The story of the _Leeds Mercury_ is an honourable one in the annals of English journalism. It was first established, if I remember aright, in the year 1718. In the editor's room at Leeds a file of the paper is preserved, dating from the year 1727. This file is complete for more than 170 years, with one melancholy exception. In the volume for 1745 the numbers of the paper published during the second Jacobite Rising are omitted. But in spite of this omission, these volumes, extending over so long a period, are of immense value and interest. In its earliest days the _Mercury_, though published in a provincial town, sought to reproduce in its columns not so much the news of the locality as the humour of the Metropolis; and the very first leading article in the earliest volume preserved at Leeds bears the quaint title, "To the Ladies who affect showing their stockings." Comparatively early in the Georgian era the _Mercury_ became distinguished for the excellence of its news, both local and general. It was not, of course, a large newspaper in those days, but the four pages of which it consisted were full of meat. There was no descriptive reporting; but what could be more expressive than the announcement of a marriage in such terms as these:--"On Tuesday se'n-night, Squire Brown of Bumpkin Hall was married to Miss Matilda Midas of Halifax, a handsome young lady with ten thousand pounds to her dowry"? We are much more florid nowadays, but by no means so precise. The leader-writer did not spread himself abroad a hundred years ago. Indeed, soon after the _Leeds Mercury_ gave up discussing the amiable weakness that it attributed to ladies with well-turned ankles, it ceased for a time to discuss anything at all. It was only in the beginning of the nineteenth century that it resumed its leading articles. But what leading articles they were! Fine writing and redundancy of style were both discarded, and when the news of Waterloo arrived, the editor's comment upon the great epoch-making victory was expressed in a dozen lines. One sighs at the thought of the miles of "long primer" that would be expended if we had the opportunity of commenting upon such a theme to-day. Yet the twelve-line article in the _Leeds Mercury_ of June, 1815, really said everything that was to the point on the subject with which it dealt.