The Colonies started the century with a newspaper. The Boston “News-Letter,” printed on a foolscap sheet, and issued once a week, in 1704, only twenty-eight years after the first newspaper was started, and in the very year the first editor, Roger l’Estrange, died, was the parent of that large family of children of all sizes and with such varied characters, which are now disseminated through almost every village of the land, and has acquired such a wide influence, interest, and large real estates among us. Meet it was that this prolific stock should have originated on the spot where, as is now pretty well proved, the first white men who visited our continent made their first landing within our borders, seven hundred years before. It must not, however, be supposed, that the pioneers in newspapers were Danes. From all that can now be ascertained, they were Bohemians. We may add that the “News-Letter” was never merged in the New York “Herald.” As it never issued but a single edition on any one day, and had no contemporaries at first to cull from, it did not become the New York “Express.” It is also a common mistake to suppose that it was afterwards expanded into the “North American Review,” or became by cultivation that large, flowering double monthly rose, “The Atlantic.” The “News-Letter” offered no premiums to multiply subscribers or to divide the claims of competitors; for it had no rival for fifteen years. Then Philadelphia, always emulous, got up a second sheet, a warm, gray worsted one, which wrapped up comfortably her growing youth, and displayed most acceptably her comely proportions. Two years later, in 1721, James Franklin established at Boston “The New England Courant,” the fourth American newspaper, full of audacious thinking and independent notions, some of which were furnished by his brother Benjamin, then a stripling of fifteen years. The criticisms were too strong, even for Boston; and after trying in vain for two years to nurse the place up to the wholesome diet, Benjamin left it. After a perilous journey to New York, whence he footed it across New Jersey without being policed or tolled,—for the Camden and Amboy Railroad had not yet subjected that Province to its sway,—he entered Philadelphia with two loaves of bread for himself. He soon set up a good intellectual oven of his own, and distributed, not Boston brown bread, but well-baked, healthy, family loaves, made of the best white flour to be had, to the world and—Philadelphia. In 1740 there were eleven newspapers in America, one in each of the Colonies of New York, Virginia, and South Carolina, three in Pennsylvania, and five in Boston, which thus early began to gather Massachusetts to a head.