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For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor when we have to pay commission for forwarding the money; nor when we club the LIVING Age with another periodical.

An extra copy of THE LIVING AGE is sent gratis to any one getting up a club of Five New Subscribers. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of

LITTELL & GAY.

AN OLD ROAD.

A CURVE of green tree-tops,

And a common wall below,

THE CLOUD.

A CLOUD came over a land of leaves

(O, hush, little leaves, lest it pass you by !)

And a winding road, that dips and drops, How they had waited and watch'd for the rain,

Ah me! where does it go?

Down to the lovely days

Goes that familiar track,

And here I stand and wait and gaze, As if they could come back.

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For there they lie asleep,.

Eyes that made all things sweet, Hands of true pressure, hearts more deep Than any left to beat;

A world where all was great;

Paths trodden not, but seen; Light streaming through an open gate — The world that might have been!

Pictures, and dreams, and tears

O Love, is this the whole?
Nay, wrap your everlasting years
About my failing soul!
The lightest word you spake
Beyond all time shall last
These only sleep before they wake
In Love there is no Past!

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Mountain and valley, and vineyard and plain,
With never a sign from the sky!

Day after day had the pitiless sun
Look'd down with a lidless eye.

But now! On a sudden a whisper went Through the topmost twigs of the poplar. spire;

Out of the east a light wind blew

(All the leaves trembled, and murmur'd, and drew

Hope to the help of desire),

It stirred the faint pulse of the forest-tree
And breathed through the brake and the brier.

Slowly the cloud came: then the wind died,
Dumb lay the land in its hot suspense :
The thrush on the elm-bough suddenly stop.
ped,

The weather-warn'd swallow in mid-flying dropped,

The linnet ceased song in the fence,

Mute the cloud moved, till it hung overhead, Heavy, big-bosom'd, and dense.

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WE stood beside the sleeping bay;
She held my gift-rose in her hand;
It was the last sweet trysting-day,

And then, ho! for a strange, far land. She plucked each tender leaf apart,

And each leaf told its tale to me Each leaf a hope torn from my heart: The leaves fell fluttering by the sea.

And oft in far-off lands I thought

Of one who never could be mine; Who must be loved, but be unsought'Twas hard to love and not repine. Those rose leaves withered on the sand, But other roses bloom for thee;

O lost love in the distant land,
O rose leaves withered by the sea!

Once A Week.

From The Cornhill Magazine.
THE FRENCH PRESS.

I. FIRST PERIOD.

THE FRENCH PRESS, FROM ITS FOUNDATION

TO THE DEATH OF MAZARIN.

I.

In the Middle Ages, news were disseminated by chroniclers and troubadours; and it would be a mistake, therefore, to attribute the popularity of the latter to their mere vocal or musical proficiency. A troubadour was as welcome in hall or village as the special edition of a modern THE first Frenchman to found a printed newspaper. He came from afar, had newspaper was Dr. Théophraste Renau- endless things to tell, and only began his dot, who obtained the King's privilege singing when he had spun his yarns in for the Gazette de France in 1631. The prose. The troubadour's songs bore a idea was not a new one, for the Weekly likeness to the music-hall minstrelsies of News existed already in England; and our own time, being jingling rhymes on so far back as the year 1568, the bankers the current topics of the day, rounded off Fugger of Augsburg had instituted a with witticisms more or less smart, accommercial news-sheet called Ordinari- cording to the skill of the singer; but the Zeittungen, which, though manuscript troubadour exercised many of the funcuntil the year 1600, enjoyed a very exten- tions of the nineteenth century leadersive circulation and differed but little writer, for he incited men to battle, and from the mercantile journals established was responsible for a good many of those since. The Venetians, however, are said rebellions against excessive taxation to have preceded the Germans, and the which could never have spread so rapidly derivation of the word gazette is ascribed as they did had there not been men to carry to the small coin paid by the public for from town to town in glowing language the copies of a news-bulletin first issued by reports of successful risings. Edward I. the Council of Ten during the wars of of England waged a pitiless war on the Venice against the Turks. Others pre- Welsh bards, for these men were dangerfer tracing gazette to gazza, Italian for ous in the same way as the National press the garrulous magpie; and a few, with in Ireland is dangerous now, and as the that taste for riddles which is happily French Alsatian press is dangerous to imperishable, deduce the word from the Prince Bismarck. So again, when after Hebrew izgard, or messenger, thereby the agitations for municipal franchises in implying that gazettes were in some Philip Augustus's time, and after the shape known to the Children of Israel at jacqueries in the reign of Charles V., a date prior to the Acta Diurna of the many wandering minstrels were hanged, Romans, the Ephemeride of the Athe- it was not by any means for the same nians, and those Daily Chronicles of the reasons which conduce to the modern Babylonians, by the help of which Bero- prosecutions of organ-grinders. As to sius is said to have written his History the chronicles of the Middle Ages, these of Chaldæa. assumed towards the fifteenth century The French have always been very more and more the character of periodical fond of news. Cæsar mentions in his intelligencers. They were not records Commentaries that the Gauls ran after which men compiled during a lifetime for strangers and mobbed them to ask posthumous publication; but summaries whether they had any intelligence to of contemporary events, drawn up by communicate; and this practice became in time such a nuisance, by reason of the false rumours which obtained credence, among the well-ordered tribes a law was made enjoining that strangers should first be taken before the authorities, who would decide in their wisdom what items of their information had best be kept secret.

