When the first of 931 single, folio sheets of the _Observator_ appeared on 13 April 1681, the sixty-five-year-old Roger L'Estrange, their sole author, had been a controversial London Royalist for over twenty years. As Crown protégé, he had served intermittently as Surveyor of the Press, Chief Licenser, and Justice of the King's Peace Commission; as a writer, he had produced two newspapers, the _Intelligencer_ and the _Newes_ (1663-1666), dozens of political pamphlets, and seven translations from Spanish, Latin, and French.[1] Rightly nicknamed "bloodhound of the press," L'Estrange was notorious for his ruthless ferreting out of illegal presses and seditious publishers, as well as for his tireless warfare against the powerful Stationers' Company.[2] No less well known were his intransigent reactionary views, for we can estimate that some 64,000 copies of pamphlets bearing his name were circulating in the City during the two years preceding the _Observator_.[3] Thus the _Observator_ papers represent not only the official propaganda of the restored monarchy, but also the intellectual temper of a powerful, influential man whose London fame was sufficiently demonstrated in the winter of 1680, when he was publicly burned in effigy during that year's Pope-burning festivities. In the muddy torrent of "Intelligences," "Mercuries," "Courants," "Pacquets," and sundry newssheets, the _Observator_ marks the beginnings of a new sort of journalism, one which was to shape the development of the English periodical. Although _Heraclitus Ridens_ and its opponent _Democritus Ridens_ initiated the dialogue form for the newspaper seventy-two days before the _Observator_, their relatively short run relegates these pioneers to a shadowy background, as it does the even earlier trade paper in dialogue, the _City and Country Mercury_ (1667).[4] The eighty-two issues of _Heraclitus Ridens_ and thirteen of _Democritus Ridens_ cannot be compared in quantity to the 931 issues of the _Observator_ published three or four times a week from 13 April 1681 to 9 March 1687, nor can their stiff dialogues be compared in importance to L'Estrange's much fuller exploitation of the form. Consequently, even though he did not initiate the newspaper in dialogue form, L'Estrange is unanimously given the honor of having popularized the form, or, in the words of Richmond P. Bond, of having "borrowed the dialogue and fastened it on English journalism for a generation as a factional procedure."[5]