When the History of the newspaper-press comes to be properly written, it will not be a mere record of the struggles and strifes of proprietors; the successes of the few, and the failures of the many; nor even the extraordinary wealth of anecdote furnished by personal history. Along with these matters will have to be introduced critical studies, derived from close examination of the journals; discovering the amount of prescience with which each may be credited, and the growth and decay of their influence; tracing motives of particular partisanship to their source; and estimating their relative places, in the grand temple of the Fourth Estate. The task of that historian will find its best reward, in the endeavour to comprehend the first quarter of the nineteenth century. He will see the press first enslaved, then reckless, then persecuted; then partially enslaved again; then gradually presenting a prospect that it will, one day or other, become purified into something like dignity and respectability. For all this long while, it has been strangely unable to endure rivalry and opposition; and its members have vied with one another, as to which could employ the foulest epithets, impute the wickedest motives to opponents, or fawn the most gracefully upon “patrons.” There was no place for independence, in those days; for independent principles were considered to hide the wolf of Jacobinism. The alteration in tone, consequent upon a change of proprietorship, went under the favourite stigma of “profligacy.”[2] As for party-spirit, there never was a truer dictum than that laid down by Mr. Cobbett, in one of the later numbers of the London _Porcupine_: “The press is as much shackled and restrained by the spirit of party, as it could be by the most restrictive laws.”