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.
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.
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.
[Illustration: INDENTED HEADINGS.]
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.
[Illustration: "CONTEMP(T)ORARIES."]