the Life and Death of Buckingham, exhibited at the Academy in 1855. There was a fine moral lesson in the contrast the painter gave us of the life and death of a bad | voluptuary, who would have indeed writhed if he had thought that his fate would years after be selected by an English painter as a warning to mankind. The Life and Death of Dryden's Zimri were well contrasted. In the first we see the duke in the bowers of "Shrewsbury and love," or, perhaps, in some Strand palace. He is the president of the evening revels. A ringleted, sleepy-eyed beauty (probably the siren Shrewsbury), holding a champagne glass in one hand, is about, with the other, to place a coronet on his periwig, proclaiming him king of the evening. On the other side of the duke sits the merry monarch, black wigged and swarthy featured, grimly mirthful, and ready to tell his stories of the battle of Worcester to any one he can button-hold. and trembling lips showed an intensity of grief rising almost to madness. The painter had well introduced some grated squares of yellow sunshine on the prison wall. Through the Green Shades was a mere beautiful costume study. Mr. Egg's three pictures in one frame of the 1858 Exhibition began first to make me think that, though naturally endowed with a mind of great tragic powers, Mr. Egg, from ill health probably, had begun to be rather morbid in his analysis of the horrible. He seemed to begin to forget where the line lay between the horrible and the disgusting. He no longer painted the horrible because it was true and necessary, but merely because it was the horrible. painted, too, with a sense of enjoyment,-just as surgeons at last become so professionally hardened that they look with relish at a limb that must be amputated. There are too many painters who will show us happiness and prettiness till the gorge rises, but that is no reason that Mr. Egg should make us spend all our holidays in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. He As I have not these pictures before me, I will, with slight alterations, repeat my Athenæum criticism of them. Mr. Egg's unnamed picture is divided into three compartments, each more ghastly and terrible than the other, till in the last we come to such a mass of misery and loathsomeness, painted with such an unhealthy determination to excite horror, that we turn from it as from an impure thing, for it seems out of place in a sunshine gallery full of laughing young faces. At other parts of the table sit bewigged gallants of the Killigrew, Rochester, and Sedley school, and wanton-eyed and bare-bosomed beauties of the Nell Gwynne and Duchess of Portsmouth tribe. Their eyes glitter, and their cheeks flush, as they hold up their glasses to drink the health of Buckingham. To the right, a sworn toper turns up his glass, and shows that he has left no heel-taps of Burgundy. Further on, another man leaps up on a red-cushioned chair, and seems about to fling his glass, in defiance, at the broad moon, which, with its reproving, calm, angel eye, shines in through an open window, that noisy summer midnight, at the back of Buckingham. The great fault of this picture is, that its contrast with the other is spoilt by its sombre hue of colour. The duke's flowing white satin stands out admirably, it is true, against the bright red chairs and the deep violet night sky; but the room is not gay enough, not sump-wife's disgrace, and flung it like a dash of burning vitriol tuous enough, nor brilliant enough. It is like a gloomy, dirty tavern parlour. The contrast is entirely lost, and the picture, though good, lowers its fellow, instead of heightening it. The companion picture is terribly tragic in its moral. In the back, squalid room of a poor inn lies the dead voluptuary, the blue ribbon still covering his black heart; in shadow, rolled up in the sordid bed-clothes, yet with the dark red velvet of the dress and the unrolled garter visible, contrasting mournfully with the patched yellow valance which dangles from the rickety framework of the bed. The wig, its scented curls bedaubed with dust,-rolls on the floor, beside a sponge and basin, ghastly emblems of disease and death. Beneath the smoky yellow window pane lies a typical crushed butterfly. That lean shrunk body,- -one skeleton hand clutching the bed-clothes as it did in the death agony,-the staring eye, the waxen features, the dropping jaw, are almost too akin to the horrible. Unfortunately, too, as I showed in my Athenæum criticism at the time, Mr. Egg had followed Pope in giving this version of Buckingham's death, which is entirely away from the truth. Buckingham, in point of fact, was taken ill while out fox-hunting, and died in a comfortable farm-house in Yorkhouse. Some time before his death he had paid off his debts, and become sincerely religious, as Calamy tells us. Still, take them for all in all, with many defects, these two pictures, though a trifle morbid and horrible, were truly great works. The same year of hard intellectual toil and triumph Mr. Egg exhibited at the Academy his