... A man may learn, sitting by his fireside, more than
an angel would desire to know of human life, by reading well a single
newspaper. It is an instrument of many tones, running through the whole
scale of humanity; from the lightest gayety to the gravest sadness; from
the large interests of nations to the humblest affairs of the smallest
individual. On its single page we read of Births, Marriages, and Deaths;
the daily, almost hourly, register of royalty, how it eat, walked, and
laughed; and the single incident the world deems worth recording of the
life of poverty--how it died. It is a picture of motley human life;
a poet's thought, or an orator's eloquence in one column, and the
condemnation of a pickpocket in another....
Doubtless it was a very satisfactory thing for a Roman poet, when the
wind was quiet, to get an audience about him, under a portico, and
unwind his well-written scroll for an hour or two; but there must have
been a vast deal of secret machinery, and influence, and agitation,
to keep up his name with the people. The followers of Pythagoras, in
another country, we know, said he had a golden leg, and this satisfied
the people that his philosophy was divine. Truly were they the dark ages
before the invention of newspapers.
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