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1724, March 23. Plain Dealer, No. 1.— Of this paper Dr. Jobnson observes, that it " was a periodical paper written by Mr. Hill* and Mr. Hond, wfaom Saraffe called the two contending powers of light ana darkness. They wrote by turns each six essays ; and the character of the work was observed regularly to rise in Mr. Hill's weeks, and to fall in Mr. Bond's." The Plain Dealer was published twice a week, and was concluded on May 7th, 1725, having reached one hundred and seventeen numbers ; it was reprinted in 1734, and forms two octavo volumes.
It was unfortunate, that in writing the Plain Dealer thai Mr. Hill should have fixed upon a coadjutor so inferior to himself as Mr. Bond. Notwithstanding this unhappy choice, it is, as a miscellaneous paper, the best that has come under our notice since the Free Thinker.
1724, July 8. Inauiritor, No. 1.
1724, Sept. 5. Monitor, No. 5.
1724, Dec. 21. Protettant Advocate, mlh re- mark! upon Popery, terious and comical. No. 3.
1725, Nov. 30. Edmund Curll, the notori- ous bookseller, who lived at the sign of the bible, in Bow-street, convicted of publishing several obscene books, Venus in the Cloister ; or, the Nun in her Smock, translated from the French, Sec. for which he stood in the pillory, and had his ears cut off. Pope has immortalized him to public infamy in the Dunciad.
1725, Jan. New Memoirs of Literature, by Michael de la Roche, No. I. Continued till December, 1727, in 6 volumes, 8vo.
1725, Jan. The Monthly Catalogue, No. 1, being a general register of books, sermons, plays, and pamphlets, printed and published in London or the universiaes.
1725, Jan. 10. The Halfpenny London Jour- nal, or the British Oracle, No. 10.
1725, May 1. The Weekly Journal, or the British Gazetteer, No. 1.
1725, Sept. 25. The British Spy, or Weekly Journal.
1726. Died, Michael Burghers, an eminent engraver, a native of Utrecht, who settled at Oxford, where he engraved the almanacks : his first appeared in 1676 without his name: also small views of Queen's college, and portraits.
1726, Feb. The Occasional Paper, No. 2.
- Aaron Hill was born Id London, Feb. 10, 1685, and was
a man of amiable manners and of great moral worth. In 1709 he married a lady of beaaty, wealth, and accomplish- ments, and in the same year, became manager of Drury- lane theatre, for which be wrote his Elfred, or the Fair Incoiutani. The foUcwinff year he became master of the Opera-house, and wrote the opera of Rinatdo, the Ant which Handel composed in England. About 1718 he pablished a poem called the Northern Star, or a Panegyric on Peter the Great, for which the empress Catherine sent him a gold medal. It was in the province of a dramatic poet, however, that Mr. Hill was best known to his co- temporaries; and in this more as a tninslator than an original writer; bis Fall of Slam, performed in 1716, and his ilMe/tfan in 1731, are now forgotten; but his adapta- tions from Voltaire, his Zara, Atxira. and Merope, luive great merit, and the first and third still keep possession of the stage. Ouranthor did not long survive the prodoction . of hlsJfero^; he expired on February Mb, 1750, in the sixty-eigbth year of his age, and was buried in the cloisters of Westminster abbey, In the same grave with Us wife.
1726. A learned man, Ibrahim Effendi, fiilly perceiving the advantages to be derived from the use of a press, exerted his influence towards oh- taining the erection of one in Constantinople, and shortly afterwards succeeded. Peignot, in his Repertoire des bibliographies tpeeiales, p. 163, affirms a Turkish Grammar, dated 1730, to be the first book really printed at Constantinople : in this assertion however he is decidedly mis- taken, since the Bodleian library contains two works executed in this city, bearmg the date of 1729, in one of which Ibrahim is called Archi- typographer to the Sublime Porte ; so that printing was then exercised, not only openly, but under the express authority of the government. It rather appears that the first printed book was a Turkish. Arabic Lexicon, by Mahomet, the son of Mustapha, executed between 1726 and 1728, in two handsome volumes small folio, of which likewise a copy has been recently placed in the same library. Yet even this printing establish- ment of Ibrahim (who is said by lord Teig^- mouth, in his Life of Sir William Jones, to have learned Latin by his own industry, to have been no contemptible writer in his native lan- guage, and to have cast his own types) does not seftm to have been carried on with vigour. M. Hammer, in his catalogue of Arabic, Peisic, and Turkish manuscripts contained in the imperial library at Vienna, enumerates sixty-three works printed at Constantinople and Scutari from the year 1728 to 1819. In this series, however, there is a complete blank from the year 1744, that of the death of Ibrahim, after which it does not appear that any thing was done, except that the lexicon of 1728 was reprinted in 1758, under the care of another Ibrahim. Through the in- fluence of the scribes, the press can scarcely be said to have gained an effectual footing in Con- stantinople until the year 1782 ; at which period the press was re-established through the interest of the French ambassador at theOttoman court, who erected a press in his own house at Pera. Of Ibrahim's first book, the Turkish Lexicon of 1728, one thousand copies were printed, at the cost of thirty-five piasters for each copy. The grammar mentioned by Peignot, as also many of the Constantinople earlier Hebrew books, may be seen in the Bodleian library : a copy of the very rare Polyglott Pentateuch, executed here in 1546, is in the imperial library at Vienna ; and a second in the Oppenheimer collection : and it is said that most of the books from Ibrahim's press are to be found in the royal library at Paris. Many of them are in possession of Mr. W. Marsden, and are enumerated in the Biblio- theca MarsdJmiana, 4to., 1827. Of the Gram- maire Turque M. Renourd, of Paris, had a copy, every sheet of which was on paper of different colours. For some interesting details of the modern printing-establishment and two paper manufactories of Constantinople in 1828, see Walsh's Narrative, 8vo. 1828.
1726, May 3. Thomas Wood, " a member of the company of stationers, gave the king's coat of arms."
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