Emmet in Prison, and his Through the Green Shades wandering. The first was a pathetic scene, showing the misguided Irish rebel parting with his mistress in prison. The lover's head was bent down, while the lady's staring eyes The first scene of this domestic tragedy shows us the husband just returned from a journey; he is reading with maddened anguish a note of assignation that discloses his wife's disgrace. The scented pink envelope which had held it lies on the floor. He has screamed out his into her pale face. Poor sinful creature, it has felled her like a blow from a bludgeon. She lies now, face downwards, on the ground, in a death-like swoon, her white braceleted arms stretched out as if to ward off a death-blow. So sudden has been the catastrophe, that her two children are still playing at card houses (frail as human happiness). One of them, the eldest, looks round, astonished at her mother's fall, yet is too innocent to be much alarmed; the child's large, dilating eyes are only slowly awakening to a sense of the impending misery. The two other pictures are both moonlight scenes. In the one we see those same two motherless children, the happy card builders of the first scene, now grown up: one is looking from the open window of a poor squalid London lodging at the moon, thinking, doubtless, of her poor lost mother; while the younger sister kneels and prays for her, her forehead in the elder girl's lap. The last picture is too terrible to dwell upon. The painter had better never have painted it. It shows us the same mother, now a lost, squalid, degraded beggar, hiding under the grave-vault shadow of one of the Adelphi arches,--those sanctuaries of vile and houseless misery. The thin starved legs of a bastard child, dead asleep at her lean breast, protrude with horrible significancy from her rags. She, too, miserable mother, already immured in the hell of an undying conscience, having made her husband and children, like herself, miserable for life, is looking, too, at the moon the poor girls are looking at, as, full and royal, it casts a path of cold, molten gold, upon the heedless, polluted river. Above her head, a lamp, faint and rayless, glimmers in the cold gray daybreak. Mr. Egg, with true painter's contrast, has given special value to his rich and mellow moonlight by contrasting it with the dim murkiness of the sewer arch. But even allowing that Mr. Egg's picture were not almost repulsive in its horror, there were several things to condemn in the series. The wife's guilt was not shown clearly enough in No. 1; and in No. 3, the beggar child jars rather confusedly with the two little girls the unhappy woman has deserted. No wonder that the critics of this Exhibition lamented, as the Athenæum did, that so much tragic power should have been thrown away in three unpleasant though most clever pictures. There was a universal regret that an unhealthy love for the painful, eccentric, and shocking, should be creeping over Mr. Egg's mind, to the destruction of that simplicity and sense of happiness which is necessary to balance the dramatic intensity of a mind by nature so susceptible of tragic impulses. In 1857, Mr. Egg again stooped to illustrate another man's thought, and, of old liking to shelter his dreams under cover of those of another "creator," if he could, he selected a scene from Mr. Thackeray's Esmond,-the scene where Esmond returns after the battle of Wynendael. It was full of sober colour, quiet, subdued power, and dramatic feeling, and expressed a sincere delight in the fine story of Queen Anne's age. tomed to explore charnel-houses and graveyards, required less powerful stimulants than he (Marlow) did. The consequence was that in the Jew of Malta he kills whole townfuls of people, and makes the stage slippery with blood; and all to rouse feelings which one death, properly applied, would have shaken to their basis. The Caraveggio school of painters were also great sinners in this way. They were always chopping martyrs to death in a gross, unfeeling, butcherly manner, merely because they were ignorant that the whole world was not, like themselves,-butcherly. The painters who resort to such strong stimulants to the feelings always remind me of the Verdi school of composers, who, not being able to invent much melody, bray out their orchestral effects, and drown flutes and violins under one universal deafening whirlwind of wind and brass. WALTER THORNBURY. THE REVIVED GUILD OF LITERATURE. No labour is so disheartening as the labour of charity. The moment any man steps forward to act as a philan No tragedy or death this time; no tears and sobs;thropist he becomes a target for ridicule and envy. He nothing, on the other hand, to make you smile; but is called a fool, a liar, a vain selfish projector, a secret merely a quiet moment of drawing-room life, with some jobber, a mistaken enthusiast. Stones, mud, and rotten strong characters to vivify and do justice to. The com- eggs fly round him as thick as locusts; he is bullied upon position was clever and unaffected; no