that

indefatigable writers, chiefly monks or clerks in the households of noblemen, and published four or five times a year, sometimes oftener. Such of these chronicles as are extant offer interesting mines of research to the historian. They are very minute in their narratives, and would be well worth the reading of certain enthusiasts who imagine that every

age previous to this one was steeped in barbarism up to the ears. We learn from them that there was plenty of homely liberty and of good justice, too, for those who kept clear of conspiracies, irreligion, or theft. Men went to church more than is the present fashion, dressed as the sumptuary laws required - that is, according to their means and station, without all trying to ape their betters - and were deterred by the fear of whipping from that sort of business competition which takes shape in false weights and measures. But in other respects, they had as great a fancy as their descendants for gathering in the market-places to air their grievances, and if a traveller brought them news of war, court-jousts, distant plagues, or new books, an epitome of the same was quickly engrossed on a sheet of paper, of which copies found brisk sale for something like a halfpenny of our present

money.

Sont d'estranges manières,
Sauvages et velus.

D'or et d'argent minières
Voit on en ces pallus."

Gutemberg's invention did not for a long while suggest the notion of printed newspapers, but the religious wars which raged throughout the sixteenth century effected a great move in that direction by the inauguration of printed manifestoes, accounts of battles and tales of martyrdoms which the Protestants of Germany and England circulated among the Huguenots of France, and vice versâ, to fire Not a Reformer each other's zeal. crossed the frontier of a state where the religious strife was in progress without bringing, concealed in his saddle-bags or in the lining of his doublet, some printed scrap to tell how it fared with the good cause in the country he was leaving, and some of these scraps, notably those which were despatched from France after the Life being very local during the feudal massacre of St. Bartholomew, are veritaera, almost every town had its chronicles, ble newspapers. They were written in and these jumbled big events and little Latin, the universal tongue then, and contogether in a way that was occasionally tained a graphic and most sensational odd; but the chroniclers of Paris, writ- résumé of all the cruel things that had ing in a city that was the centre of the been done - the murder of Coligny, the whole world's news, exercised discrimi- butchering of women and children by nation in their editing, and as a rule re- torchlight, the bloody mass of thanksgivcorded only facts that were worth the ing attended by Henri de Guise and his mention. Thus in the rhyming chron-red-handed accomplices in the Church of icles, begun by George Chastelain and St. Germain l'Auxerrois on the morning continued by Jehan Molinet over a space of the 26th of August, 1572, after the of seventy years 1428-1498- events of massacre was over, and even that disgeneral importance only were inserted; puted fact (though, by the way, everything and in the versical summary which conis now disputed), of Charles IX. having cludes these chronicles, and gives the pith himself fired on his Protestant subjects of them, we find the invention of printing from a window at the Louvre. The King, and the discovery of America thus allud- who seems to have learned that reports of his high deeds were being printed, launched a fulminating edict against all and any who should be found with copies of the seditious sheets in their possession; and on the 2nd September, one Nicolas Beschelle, a barber, was hanged

ed to:

