a modern newspaper it may after all be said to represent only the type of mind to which the founding of a newspaper has always appealed. Théophraste Renaudot founded , in 1631 at La Maison du Grand-Coq, the Gazette de France, the first news paper printed in Paris, and in 1884 an inscription commemorating that event was placed on the building erected on the site of the earlier structure. To M . Hatin it seemed inexcusable that the
inscription did not enumerate the other services of Renaudot,-
the establishment of an employment office, an information bureau, an auction market, a dispensary, the mont-de-piété , and other " simple inventions” as their originator termed them , and in various brochures he has done honor to the memory of
this greatest forerunner of modern journalists.37 But at least the eighteenth century periodical in England had tried the plan of stimulating interest and increasing its circula
tion through prize -giving and other devices held to be modern . The Gentleman's Magazine in 1734 offered a prize for poems and soon after for epigrams,38 but it was doubtless an appreciation perhaps unconscious of the failure of such prizes to conform to
the principles subsequently laid down by Pebody,39 that led Samuel Johnson , in 1738, to write Cave, who had offered a prize
for the best poem on the Divine Attributes, “ I shall engage with little spirit in an affair , which I shall hardly end to my own satisfaction , and certainly not to the satisfaction of the parties concerned .” 40 It is at least significant that the most recent step in the evolu
tion of prize-giving in connection with the press has been the conferring of prizes and medals on newspapers in addition to the 37 E . Hatin , La Maison du Grand -Coq; Théophraste Renaudot et ses in nocentes inventions; A propos de Théophraste Renaudot. L ' Histoire, la Fan tasie et la Fatalité .
E . T . Cook says of Delane that " hewas a pioneer in the journalism which
does things as well as says things." - Delane of “ The Times," p . 89. But Delane had been anticipated on the continent by more than two centuries .
38 J. Nichols, The Rise and Progress of the Gentleman's Magazine, pp . xi- xii .
39 To all newspaper enterprises of this character the one condition is “ that the work shall be work that appeals to the imagination , to national
sentiments, or to national pride.” — C . Pebody, English Journalism and the Men Who Have Made It, p . 184.
40 Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson , Dent ed., I, 76 .
