From Behind the Speaker's Chair.
IV.
(VIEWED BY HENRY W. LUCY.)
ABOUT INDENTED HEADINGS. I SUPPOSE if anyone has a right to indulge in the convenience of indented headings when writing a discursive article, I may claim a share in the privilege. When I retired from the editorship of a morning newspaper, a not obtrusively friendly commentator wrote that my chief claim to be remembered in that connection was that I had invented sign-posts for leading articles. But he was careful to add, lest I should be puffed up, this was not sufficient to establish editorial reputation.
Indented headings.
It is true; but it is interesting to observe how the way thus adventured upon has grown crowded. The abstentions indicate a curious and interesting habitude ingrained in the English Press. Whilst most of the weekly papers, not only in the provinces but in London, have adopted the new fashion, no daily paper in London, and in the country only one here and there, has followed it. That is a nice distinction, illustrating a peculiarity of our honoured profession. As it was a daily paper that made the innovation, weekly papers may, without loss of dignity, adopt the custom as their own. But it is well known that, in London at least, there is only one daily paper, and that is the "We" speaking from a particular address, located somewhere between Temple Bar and St. Paul's.
"contemp(t)oraries."
Argal, it is impossible that this peculiarly situated entity should borrow from other papers. Yet I once heard the manager of what we are pleased to call the leading journal confess he envied the Daily News' side-headings to its leaders, and regretted the impossibility of adapting them for his own journal. That was an opinion delivered in mufti. In full uniform, no manager―certainly no editor―of another morning paper is aware of the existence of the Daily News; the Daily News, on its part, being courageously steeped in equally dense ignorance of the existence of other journals.
Few things are so funny as the start of surprise with which a London journal upon rare occasion finds itself face to face with a something that also appears every morning at a price varying from a penny to threepence. Nothing will induce it to give the phenomenon a name, and it distantly alludes to it as "a contemporary." This is quite peculiar to Great Britain, and is in its way akin to the etiquette of the House of Commons, which makes it a breach of order to refer to a member by his proper name. It does not exist in France or the United States, and there are not lacking signs that the absurd lengths to which it has hitherto been carried out in the English Press are being shortened.
