ho never looks upon his plate
of soup without mentally reviewing in elaborate periods the whole
vegetable, animal, and mineral kingdoms?

But what is the advantage of newspapers? Forsooth, popular intelligence.
The newspaper is, in the first place, the legitimate and improved
successor of the fiery cross, beacon-light, signal-smoking summit,
hieroglyphic mark, and bulletin-board. It is, in addition to this, a
popular daily edition and application of the works of Aristotle, St.
Thomas Aquinas, Lord Bacon, Vattel, and Thomas Jefferson. On one page it
records items, on the other it shows the relations between those items
and the highest thought. Yet the whole circle is accomplished daily. The
journal is thus the synopticized, personified, incarnate madness of the
day,--for to-day is always mad, and becomes a thing of reason only when
it becomes yesterday. A proper historical fact is one of the rarest
shots in the journalist's bag, as time is sure to prove. If we had
newspaper-accounts of the age of Augustus, the chances are that no other
epoch in history would be so absolutely problematical, and Augustus
himself would be lucky, if he were not resolved into a myth, and the
journal into sibylline oracles. The dissertational department is equally
faulty; for to first impressions everything on earth is chameleon-like.
The Scandinavian Divinities, the Past, the Present, and the Future,
could look upon each other, but neither of them upon herself. But in the
journal the Present is trying to behold itself; the same priestess
utters and explains the oracle. Thus the journal is the immortal
reproduction of the _jour des dupes_. The editors are like the newsboys,
shouting the news which they do not understand.

The public mind has given itself up to it. It claims the right to
pronounce all the newspapers very bad, but has renounced the privilege
of not reading them. Every one is made _particeps criminis_ in the
course of events. Nothing takes place in any quarter of the globe
without our assistance. We have to connive at _omne scibile_. About
everything natural and human, infernal and divine, there is a general
consultation of mankind, and we are all made responsible for the result.
Yet this constant interruption of our private intellectual habits and
interests is both an impertinence and a nuisance. Why send us all the
crudities? Why call upon us till you know what you want? Why speak till
you have got your brain and your mouth cl