newspapers. The volume which serves us for a writing-desk is a folio of
larger dimensions than the one before described; and the papers are
generally printed on a whole sheet, sometimes with a supplemental leaf of
news and advertisements. They have a venerable appearance, being
overspread with a duskiness of more than seventy years, and discolored,
here and there, with the deeper stains of some liquid, as if the contents
of a wineglass had long since been splashed upon the page. Still, the
old book conveys an impression that, when the separate numbers were
flying about town, in the first day or two of their respective
existences, they might have been fit reading for very stylish people.
Such newspapers could have been issued nowhere but in a metropolis the
centre, not only of public and private affairs, but of fashion and
gayety. Without any discredit to the colonial press, these might have
been, and probably were, spread out on the tables of the British coffee-
house, in king Street, for the perusal of the throng of officers who then
drank their wine at that celebrated establishment. To interest these
military gentlemen, there were bulletins of the war between Prussia and
Austria; between England and France, on the old battle-plains of
Flanders; and between the same antagonists, in the newer fields of the
East Indies,--and in our own trackless woods, where white men never trod
until they came to fight there. Or, the travelled American, the petit-
maitre of the colonies,--the ape of London foppery, as the newspaper was
the semblance of the London journals,--he, with his gray powdered
periwig, his embroidered coat, lace ruffles, and glossy silk stockings,
golden-clocked,--his buckles of glittering paste, at knee-band and shoe-
strap,--his scented handkerchief, and chapeau beneath his arm, even such
a dainty figure need not have disdained to glance at these old yellow
pages, while they were the mirror of passing times. For his amusement,
there were essays of wit and humor, the light literature of the day,
which, for breadth and license, might have proceeded from the pen of