studio airs, no platforms, he is taken to task in letters, and he is torn to flourish of learning, no feeble attitudes after Poussin, no pieces by his own committee. The weight and colour of brown tree after Sir George Beaumont, no striped stuffs his money are scrupulously examined, and he is asked of a mimic Veronese. There was mature art,-art felt why he dares to step forward to benefit his fellowrather than seen. The colour was not gay, but good, creatures. Hungry lawyers, budding secretaries, and and full of a fine gravity and English sombreness which small windy orators crowd round him, and are often the seemed to give it quite a look of antiquity after look-only supporters who cheer him on in his task. He draws ing at the more meretricious modern colourists. There is always something brave and true-hearted in the quietude of a really thoughtful man like Mr. Egg. The painter showed us Beatrice, that proud, ambitious beauty, who preferred being a great man's guilty mistress to being a poor man's honest wife. She is stooping, with haughty condescension and witching wilfulness, to loop and knot the scarf of the young conqueror. The old lady, with the exaggerated nose peculiar to the aristocracy, and with the tower of lace on her head affected by Queen Anne matrons, sits with her back towards us, looking on calmly; while the softer-hearted lady observes the scene in a sidelong way. Esmond, in the stiff red-skirted Duke of Marlborough dress, and the high square-toed cavalry boots, was solidly and massively painted, and his face was an admirable study of conflicting passions. He feels ashamed, and shows he feels so. Pride and love are swelling in his brain. The accessories, too, were chosen with knowledge and taste, the seamy Turkey carpet, with its figured red and blue, the table-cloth, the high-backed chairs, were all beyond praise, because they were introduced so judiciously. We are sorry to learn that Mr. Egg, never very vigorous in health, has lately been obliged to leave his delightful home at Kensington, and hurry to the extreme south of France in search of health. Let us trust he may return well and strong, to delight us with more comedy and tragedy of the pure Shakspearean vein. And here, in conclusion, we would advert again for a moment to the necessity of a painter with tragic impulses drawing a line between the horrible that he may paint, and the disgusting that he may not. Stern, cold men, dealing much with tragic subjects, are too apt to forget and overstep this limit. There is Marlow, for instance, whom Shakspeare so justly admired. He had handled the rrible so much that he forgot that others, less accus his cheque, he gives his land, or he collects his fund; and in five cases out of ten the amount is returned to him shorn of one-half of its fair proportions by the " 'preliminary expenses." In the other five cases it is taken more as a right than as a gift; is quietly and systematically diverted from its original object, and becomes a basis of operations for future begging. The difficulties and annoyances of ordinary charity are increased a hundred-fold when literary men endeavour to benefit literary men. Every angle in every writer's body and mind then becomes sharpened; few authors then seem so framed that they can be made to fit into any particular hole; and no general definition can be arrived at as to who is and who is not a literary man. The leading writers of the day keep aloof from each other, as if, in such a cause, they were not all bound to work together for good. An institution for decayed potboys, for distressed tripe-boilers, or improvident nightmen, can be founded without any class jealousies or opposition; but an asylum for aged and infirm journeymen writers, schools for their orphan children, or refuges for their helpless widows, cannot be organized, so it seems, by these guides and instructors of mankind. In their daily organs, their weekly organs, their monthly and their quarterly organs, they can direct others glibly enough in the right way, but when they are called together to do something for themselves, to lay aside their pen and ink for action and cooperation, they appear more helpless than a sucking child. Whenever one of their number,-of my own. number,-drops through, leaving few assets and many children, what is always done? A committee is hurriedly formed; the case of distress is apologized for in some quarters, defended in others, and advertised in all. A conference is held, and a variety of schemes are proposed, but they all end in benevolent ground and lofty tumbling, and in sending round the hat. The English language is ransacked to find words that may hide the disgrace towards the payment of their premiums of assurance when such members should be proved, to the satisfaction of the council, to be unable to meet those demands; and, secondly, to aid similar payments to the Provident Sick of such performances and appeals, and "memorial," "testimonial," with a few other like phrases, are placed, like feather-beds, to break the author's fall. Of spasmodic, gymnastic, painted, be-wigged charity, for literary men and their dependants, there is always enough,-perhaps ness Fund. The qualification for membership was made more than enough; of decent, orderly, reliable, provident charity there is none at all. That cold, bishop-ridden, dishonest, worse than useless class charity called the Literary Fund, may be left out of the account. It holds fast to its reserve of £30,000; it never doles out its beggarly pittances until two householders have testified to each case of distress, and it may be to the claimant's orthodoxy and regular vaccination; and it still shows an outlay of about forty per cent. upon its income, or £12 for the drawing of every benevolent draft.