which would colloquially lengthen into _gazetta_, and signify a little treasury of news. The Spanish derive it from the Latin _gaza_, and likewise their _gazatero_, and our _gazetteer_, for a writer of the _gazette_ and, what is peculiar to themselves, _gazetista_, for a lover of the gazette. Newspapers, then, took their birth in that principal land of modern politicians, Italy, and under the government of that aristocratical republic, Venice. The first paper was a Venetian one, and only monthly; but it was merely the newspaper of the government. Other governments afterwards adopted the Venetian plan of a newspaper, with the Venetian name:--from a solitary government gazette, an inundation of newspapers has burst upon us. Mr. George Chalmers, in his Life of Ruddiman, gives a curious particular of these Venetian gazettes:--"A jealous government did not allow a _printed_ newspaper; and the Venetian _gazetta_ continued long after the invention of printing, to the close of the sixteenth century, and even to our own days, to be distributed in _manuscript_." In the Magliabechian library at Florence are thirty volumes of Venetian gazettas, all in manuscript.