LITERARY INFLUENCES
Moses Coit Tyler, in his " History of American Literature," has thus summed up the literary influence of the newspapers of the first era:
Our colonial journalism soon became, in itself, a really important literary force. It could not remain forever a mere disseminator of pub- lic gossip or a placard for the display advertisements. The instinct of critical and brave debate was strong even among those puny editors, and it kept struggling for expression. Moreover, each editor was sur- rounded by a coterie of friends, with active brains and a propensity to utterance; and these constituted a sort of unpaid staff of editorial con- tributors, who, in various forms letters, essays, anecdotes, epigrams, poems, lampoons helped to give vivacity and even literary value to the paper.