J'ai veu grant multitude
De livres imprimés
Pour tirer en estude
Povres mal argentez;
Par ces nouvelles modes
Aura maint escolier
Decrets, Bibles et Codes,
Sans grant argent bailler.
J'ai vu deux ou trois isles
Trouvées en mon temps,
De chucades fertiles,
Et dont les habitants

* "I have seen a great multitude of printed books, to beguile into study the poor with little money. Thanks to these new fashions many a scholar will obtain De crees, Bibles and Codes without having much to pay. I have seen two or three islands discovered in my time, fertile in mysteries, and whose inhabitants are in a sin gular manner wild and hairy. Mines of gold and silver are to be seen in those swamps."

on the Place de Grêve for being discov- primed with special information. Moreered in the vain act of trying to decipher over, he is cognizant of everything that one of these luckless Latin prints, which takes place in town, and especially things he had just picked up in the roadway. of a scandalous nature, and he will be the But the religious wars laid the foundations first to tell you that a certain widow," of modern journalism in other manners &c.- Writing 1700 years later, La than by printed handbills. The necessi- Bruyère and Montesquieu give exactly ties of warfare led to the improvement of the same complimentary account of the roads everywhere, and to the making of Parisian newsmen as we have here of the new ones; the communications between Roman, though by the time when Monthe capital and the provinces became tesquieu wrote, the newsmen had wellmore frequent; the post established by nigh disappeared under the influx of Louis IX. acquired such a development, gazetteers and journalists. At the period that on the pacification of the kingdom by Henri IV. the mail began to leave Paris once every day, instead of three times a week as in Francis II.'s time, and all these improvements gave birth to a body of individuals who are the fathers of now-a-day chroniqueurs, feuilletonistes and reporters, and who constituted a very popular corporation under the name of Nouvellistes or Newsmen.

when the newsmen of Paris were in their full flood-tide, that is, during the first half of the seventeenth century, they had five meeting-places: the Gardens of the Tuileries, those of the Palais Royal, the Great Hall at the Palais de Justice, and the Cloisters of the Augustine and Celestine Convents. By-and-by a quarrel arose between the frequenters of these rival spots as to which of them furnished the Newsmen had flourished in ancient best news, and the matter gave rise to a Rome, and Livy, Seneca, Tacitus, and kind of joint-stock arrangement, by which most other grave writers speak of them the Tuileries became, from three to five with disfavour. They were of two sorts every afternoon, the head-quarters of all - the Subrostrani and the Parasites: the news collected at other places during the former open-air newsmen who clustered morning. The newsmen began their near the rostrum in the Forum; the lat- rounds at the Palace of Justice, then went ter babbling toadies, who waited upon to the Place de Grêve, where criminals great people in the morning with a budget were flogged or executed at midday, and of chit-chat and tattle. Seneca says of afterwards strode off in a body for the the Subrostrani, that they were "shame- Palais Royal, in the gardens of which less ferreters of anecdotes of a scandalous most stock-exchange operations were sort- echoes of all that is disreputable ; " and Livy, that, "although these chatterboxes have never set foot beyond the Forum, they know better than any general how an army should be commanded and a town besieged. They are great winners of lost or unfought battles." The Parasite is handled in a similar style by Martial:"The fellow invents news which he relates as true. He knows what the King of the Parthians has resolved in his Those who wish to form any concepprivy council; he can tell you to a man tion of it can find a pale reflex in the how many soldiers there are in the Rhine Bourse of our own time on a panic day, army and in that of the Sarmatians. He in the Petite Bourse held every evening by is in a position to communicate the sub- Parisian stock-jobbers in the Passage de stance of what the King of the Dacians l'Opéra. But what are these squib exhas confided to his generals in secret changes, even at the most excited modespatches; all the hidden things of pol-ments, compared to the Tuileries at the itics are familiar to him, and he is always date when there were no public prints to

effected. Towards three, a veteran newsman, who acted as master of the ceremonies, came, and made a selection of the most decently dressed among the Palais Royal set (for the sentries at the Tuileries admitted none but well-dressed people), and with these in tow, set off for the terrace skirting the present river-side quay. Here a regular bubble and canard mart was held.

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