What with the political, financial, theological, and sanitary disturbances of Shute’s time, and the freedom of the press, which the governor had been foolish enough to give them the opportunity of making the most of, the intellectual activity of the people had never before occasioned so great a fecundity of print. The Boston man of the early part of the eighteenth century resorted to the type-setter as readily as he gossiped, and that was easily enough. In 1719 there were five printing-presses running in Boston,[240] and the Exchange was surrounded with booksellers’ shops. The practice of sales of books at auctions had begun in 1717 with the disposing of the library of the Rev. Ebenezer Pemberton, or at least its catalogue is thought to be the first of such a sale. Thomas Fleet was selling his doggerel ballads, and the boys and girls of New England first knew who Mother Goose was when her nursery tales were published by Fleet in 1719. The _News-Letter_ had been published for fifteen years, but not three hundred were yet sold at an impression. Wm. Brooker, succeeding Campbell as postmaster, felt it necessary to divide the town and give the _News-Letter_ a chance for an altercation, when in 1719 (Dec. 21) he began the _Boston Gazette_. James Franklin had printed this paper for Brooker, but the printing being taken from him he startled the town with the _New England Courant_, which first appeared on Aug. 17, 1721. The new sheet was bold and saucy,—a sort of free lance, to which people were not accustomed; and while it gave little news and had few advertisements, its columns swarmed with what the staid citizens called impertinences. It wildly attacked the new inoculation theory, and elicited a public rebuke for its scandalous conduct from Increase Mather, who was in turn attacked by it.[241]