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Tech Giants, Artificial
Intelligence, and the Future of
Journalism

This book examines the impact of the “Big Five” technology companies –
Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft – on journalism and
the media industries. It looks at the current role of algorithms and artifi-
cial intelligence in curating how we consume media and their increasing
influence on the production of the news.
Exploring the changes that the technology industry and automation
have made in the past decade to the production, distribution, and con-
sumption of news globally, the book considers what happens to journal-
ism once it is produced and enters the media ecosystems of the Internet
tech giants – and the impact of social media and AI on such things as
fake news in the post-truth age.
The audience for this book are students and researchers working
in the field of digital media, and journalism studies or media studies
more generally. It will also be useful to those who are looking for ex-
tended case studies of the role taken by tech giants such as Facebook and
­Google in the fake news scandal, or the role of Jeff Bezos in transforming
The Washington Post.

Jason Whittaker is the Head of the School of English and Journalism at

the University of Lincoln. He worked for 15 years as a tech journalist
and has written extensively on magazine journalism and digital media,
most recently as the co-editor of the collection Online Journalism in
Africa (2013) and as the author of Magazine Production (2016).
Routledge Research in Journalism

19 News of Baltimore
Race, Rage and the City
Edited by Linda Steiner and Silvio Waisbord

20 The Trump Presidency, Journalism, and Democracy

Edited by Robert E. Gutsche, Jr.

21 Russia’s Liberal Media

Handcuffed but Free
Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova

22 Critical Perspectives on Journalistic Beliefs and Actions

Global Experiences
Edited by Eric Freedman, Robyn S. Goodman, and Elanie Steyn

23 Economic News
Informing the Inattentive Audience
Arjen van Dalen, Helle Svensson, Anotinus Kalogeropoulos, Erik
Albæk, Claes H. de Vreese

24 Reporting Humanitarian Disasters in a Social Media Age

Glenda Cooper

25 The Rise of Nonprofit Investigative Journalism in the United States

Bill Birnbauer

26 Tech Giants, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of Journalism

Jason Whittaker

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge​.com

Tech Giants, Artificial
Intelligence, and the
Future of Journalism

Jason Whittaker

NEW YORK AND LONDON

First published 2019
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2019 Taylor & Francis
The right of Jason Whittaker to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The Open Access version of this book, available at
www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under
a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No
Derivatives 4.0 license. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
CIP data has been applied for.

ISBN: 978-1-138-49997-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-351-01375-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
To Sam for her patience and support
Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction: Automatic for the People 1

1 The New Ecology 11

2 Distribute and Be Damned 39

3 Zombie Media: Alt-Journalism, Fake News, and

Robot Editors 71

4 Turing’s Test: Automated Journalism and the

Rise of the Post-Human Writer 99

5 Citizens: The Voice of the People in the

Age of Machines 126

Conclusion: The Future of Journalism 163

Bibliography 173
Index 183
Acknowledgements

This book has developed over a series of discussions with a num-

ber of colleagues, students, and friends who have had the patience to
sit through presentations and debates on various aspects covered in
this book over the years. I would particularly like to thank Deborah
Wilson-David, John Cafferkey, Ola Ogunyemi, Hayes Mabweazara,
John Cafferkey, Gary Stevens, Rob Brown, and Julia Kennedy, as well as
Eleanor Simmons and Felisa Salvago-Keyes at Routledge who helped to
develop this book from initial idea through to final publication.
Introduction
Automatic for the People

In August 2018, financial reporters around the globe became extremely

excited at news that the tech company Apple had passed the $1 trillion
mark in terms of its market capitalisation, the value of all its shares at
that time. The BBC announced that it was “the first public company
worth $1 trillion”, remarking that its shares had risen by more than
50,000 per cent since it had first been listed in 1980. Likewise, The
Washington Post, Bloomberg, Fortune, and many others remarked its
status as the most highly valued company, at that time the most ex-
clusive club in the world with one member, although on 4 September,
Amazon briefly joined before dropping down to a mere $995 billion.1
The more carefully written of these stories tended to mention that this
trillion-dollar record referred to a “publicly-owned” or “US” company,
as Apple would at best be the second trillion-dollar company in history.
As Forbes writer Lucinda Shen pointed out the previous November, the
state-owned oil and gas producer, PetroChina, had briefly topped the
magical mark on the Shanghai stock exchange in 2007. 2 PetroChina
also saw the biggest-ever stock market losses, with some $800 billion –
or approximately the size of Italy’s stock market in 2017 – being wiped
off its shareholder value. Incredible drops in oil prices, combined with
plans to move towards alternative sources of power in China and a
clampdown on excessive swings in Chinese stocks in the aftermath of
the 2007 global financial crisis demonstrated the fragile nature of such
high-risk speculation.
It is no accident that a book on tech giants, artificial intelligence and
journalism begins not with innovation and ideas but with the effect of
share prices. In the business world, the value of the major technology
companies is extremely significant news and, in many quarters, report-
ing about technology is synonymous with financial journalism. In March
2017, Fortune ran a piece that is typical of the speculative opinion pieces
familiar to anyone interested in such stories, betting on whether it would
be Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon, Apple, Facebook,
Microsoft, or Tesla that would hit the trillion-dollar mark first. 3 With
the exception of Tesla (whose name is only featured here because its char-
ismatic but sometimes erratic founder, Elon Musk, suggested it), these
2 Introduction
five companies will be returned to again and again throughout this title.
Their value is a reflection of their power in a number of areas – including
the ways in which we consume and perceive the media in the twenty-first
century. For anyone sceptical about how important these companies are
to contemporary society, it is worth reflecting on an article written by
Ryan Derousseau at the time that Apple hit the magic target, and which
noted five historical companies that would have been worth more. Leav-
ing aside PetroChina, companies such as the Dutch East India Co., the
British South Sea Co., and Standard Oil all had immense impacts upon
the societies of their day – often enriching the countries in which they
were based or bankrupting them as with the South Sea bubble.4 Apple
has shown nothing remotely akin to the volatility the South Sea Co., nor
even that of PetroChina and its trillion-dollar mark is unlikely to be its
highest point. Since the second quarter of 2013 (when it briefly traded
the top spot with Exxon Mobil), Apple has been the most highly valued
company in the world according to its market capitalisation, rising from
a value of nearly $416 billion at the beginning of 2013 to $921 billion by
the end of 2017 according to the Fortune 500. Indeed, the value of the
top ten companies worldwide at the end of 2017 was equally revealing
as shown in Table I.1.
Although Walmart dominated the Fortune 500 in terms of revenue
(alongside petrochemical companies, energy conglomerates, and even
car manufacturers), it was tech firms that held the top spots in terms of
their overall market value. In the first decade of the twenty-first century,
the highest valued companies were energy giants such as Exxon Mobil,
PetroChina, Gazprom, Royal Dutch Shell, and BP. The relative decline of
oil prices in the second decade means that, Exxon aside, such companies
have almost never made the top ten in recent years and that since 2011, a
very noticeable change has occurred: the Fortune 500 in terms of market
capitalisation has largely been dominated by Apple, alongside Microsoft

