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CHAPTER XIV. THE REPORTER. All speakers can imagine what must be the. labor of putting to- gether our ungrammatical sentences, and filling up from conjecture the unknown name of some unheard of author, who has unfortu- nately been quoted in the midst of a speech on modern topics. — Dean Stanley. EPORTERS for the Press have been termed contemporary historians, and no description could more aptly designate their functions. They are the successors of the earlier an- nalists to whom history owes nearly everything which is known of many periods of national life. But how different are the characteristics and methods of the modem race of reporters compared with those of the monkish chroniclers of old, or even with the news-letter writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A bold flight of imagination is necessary if we would picture to ourselves the nineteenth century reporter doing his work in the monastic scriptorium, or writing in a garret in Grub-street. We can imagine that he would be sadly out of his element in the scriptorium with its reverent surroundings, for it cannot be said that the bustle and excitement which accompany the everyday work of the modem reporter would be calculated to fit him for the quiet leisurely work of the ancient chronicler. Our modem reporter would no doubt greatly enjoy the gossipy ways of the letter-writers and their visits to coffee-taverns and clubs, but he would regard with righteous indignation a proposition that he should inhabit a garret or undergo any of the privations which men who followed the lit- erary calling had once to endure. Happily in our own time the Press of England, which is the hand-maid of