port of his weekly News-Letter, he had not made anything by it. He begged the Governor to grant him some allowance "to encourage him in said duty for the future," a petition that resulted in his being allowed six shillings or six pounds, the exact amount not being decipherable.[1]
Fifteen years after he had started the paper he appealed to the public for assistance, stating that he had "supplied them conscientiously with publick occurances of Europe and with those of these, our neighboring provinces, and the West Indies,"[2] although he admitted that at one time he had been a little matter of thirteen months behindhand with the news. The time had come, he said, when he must have assistance, frankly admitting that his circulation was not over 300 copies, although some ignorant persons had spread about a report that he was selling upward of a thousand. He therefore pleaded, the good postmaster, that those who had not paid for the haii year's subscription would please come forward to his house in Cornhill and lay down the cash.
Campbell's lack of success aroused little sympathy, for while some of the fault may have been with the authorities, we cannot help contrasting his puny and generally uninteresting gazette, which had held the field for sixteen years without a rival, with the great development of journalism, in the mother country. It was during these sixteen years that Addison, Swift and Steele were, as Henry Morley says, "teaching the English people to read" in journals which, if they did not come up to modern ideas and high standards of journalism, were bridging the chasm between journalism and literature and establishing for the former an authority, a political and social standing that
