Respecting the first English printed newspaper, the public have lain under a mistake for nearly a century. Some ten years ago, however, Mr. Thomas Watts of the British Museum exploded the long prevalent fallacy that the “_English Mercurie_,” dated in 1588, was originally the progenitor of modern journals. A copy of such a paper exists in the Birch Collection; but it is a manifest forgery, the concoction of which was traced to the second Lord Hardwicke. It pretends to give news from the expedition against the Spanish Armada; but, besides a host of blunders in dates, it is printed on paper made posterior to the date it bears. The truth is that no periodically printed newspaper appeared till thirty years after. When the reign of James the First was drawing to a close; when Ben Jonson was poet laureate, and the personal friends of Shakspeare were lamenting his then recent death; when Cromwell was trading as a brewer at Huntingdon; when Milton was a youth of sixteen, just trying his pen at Latin verse, and Hampden a quiet country gentleman in Buckinghamshire; London was solicited to patronise its first Newspaper. There is now no reason to doubt that the puny ancestor of the myriads of broad sheets of our time was published in the metropolis in 1622, and that the most prominent of the ingenious speculators who offered the novelty to the world was Nathaniel Butter. His companions in the work appear to have been Nicholas Bourne, Thomas Archer, Nathaniel Newberry, William Sheffard, Bartholomew Downes, and Edward Allde. All these different names appear in the imprints of the early numbers of the first Newspaper—THE WEEKLY NEWES.[1] This prime, original progenitor of the acres of news which are now rolled out from the press failed, after many lapses and struggles, chiefly occasioned by the Star Chamber. Its end was untimely. The last number appeared on the 9th of January, 1640. Could it have survived a little longer it might have run a long career, for the incubus which smothered it was itself stifled—the Star Chamber was abolished in 1641. Footnote 1: The Fourth Estate, by F. K. Hunt.