The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ establishing it, for it was not at first successful. Charles Dickens was the first editor, but politics were not much in the line of the genial and unrivalled novelist, and he was soon succeeded by John Forster and Charles Wentworth Dilke, whose connection with the South Kensington Museum and the great Exhibition has made him a knight, a C. B., and a very important personage. The Daily News is now one of the ablest and most successful of London journals, and has had and still enjoys the assistance of the best writers of the day in every department. The line which this journal has always maintained toward America will forever earn it the admiration and gratitude of the United States. Another firm friend of the great republic is The Morning Star, the organ of Mr. Bright and the Manchester school, started in 1856. In addition to its political claims, it has a great hold upon the public as a family newspaper, by the careful manner in which everything objectionable is excluded from its columns. Its twin sister, born at the same time, is called The Evening Star. Bell's Life in London, a weekly journal, was originally brought out in 1820, and, although it has more than one successful rival to contend against, it still maintains its preëminence as the first English sporting paper. It is very carefully edited, each department being placed under a separate editor, and is the great oracle in all matters relating to sports and games. The history of one of the ablest contributors to this journal, who wrote some most charming articles on fly-fishing and other kindred topics, under the signature of 'Ephemera'—though he was said never to have thrown a fly in his life—is a very sad one. His name was Fitzgerald, a man of good family and connections, married to a lady with £1,200 a year, and living in a good house at the West End. But the alcoholic demon had got hold of him. He would disappear for days together, and then suddenly present himself at the office of the paper with nothing on but a shirt and trousers. He would then sit down and write an article, receive his pay, go away and purchase decent clothes, return home, and live quietly perhaps for a month, when he would—to use a prison phrase—break out again as before. He was last seen, in the streets of London, in a state of complete intoxication, being carried upon a stretcher by two policemen to the police cell, where he died the same night.

      At the head of the Sunday papers stands The Observer, founded in 1792. Like The Globe, it is extremely well informed upon all political matters, for very good reasons. It spares no expense in obtaining early news, and is an especial favorite with the clubs. The Era is the great organ of the theatrical world, but joins to that specialité the general attributes of an ordinary weekly journal. It was established in 1837. The Field, which calls itself the country gentleman's newspaper, is all that it professes to be, and a most admirable publication, treating of games, sports, natural history, and rural matters generally. It was started by Mr. Benjamin Webster, the accomplished actor manager, in 1853. But to particularize the principal papers, even in a short separate notice of a few lines, would far transgress the limits at our disposal. All the professions are well supplied with journals devoted to their interests, and it is impossible here to dwell upon them or those which represent literature and the fine arts. With regard to religious papers, their name is legion, and they would require a separate article to be fairly and honestly considered. Punch, too, and his rivals, dead and living, are in the same category, and must, however reluctantly, be passed over. Two curiosities, however, of the press must be mentioned. Public Opinion was started about two years and a half ago. It consisted of weekly extracts from the leading articles of English and foreign journals, and scraps of news, and other odds and ends. It has succeeded mainly from its cost of production being so slight, owing to its paste-and-scissors character, and also because it freely opens its columns to correspondents de rebus omnibus, who are willing to buy any number of copies for the pleasure of seeing themselves in print. The Literary Times, in addition to reviews of books, professed to criticize the leading articles in the various papers, but, after an existence of some six months or so, one Saturday morning The Literary Times was non est inventus.

      In concluding this series of articles, which has run to a much greater length than he originally intended, the writer is conscious of many shortcomings and omissions, which he trusts will be pardoned and overlooked when his principal object is borne in mind. That object has been to give a general outline of the history of the press, and especially of its struggles against 'the powers which be;' and, though tempted now and again—he fears too often for the patience of his readers—to wander away into particularities, he has always endeavored to keep that object in view. Above all, he hopes he has at least been successful in showing the truth of that sentiment which was first publicly expressed as a toast at a Whig dinner, at the Crown and Anchor tavern, in 1795: 'The liberty of the press—it is like the air we breathe—if we have it not, we die!'

      OUR MARTYRS

      Lightly the river runs between

      Hanging cliffs and meadows green.

      Blackly the prison, looking down,

      Frowns at its shadow's answering frown.

      Shut from life in his life's fresh morn,

      Crouches a soldier, wounded and worn.

      Chained and starved in the dungeon grim,

      Day and night are alike to him;

      Save that the murmurous twilight air

      Stings his soul with a deeper despair.

      Day by day, as the taunting breeze

      Wafts him the breath of orange trees,

      He fancies in meadows far away

      The level lines of odorous hay;

      And sees the scythes of the mowers run

      In and out of the steady sun.

      Night by night, as the mounting moon

      Climbs from his eager gaze too soon,

      The gleams that across the gratings fall,

      Broken and bright, on the prison wall,

      Seem the tangles of Northern rills,

      Like threads of silver winding the hills.

      When, sinking into the western skies,

      The sun aslant on the window lies;

      And motes that hovered dusty and dim,

      Golden-winged through the glory swim:

      He drops his head on his fettered hands,

      And thinks of the fruitful Northern lands.

      Between his fingers' wasted lines,

      Tear after tear into sunlight shines,

      As, wandering in a dream, he treads

      The ripened honey of clover heads;

      Or watches the sea of yellow grain

      Break into waves on the windy plain;

      Or sees the orchard's grassy gloom

      Spotted with globes of rosy bloom.

      Through the shimmer of shadowy haze

      Redden the hills with their autumn blaze.

      The oxen stand in the loaded teams;

      The cider bubbles in amber streams;

      And child-like laughter and girlish song

      Float with the reaper's shout along.

      He stirs his hands, and the jealous chain

      Wakes him once more to his tyrant pain—

      To festered wounds, and to dungeon taint,

      And hunger's agony, fierce and faint.

      The sunset vision fades and flits,

      And alone in his dark'ning cell he sits:

      Alone with only СКАЧАТЬ