Evenrsopy does well who within proper bounds of modesty, and consideration for the claims of others, socks to magnify his office. It is a consolation when one feels the smart of neglect, or fancies that conscientiously por. formed daties fail to obtain due appreciation, to consider that the discharge of these duties enters as a needful clement into the well-being or the comfort of the community. Oh. pectively, too, it is not inadvisable that e3. From time to time the people for whom one labours should be reminded of how badly they would probably get on without individuals or institutions whose services are performed with so much regularity that they at last come to be as little thought about as the breathing air, which is never really valued until accident diminishes the supply. It is fairly to be assumed that what civilised communities, and they only, always demand, is a real need created by civilisation. And among many such needs that might be mentioned, the dispersal of news takes a prominent place, We may be quite certain that from the very dawn of trade, the correspondence between individuals along the lines of commercial inter. course contained a great deal more than mere market quotations, orders for goods, and advices of their despatch or receipt. Friends would doubtless interchange family intelligence and social gossip and scandal, while political news would in troubled times neces+ sarily form a part of nearly every mercantile despatch. Thus, for long ages probably, the circulation of news depended upon private correspondence, which supplied the place of newspapers before these latter were ever dreamt of, As, however, it is our design to show that journalism has, besides ita many other claims upon the world's consideration, the consecration of antiquity, we are fortunate in being able to set back the rise of newspapers to a period at least two thousand years removed from us. A claim to great antiquity is perhaps the least offensive form in which dignity can be asserted. Wo shall therefore tread on nobody's corns while we shew of what sort were our earliest predecessors in the art and mystery of journalism, and what kind of wares they Laid before the public. We look with veneration upon the fow extant numbers of the Relationen of Vienna, which, in the latter half of the fifteenth century, marked the beginning of modern newspaper enterprise in Europe, and we should even regard with hardly less interest an early number of the Peking Gazette, But with however much more reverence glimpse at a copy of the Roman Acta diurna of the time of Cesar would inspire us, we are doomed never to see one of those sheets which carried the news of the capital to the remotest corners of the Empire, and by virtue of an elaborate system of foreign correspondence united in common
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.