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SECOND EDITION.

SOME of my critics while admitting that if the notes and sketches in "While the 'Boy' Waits" had been worth writing, they would have been worth reprinting, rejected the hypothesis. Others more generous predicted success for this little venture. The kindly-expressed hope has been realised, and in issuing a Second Edition, I have added "other papers," I fear no better, but I trust not worse, than those received with so much forbearance in 1873.

J. M. G.

1

"While the 'Boy' Waits."

I.

NEWSPAPER-READERS.

THE readers of newspapers constitute a very remarkable variety of the human species, worthy of attention for the number and dissimilarity of their tastes, habits and predilections, but not hitherto told off into classes as their peculiarities suggest and in a certain sense require they should be. The old-fashioned "Constant reader" is apparently dying out in consequence of some mysterious Darwinian process of extinction. Possibly the food on which this particular class subsisted has failed. They have never been so numerous in connection with the daily press as with the weekly;

B

and as periodicals published every twenty-four hours are rapidly superseding those which make their appearance at intervals of a hundred and sixty-eight, the order of intellect which flourished on the latter kind of pabulum may also soon be superseded. The patron of the daily press is the very antithesis of the "Constant reader." His style of reading is more cursory; he has none of the faith so sedulously cherished and loudly professed by his progenitor. He never spells his paper from title to imprint; seldom believes what he reads; has little or no awe of the "we;" does not suppose the editor to be omnipresent and know everything, and more than suspects he is only an average mortal after. all. With the substitution of the "inconstant," if we may so call him, for the "constant" reader, a decided change has come over the character of newspaper literature. Poetry has ceased to be a staple of the journalistic supply. Natural history is no longer served up in paragraphs, except on very rare occasions, such as on a reappearance of the sea-serpent, the enfolding of a whole boat's crew in the fins of a devil-fish, or something

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