* Of the “fifty men of learning and genius" which it professes to relieve every year with costly privacy, how many escape the chagrin of having their necessities known to all the literary world within four-and-twenty hours of receiving the succour ? council. as broad as possible, to get over the difficulty of defining authors and artists. Those desiring to become professional members were to be recommended for admission by two professional members of the Guild, or by one of the council, and were to be persons following literature or the fine arts as a profession. This qualification was defined to mean writers, of either sex, of books not being translations (translations from the ancient and eastern languages were excepted), and writers in periodicals; writers of dramatic and other theatrical pieces, not being translations or adaptations from any foreign language; exhibitors of either sex of works of original design in painting, sculpture, or architecture, at any public exhibition in the United Kingdom; designers of approved merit for engravers, and engravers. The entrance fee, An attempt was made, some ten years ago, by Mr. on election, was two guineas; and the honorary members, Charles Dickens, with the assistance of Sir Edward as distinguished from the professional members, were to Bulwer Lytton, and a circle of literary and artistic asso-be simply donors of so much per annum, elected by the ciates, to remove these disgraces from the literary body, and found an institution on a broad and practical basis, called the Guild of Literature and Art. It had one excellent feature about it, which ought to have commended it to all classes of literary men who had any self-respect,-no professional working member was to be admitted until he had insured his life for at least £100. An arrangement was made with a leading assurance company for life policies and deferred annuities, by which a certain percentage was to be returned to the council for the general benefit of the Guild. Another excellent feature, carrying out the self-help principle, was the sick fund for the relief of subscribing members during illness; and the third feature, which had more of charity,-of the everlasting give, give, in it, than the others, was what was called the Guild Institution. Under this heading it was in contemplation to found annuities, to which professional members and the widows of professional members should be eligible, and of which the object would have been, in the words of the promoters, "to associate an honourable rest from arduous labours with the discharge of congenial duties in connexion with popular instruction." To make a beginning in carrying out this very sensible and well-considered scheme, it was necessary to collect a fund, and an amateur theatrical company of authors and artists, with Mr. Charles Dickens at their head, gave performances in London and the provinces in aid of this fund. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton wrote and presented them with a comedy, called Not so Bad as we Seem, the acting and publishing copyright of which was sold for £550. Mr. Charles Dickens and Mr. Mark Lemon also wrote a farce, called Mr. Nightingale's Diary, and the net result of the amateur performances was £3,065. About seventy donors and subscribers came forward, and paid in £532; and the dividends on this last sum, invested in the 3 per cents., up to April 30th, 1853, amounted to £36 16s. The expenses for advertisements, printing, stationery, rent, law expenses, salaries, furniture, etc., were £393, leaving a balance in hand at that date (April 1853) of £3,790. At this point of the Guild's proceedings it was dis covered that, in consequence of the changes in the laws regulating benefit societies, an act of parliament was necessary to legalize the scheme, and this act was accord It was also intended to erect a limited number of free residences, on land to be presented for the purpose by Siringly obtained June 2nd, 1854. The moment the aid of E. Bulwer Lytton, and which were to be occupied by the male annuitants elected on the foundation. The funds, excepting the sick contributions, were to be so divided, in equal portions, that one-half should go to the Guild Institution objects, and the other half to an account called the Assurance and Provident