and accordingly got out of the difficulty by adjourning over the day for which the redoubtable Wilkes had been summoned. On the 27th of April, however, the lord mayor was sent to the Tower. The whole country rang with indignation; but, nevertheless, the city magistrates remained incarcerated until the 23d of July, when the Parliament was prorogued, and, its power of imprisonment being at an end, they were set free. Such was the issue of the last battle between the Parliament and the press, on the question of publishing the debates. It was fought in 1771, and had been a tougher conflict than any of its predecessors, but it was decisive. There is no danger of the subject being reopened; the reporting of the debates is now one of the most important of the functions of our newspapers; and the members themselves are too sensible of the services rendered them by the reporters' gallery to be suicidal enough to inaugurate a new crusade against it. What those services are, any one who has been patriotic or curious enough to sit out a debate in the strangers' gallery over night, and then to read the speeches, to which he has listened, in the newspapers next morning, can readily appreciate. Hazy ideas have become clear, mutilated and unintelligible sentences have been neatly and properly arranged, needless repetitions and tautological verbiage have disappeared; there is no sign of hesitation; hums and haws, and other inexpressible ejaculations, grunts, and interpolations find no place; the thread of an argument is shown where none was visible before, and all is fluent, concise, and more or less to the point. Meanwhile the tone of the press had again greatly improved, partly owing to purification through the trials which it had undergone, and partly owing to the better taste of the public. Its circulation had rapidly increased. In 1753 the number of stamps on newspapers in the United Kingdom was 7,411,757; in 1760, 9,464,790; in 1774, 12,300,608; in 1775, 12,680,906; and in 1776, 12,836,000, a halt in its progress being caused by Lord North's new stamp act, raising the stamp from one to one and a half pence. The ordinary price of a news sheet was two or two and a half pence, but this was more than doubled by its cost of transmission through the post office, which, for a daily paper, was L5 a year. The _Morning Post_, the full title of which was originally the _Morning Post and Daily Advertiser_, first came out in 1772. In 1775 it appeared regularly every morning, under the editorship of the Rev. Henry Bate, afterward the Rev. Sir Henry Bate Dudley, Bart. The _Gentleman's Magazine_--that prolific mine to whose stores of wealth the present series of articles is beholden times out of number--gives a curious account of a duel into which this clerical editor was forced in his clerical capacity. Editorial duels were not unknown in those days. Wilkes had fought one or two, as well as other editors; but these were the circumstances of Mr. Bate's encounter: