THE BRITISH APOLLO.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY: THE ATHENIAN ORACLE.

"To whom all people, far and near,

On deep importances repair."

-Hudibras, Part II., Canto iii.

IN the history of literature and the appearance of epoch-making works, we can trace the evolution of man's thoughts and opinions. In the different methods necessary to be adopted by the author to reach the public at various periods of the world's history, we also have indications of the progress being effected from time to time. Literature has been published in the form of books for a very long period, but it is only so recently as the end of the seventeenth century that periodical literature took its rise. It is in this form of publication that

we can best study in minute detail many social, political, and other human characteristics that otherwise would escape record or exposition. A book stands solely as the representative of its author or of the school to which he belongs; the contents of a periodical, on the other hand, are affected by every passing wave of thought or change of fashion or sentiment. The important books of a century while exhibiting, it may be, an advance of thought, can be expected to show to the future historian only the more prominent readings at longer or shorter intervals of the psychological barometer; whilst a periodical exhibits almost every momentary fluctuation.

A similar opinion regarding the importance and value of these frequently despised periodicals is expressed by the late Sir Walter Besant. Of the Athenian Oracle he wrote :- "It is a treasury, a store-house, filled with precious things; a book invaluable to one who wishes to study the manners and ideas of the English bourgeois at the end of the seventeenth or the beginning of the eighteenth century. Their language, their opinions, and their points of view; their science and their formalities, their social manners and their religion, may be more truly and more vividly

learned from these pages than from any other book that I know. The middle class, under the great and glorious Anna, cannot be learned from Dryden, from Congreve, or any of the poets and dramatists; because the poets did not concern themselves with middle-class manners, and the dramatists, if they did, studied them with a view to stage exaggeration. This class had no prophet unless it was the Athenian Oracle and its successor, the British Apollo." That the eminent novelist has acted practically upon these opinions is certain, for he owns that in writing two of his novels, For Faith and Freedom, and Dorothy Forster, which relate to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he found his greatest help as regards language, current opinions, and floating prejudices, out of all the books he had to read, in the Athenian Oracle.

In taking a rapid survey of periodical literature during its earlier phases, it is instructive to analyse the different ways in which such publications were conducted. The authors of News Letters wrote an account to their clients of such news as they were able to obtain from hearsay, and sometimes, it is said, when such means failed, they had recourse to invention to supply the deficiency.

The printers of the earlier newspapers relied, to a large extent, on extracts from other papers, home and continental; and the late arrival of a foreign mail was quite as serious to them as the breakdown of a section of the telegraph system is to the editors of our own time.

In pursuing these methods the printer supplied the public with the reading matter that came most readily to hand, without much personal search, and which he thought might best suit the palates of his customers. In gauging this taste he might be right or otherwise, when success or failure would attend his efforts, but he had no means of knowing if he pleased the public except by the amount of his weekly sales.

The idea of keeping in better touch with the purchasers of a paper by inviting them to correspond or ask questions, not relating to news, but to subjects of general interest, was an entirely novel conception, and occurred to an eccentric bookseller, named John Dunton (1659-1733). As finally determined upon, this resulted in the publication of the Athenian Mercury. This was neither a newspaper, a magazine, nor an essay, but may be tersely described as nearly the equivalent of the "Answers to Correspondents "