. iii.
made; of circulating speeches that were never delivered ; of attributing to members speeches “ which they never spake.” It must be remembered , however , that the stationers, rather than the reporters, were often the ones responsible for some of these
short-comings, since to stationers and printers all such parlia mentary material had a commercial value.5 These " separates," or parliamentary documents or speeches “ to be found in a single manuscript," when combined with the news-letter, " a daily or weekly narrative of parliament, a narra tive that was sent out in many manuscript copies, " gave the constituents of members all the information in regard to Parlia
ment that escaped the vigilance of the authorities. By the time the Long Parliament met the news-letter had " be come a regular feature in connection with Parliament. It satisfied
a real demand.” Yet in spite of this the Commons were ordering “ their Printing Committee to 'suppress the Printing or Venting in manuscript, the diurnal Occurrences of Parliament.' ” But sup pression was impossible and the “ Diurnall Occurrences in printwas
the successor of Diurnall Occurrences in manuscript news-letter." Later in the century the professional news- letter writers “ flour
ished exceedingly ,” says Porritt, largely through the eagerness of
the county families for Parliamentary news, and " between the Restoration and the Revolution , (they] had more subscribers to their letters from London than at any time in the history of the news-letter writing calling.” 6 But the more these writers flour ished the more vigorously were they prosecuted by Parliament, a controversy that was kept up for half a century . The news
letters as such had disappeared before themiddle of the eighteenth century, but their spirit was perpetuated through the magazines and newspapers that gave wider circulation to reports concerning
Parliament and that in their turn inherited the old quarrel that had been waged against the news-letters. It was Edward Cave who introduced the idea of circulating the
reports ofwhat was done in Parliament. Having a post office sit uation , he had been able to supply his London friends with the 6 W . Notestein and F . H . Relf, Commons Debates. " Introduction ," pp . xi- lxvii.
• E . Porritt, The Unreformed House of Commons, I, 588 - 589.