Augmentation Fund. This latter part of the society's money was to be appropriated to two objects: first, to render temporary assistance to professional members by way of loan without interest, the law is invoked, business and progress give place to a general paralysis. The Guild became a sleeping beauty, and fell into a trance; for, by a legal technicality which had crept into the bye-laws, nothing could be done with the funds for seven years. That trance has now nearly expired, and in a few weeks before Midsummer, 1861, a sum of nearly £5,000 (if my calculations with regard to interest be correct) will be released for the general purposes of the Guild, and for the benefit of literature and art. An opportunity will then be afforded to the first of these civilized and civilizing professions of declaring whether it prefers a steady, orderly, self-helping provision for its decayed members and their dependants, or that costly and degrading system which begins and ends in benesive of Collector's Poundage, Adver-volent comic singing. No balance-sheet ever published The following is the Atheneum's fifteenth annual report of the positive cost of the benevolence of this benevolent institution, and of the cost as compared with the Artists' General Benevolent Fund: Literary Fund. Artists' General Benevolent Fund. From 1814 to 1:59 (15 years), 684 appli. From 1841 to 1853 (15 years), 904 appli cants were relieved at a cost (exclu sire of Collector's Poundage, Adver. tisements, and expenses attending Anniversary Dinner) of. £7,684 15 9 To this we now add the cost-positive and 1850. 49 Applicants relieved. cants were relieved at a cost (exclu tisements, and expenses attending Anniversary Dinner) of £1,359 11 1850. 70 Applicants relieved. Charges for Salary, for rooms for meet- Charges for Salary, for rooms for meet. ing of Committee and Subscribers For Printing, Stationery, ing of Committee and Subscribers, (exclusive of Collector's Poundage, really states the cost of these public benefit performances. Scores of men and women, whose time is worth many guineas a day, devote their unpaid energies in singing, acting, and begging, to the task of raising a fund, and never take any heed of the value of their own labour. This may be very creditable to such performers and workers, but what we want to arrive at is the real cost of such work. It always represents a heavy loss. Produc REGISTER OF FACTS AND OCCURRENCES RELATING TO tive time is money, and when such men as Mr. Dickens | which adopted it long ago. The idea was originated by the The backbone of the Guild is its nourishment of provi- JOHN HOLLINGSHEAD. feasibility of starting new cheap daily newspapers, in the many persons who are turning over in their minds the There are, no doubt, in the metropolis and elsewhere, event of the repeal of the paper duty. To such persons, as well as to the general public, who, as buyers and readers of newspapers, are interested in the improve both the old world and the new. ment of journalism, we submit the following suggestions, which are the result of some knowledge of the journals of Paris, as also those of New York, and several German cities, have a great advantage over ours, in being accusFirstly, we would point out that the daily journals of tomed to publish a class of articles which with us are rele gated to the magazines. The lower part of each of certain pages of every Parisian journal is divided from the upper feuilleton, is devoted to the publication of essays, narratives part by a broad black line, and this lower space, called the of travel, serial romances, and other matter of the like kind. With the exception of the serial romance, the New York dailies supply the same class of matter, though somewhat less formally and regularly. No number of a French journal ever appears without its feuilleton, but the corresponding feature of an American journal may be absent for days together. On the other hand, however, the feuilleton is SUGGESTIONS TOWARDS AN IMPROVED DAILY of unvarying dimensions, always giving exactly the same NEWSPAPER PRESS. A FEW years ago, during the Crimean campaign, our daily journalists were loudly demanding "administrative reform." The Times told us that we were "the Byzantines of the West," and insisted every morning that our civil and military administration were possessed by the demon "routine," which it behoved all good citizens to aid in exorcising from the body politic. Our civil and naval administrators bore their quotidian castigation with much patience. They grumbled a little in an undertone, but made no retort. They themselves were little used to the ways of journalism, and no amicus curiæ stood forth in their behalf to suggest that if the defendants were routinists, the plaintiffs were equally so. gestion would certainly have been in accordance with the Yet this sugfacts; and it is so still. when he publishes what, for convenience, may be called magazine-matter, does so much more copiously than his quantity of matter; whereas the American journalist, Parisian