CROSS READINGS--AND CALEB WHITEFOORD
Towards the close of the year 1766--not many months after the
publication of the Vicat of Wakefield--there appeared in Mr. Henry
Sampson Woodfall's _Public Advertiser_, and other newspapers, a letter
addressed "To the Printer," and signed "PAPYRIUS CURSOR." The name was a
real Roman name; but in its burlesque applicability to the theme of the
communication, it was as felicitous as Thackeray's "MANLIUS
PENNIALINUS," or that "APOLLONIUS CURIUS" from whom Hood fabled to have
borrowed the legend of "Lycus the Centaur." The writer of the letter
lamented--as others have done before and since--the barren fertility of
the news sheets of his day. There was, he contended, some diversion and
diversity in card-playing. But as for the papers, the unconnected
occurrences and miscellaneous advertisements, the abrupt transitions
from article to article, without the slightest connection between one
paragraph and another--so overburdened and confused the memory that when
one was questioned, it was impossible to give even a tolerable account
of what one had read. The mind became a jumble of "politics, religion,
picking of pockets, puffs, casualties, deaths, marriages, bankruptcies,
preferments, resignations, executions, lottery tickets, India bonds,
Scotch pebbles, Canada bills, French chicken gloves, auctioneers, and
quack doctors," of all of which, particularly as the pages contained
three columns, the bewildered reader could retain little or nothing.
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