The Gloucester Journal is to be congratulated on completing its
second century under the original title with which it appeared on April 9th, 1722. No other English paper, save the London Gazette and the Northampton Mercury (started in May, 1720), can make a similar claim ; curiously enough, both the North- ampton and the Gloucester journals were started by the same printers, Robert Raikes and William Dicey. Raikes's son and namesake, who edited the paper from 1757 to 1802, is famous as the founder of Sunday-schools. The Gloucester Journal celebrated the occasion by publishing with last week's issue a full and scholarly history of the paper by Mr. Roland Austin, the Gloucester librarian, and a facsimile reprint of the first number, which students of the history of journalism will find interesting. No. 1 was, for its day, a handsome production of six double-columned pages, with an allegorical woodcut enclosing the title at the top of the front page. The contrast in size between No. 1 and No. 10,441 is instructive, though the topics that interested the Gloucester folk of 1722—politics, crime and trade—were very much the same as those which interest their descendants.
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