contemporaries, scarcely paying any regard to space. fully within the ordinary dimensions of his journal, he issues a supplementary sheet, if the subject is of sufficient When he cannot treat his subject sufficiently popular interest. politico-geographical one, he illustrates it with a rough but sufficiently accurate map, printed on the newspaper When the subject is a geographical or sheet itself. Unlike the Parisian journalist, he excludes the romance, as we have said, from his daily edition; but in the weekly, semi-weekly, or tri-weekly edition which nexion with its daily edition, and which is made up every great daily newspaper establishment issues in conSince the period of the celebrated crusade against qua non, routine, the stamp duty on newspapers has been repealed, daily newspaper seems to be in accordance with our own mainly for country circulation, the serial romance is a sine and penny daily journals have been the result. This plan of excluding the romance from the metropolis boasts three such, two of them being entirely romance in a London daily journal might prove as great a The national turn of mind. But chacun à son goût. A serial new papers, and the third* an old high-priced paper meta-hit as Anthony Trollope's stories in the weekly London morphosed. All three, we believe, have been tolerably successful, one of them, the Telegraph, remarkably so,and this argument of pecuniary success may perhaps justify their conductors in following on in the beaten track of metropolitan journalism. For it is remarkable that these cheap journals, although supported by a class of readers very different from those of the old-established, high-priced journals, have retained in their composition all the old features, and have introduced no new ones, with one single exception. This solitary innovation is the daily summary of events, introduced by the Star, and wisely copied by the Standard. In the latter journal, this general summary is followed by the orthodox parliamentary summary; in the former, a glance at the parliamentary proceedings of the previous night forms a part of the general summary. credit of having been the first English journal to adopt While the Star is entitled to the his useful feature, there can be little doubt that that ournal borrowed it from the New York journals, several of Since this article was written, a second old-established paper, the Morning ronicle, has reduced its price to a penny, so that London has now four penny ly papers, Review rate the magazine with the newspaper?" Precisely so. contemporaries, from the more important weekly jour nals, and from the leading continental and American papers, a penny paper would undoubtedly add to its own instructiveness, and this not only without prejudice to the journals it quoted, but with positive benefit to them. class, the very elements of many of the most ordinary reproducing the best articles from its higher-priced daily branches of knowledge have yet to be supplied, and through no channel could these be supplied to them more effectually than through that of the daily sheet winning their attention by its budget of news. The adoption of this suggestion would probably inaugurate a competition between quarterlies and monthlies on the one side, and dailies on the other; but what of that? The dailies would have nothing to fear, for they could, and would, create a new constituency for themselves, from the ranks of the people. Of course, the adoption by our daily newspapers of a new department of such size and fecundity as is thus proposed would necessitate the curtailment of some of their existing features, and perhaps the abolition of some others. We shall suggest some subtractions presently, but will first complete our list of proposed additions. What we would next suggest is less an addition, than a change. A penny newspaper might economize, without prejudice to its real value and interest, by doing without that expensive corps of foreign correspondents which every metropolitan daily newspaper has hitherto maintained, as a matter, in some instances, rather of dignity than of utility. A penny journal need not be ashamed to borrow from the foreign correspondence of its higher-priced contemporaries, provided it credits every extract to the journal borrowed from. Nor is this the only resource. Some of the continental newspapers have correspondents in all parts of the world, and are exceed. ingly valuable as sources of information. A journal which should deny itself the expensive luxury of the usual set of foreign correspondents, and should devote a portion of the large expense thus saved to a copious purchase of foreign journals, and the employment of editors and contributors thoroughly and minutely acquainted with the countries and cities in which it has hitherto been thought necessary that every London daily newspaper should have special correspondents, would not only be less costly to its conductors than the existing papers are, but might even be more valuable and attractive to the public, as presenting, if a