The merest glance at colonial journalism will confirm this estimate. The Boston News-Letter, begun in 1704, was the first of the journals, if we omit the single issue of Publick Occurrences in the same town in 1690. By 1765 there were nearly fifty colonial newspapers and several magazines. Their influence made for union, in Franklin's sense of that word, and their literary models, like their paper, type, and even ink, were found in London. The New England Courant, established in Boston in 1721 by James Franklin, is full of imitations of the Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian. What is more, the Courant boasted of its office collection of books, including Shakespeare, Milton, the Spectator, and Swift's Tale of a Tub. ¹ This was in 1722. If we remember that no allusion to Shakespeare has been discovered in the colonial literature of the seventeenth century, and scarcely an allusion to the Puritan poet Milton, and that the Harvard College Library in 1723 had nothing of Addison, Steele, Bolingbroke, Dryden, Pope, and Swift, and had only recently obtained copies of Milton and Shakespeare, we can appreciate the value of James Franklin's apprenticeship in London. Perhaps we can even forgive him for that attack upon the Mathers which threw the conduct of the Courant, for a brief period, into the hands of his brother Benjamin, whose turn at a London apprenticeship was soon to come. ¹ Cook, E. C. Literary Influences in Colonial Newspapers, 1704-1750. N. Y., 1912. If we follow this younger brother to Philadelphia and to Bradford's American Mercury or to Franklin's own Pennsylvania Gazette, or if we study the Gazettes of Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, the impression is still the same. The literary news is still chiefly from London, from two months to a year late. London books are imported and reprinted. Franklin reprints Pamela, and his Library Company of Philadelphia has two copies of Paradise Lost for circulation in 1741, whereas there had been no copy of that work in the great library of Cotton Mather. American journalism then, as now, owed its vitality to a secular spirit of curiosity about the actual world. It followed England as its model, but it was beginning to develop a temper of its own.