Mr. Newdegate, M.P., in a speech at the Nuneaton Literary
Institution last week, made some rather just observations on the unfortunate effect produced by the growing pressure of news on the usefulness of newspapers, and congratulated his audience that a new class of monthly periodicals had sprung up, to discuss serious topics more thoroughly than the modern newspaper can now afford to do, and yet at more fre- quent intervals, and with more variety of treatment, than the old " quarterlies" find to be in their power. He was quite ani- mated in his praise of the services rendered by the Fortnightly Review and the Nineteenth Century to modern literature, and in his praise of statesmen out of office, like Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Lowe, for contributing, under their own names, to these periodicals. Such contributions tend, says Mr. Newdegate, to restore to the public that opportunity of bearing the mature judgment of the ablest minds on political issues, which the hurry of Parliamentary reporting for the daily Press now prevents it from supplying in the accounts of Parliamentary debate. It is odd to find Mr. Newde- gate among the panegyrists of the Fortnightly, true as his criticism is. But we venture to doubt whether the new " ironclads " of the periodical Press really discharge precisely that kind of service which the newspapers, in so highly compressing their Parlia- mentary reports, have abandoned. When debate becomes snippety, disquisition, however able, will hardly supply its place.
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