less pretentious, a much fuller and completer digest of foreign intelligence. Secondly, why not put headings to the editorial articles in our daily newspapers? We have such headings in our quarterlies, monthlies, and weeklies. No one would think of doing without the caption there. It tells you at a glance the subject of the article you are invited to peruse. Why not employ it in our dailies? What but a Chinese-like habit of imitation causes our journalists so unanimously to eschew the practice? They have not the excuse of the Chinese, for no English Confucius has enjoined leading articles without headings on all subsequent generations of his countrymen. Nor is there any necessity for having all the editorials of one uniform stereotyped length. Everybody knows that all sorts of subjects are not equally well treated in the same given space. On this point we call for more liberty and elasticity. It is true that on two solemn stated occasions in the year, namely, when The foreign intelligence department, conducted on the reviewing the parliamentary session and when sum- plan here suggested would not occupy more space than at marising the events of the year, our editors feel themselves present, but how should we find space for the magazineat liberty to disregard the usual restriction as to space. matter and the "Spirit of the Press ?" What features of But this liberty should be exercised, not merely twice a year, the present system could be curtailed or lopped off? but whenever circumstances called for its exercise. Still Firstly, we do not see the use of the short legal reports more valuable would be the innovation of giving short, from the equity courts and the sessions in banco of our sparkling, epigrammatic leaders, from ten lines to half a common law courts. The lawyers have their journals column in length. How many thousand subjects which specially devoted to these reports, and the dailies already are each year spun out to the length of a column and one-established will doubtless continue to give them. But sixteenth, more or less, would be better treated in one- this is surely enough; there is no need that any new fourth the space. This class of short article is espe- journal should give these reports. To trials of great cially adapted to the intellectual wants and business popular interest, causes celèbres, and cases of national exigences of the majority of those on whom cheap dailies importance, our remarks do not apply; but what would must rely, yet none of those now in existence in the be the good of a new journal devoting an important metropolis avail themselves of this resource. The Daily proportion of its space to reporting an infinity of cases of News has set a good example in breaking through the interest only to the profession and the parties conerned ? senseless custom that now prevails. Yet even it treads We would, secondly, dock the reports of the parliatimidly, as if, in giving articles of unconventional concise-mentary debates, on the same principle as the legal ness or copiousness, it were experimenting, rather than reports. Important debates should, of course, be given acting boldly and freely on well-grounded and unhesitating convictions. Thirdly, why not publish an index bi-annually? An index is said to double the value of a book; it would decuple that of a volume of newspapers. The Independance Belge, the Allgemeine Zeitung, and other continental daily papers, publish one half-yearly; why should not our journals? To do so would, of course, involve a new system of paging, but there is no difficulty there. Let our journalists be more ambitious, and look, not only to the day on which their sheets appear, but to the wants of the student of the events of his time, and to posterity. If daily papers were indexed, ten people would file them where one files them now. in full; but all the minute business of parliament interests few except professional politicians, and these, like the lawyers, would find their wants better catered for in the Times and the other old-established and high-priced papers, than in the new, low-priced, popular sheet we propose. What cares the mass of the public for two-thirds of the business transacted in parliament? And how absurd, from a popular point of view, to give, as was done the other day, five long columns to the passage of sixty clauses ofthe Bankruptcy and Insolvency Bill through a Committee of the House of Commons, when no one, after the perusal of these five columns, could possibly know what had been done, unless he possessed a parliamentary copy of the bill in question, and made constant reference to it while reading the five-column report. We have surely seen enough of this style of parliamentary reporting. Fourthly, we cannot but think that a more copious use than has hitherto been made of the department which is sometimes called "Spirit of the Press" would add to Our daily journals, moreover, have a habit of reportthe interest and value of a cheap daily newspaper. By ing at great length the speeches made by members to |