The pamphlet was one of the most immediate and necessary creations of the printing press. Before that invention it was hardly possible, and a very considerable time had to elapse afterwards before the combination of education in the reader, command of mechanical means in the diffuser, and changed political conditions, enabled the newspaper to supplant it. The pamphlet, so far as production is concerned, when once private presses are accessible, gives few hostages to fortune or to the strong hand of authority. It may make but a single appearance, and then the type is broken up, the machinery removed, and the printed copies left to find their way and do their work. A newspaper must have more or less of a headquarters, definite managers, at the very least a regular place and time of appearance at which it can be waited for and snapped up. Of the advantages offered by the pamphlet there is a good example in the fact that under the active, intelligent, and almost despotic government of Elizabeth, though the Martin Marprelate tracts excited the intensest hatred not merely of the lay authorities but of a powerful and omnipresent ecclesiastical corporation, the presses were only once (at Newton Lane in Lancashire) discovered and seized. In less perilous matter the pamphlet, if it did not give so much protection, 'obliged' even less. Its cost was small; the author was in no way bound to follow it up with anything else. It took him but a little time to produce; its profit, if there was any, came in quickly; it could be sold out before pirates could get hold of it; it did not frighten the unlearned by bulk and pretensions. On the other hand, of course, it had its drawbacks. It was of its nature, and in more points than one of that nature, ephemeral. The chances were rather against than in favour of its being preserved; for even in these days when most people have a library or book-room of some kind, the very student himself acknowledges with gnashings of teeth the way things published in pamphlet form have of 'going under,' of simply disappearing, he cannot tell how or whither. Hence the real and intrinsic interest of the pamphlet has had added to it the accidental and factitious interest of rarity. It is hardly a paradox to say that one of the best chances which such a thing had of surviving was the fact of its being proscribed and burnt by the hangman. There was then some reason for treasuring it instead of letting it go to clean boots, light fires, and wrap pounds of butter.