ies,
there was scarcely a printer in the kingdom. The only press in England
north of Trent appears to have been at York. [167]

It was not only by means of the London Gazette that the government
undertook to furnish political instruction to the people. That journal
contained a scanty supply of news without comment. Another journal,
published under the patronage of the court, consisted of comment without
news. This paper, called the Observator, was edited by an old Tory
pamphleteer named Roger Lestrange. Lestrange was by no means deficient
in readiness and shrewdness; and his diction, though coarse, and
disfigured by a mean and flippant jargon which then passed for wit in
the green room and the tavern, was not without keenness and vigour. But
his nature, at once ferocious and ignoble, showed itself in every line
that he penned. When the first Observators appeared there was some
excuse for his acrimony. The Whigs were then powerful; and he had to
contend against numerous adversaries, whose unscrupulous violence might
seem to justify unsparing retaliation. But in 1685 all the opposition
had been crushed. A generous spirit would have disdained to insult a
party which could not reply, and to aggravate the misery of prisoners,
of exiles, of bereaved families: but; from the malice of Lestrange the
grave was no hiding place, and the house of mourning no sanctuary. In
the last month of the reign of Charles the Second, William Jenkyn, an
aged dissenting pastor of great note, who had been cruelly persecuted
for no crime but that of worshipping God according to the fashion
generally followed throughout protestant Europe, died of hardships and
privations at Newgate. The outbreak of popular sympathy could not be
repressed. The corpse was followed to the grave by a train of a hundred
and fifty coaches. Even courtiers looked sad. Even the unthinking King
showed some signs of concern. Lestrange alone set up a howl of savage
exultation, laughed at the weak compassion of the Trimmers, proclaimed
that the blasphemous old impostor had met with a most righteous
punishment, and vowed to wage war, not only to the death, but after
death, with all the mock saints and martyrs. [168] Such was the spirit
of the paper which was at this time the oracle of the Tory party, and
especially of the parochial clergy.

Literature which could be carried by the post bag then formed the
greater part of the intellectual nutriment ruminated by the country
divin