Table I.1 Top ten valued companies in 2017

Company Market cap (2017,

Fortune 500, billions)

Apple 921
Amazon 765
Alphabet 750
Microsoft 746
Facebook 531
Berkshire Hathaway 492
JPMorgan Chase & Co. 388
Exxon Mobil 349
Johnson & Johnson 332
Bank of America Corp 315

Source: Fortune 500.

 Introduction 3
(the one consistent technology company to appear in this company since
the 1990s), and regularly the top positions are held by Apple, Alphabet,
Microsoft, and Amazon as these organisations jostle for the top spot of
most highly valued company. A comparison of 100 years of the market
made by Visual Capitalist using data provided by Forbes rather than the
Fortune 500 offers a similar comparison to the top companies in 2017
but also allows a much wider contextualisation. Thus in 1917, the John
D. Rockerfeller’s Standard Oil and J. P. Morgan’s US Steel dominated the
US stock exchanges, stalwarts of the industrial era although at this time
Standard had already been broken up through antitrust action. Fifty
years later, in 1967, Standard Oil (soon to be renamed Exxon) remained
important but this was now the emerging domain of hardware and tele-
communications companies such as IBM and AT&T, as well as other
manufacturers such as Eastman Kodak and Polaroid. 5 It is slightly too
early to define the second decade of the twenty-first century as the decade
of digital platforms: the volatility of market values is clear over a period
of years, but it is remarkable just how stable Apple has been at the top of
the pile. In the future, emerging markets such as those around health and
medicine, or indeed a resurgence of energy in alternative forms to gas
and oil, could see a revolution in the capitalisation of companies, but to
all intents and purposes, the 2010s have been the decade of the Big Five.
This brief excursion into the financial status of contemporary tech-
nological companies is one means of emphasising the significance of big
tech. Nor should it be forgotten (Apple and Microsoft aside) just how
recent this transformation has been: until 2015, Amazon, Facebook, and
even the mighty Google never made to the top ten list of companies,
while until 2003, Intel and even IBM remained significant players. The
impact of Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft reaches
into a great variety of areas of everyday life, but for the purposes of
this book, their significance can easily be weighed by comparing their
market value to those for more traditional media companies (Table I.2).

Table I.2 V
 alue of top tech companies versus top media companies

Tech company 2018 Q3 value Media company 2018 Q3 value

(billions) (billions)

Apple 1,091 AT&T b 248

Amazon 976 Walt Disney 173
Microsoft 877 Comcast 161
Alphabet 839 Twenty-First 85
Century Fox
Facebooka 473 Thomson Reuters 32

Source: Fortune 500.

a
Number six on the overall list behind Berkshire Hathaway.
b
Owner of Time Warner Inc. since June 2018.
4 Introduction
The message is clear: with the exception of Disney, flush with the
success of the Star Wars franchise among other elements, AT&T and
Comcast (which both have extensive telecommunications components
as part of their business) the larger, more traditional media companies
lag behind the main tech companies by a factor of at least ten. The com-
panies on the right of the aforementioned chart are responsible for pro-
ducing the vast majority of media consumed by audiences around the
world and yet, increasingly, it is the companies on the left that enable
the majority of that audience to consume media in the first place. When
Ben Bagdikian outlined the companies that controlled the media in the
USA in 2004, his five conglomerates were: Time Warner, Walt Disney,
News Corporation, Viacom, and Bertelsmann.6 Just over a decade later,
it is the Big Five who are the subject of this book that, increasingly, con-
trol access to the new ecologies of media distribution in the twenty-first
century.
“Big tech” is a phrase that will recur frequently in this book, and is
often associated with the “Big Five” (Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple,
Facebook, and Microsoft) although it is not entirely synonymous with
them. The phrase itself evolved slowly, beginning with Eric Schmidt’s
reference in 2011 to the “gang of four” – Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and
Google – which at that point were worth half a trillion dollars combined
and which, in his opinion, were shaping consumer technology.7 At this
time, the Big Four were considered the most exciting and dynamic com-
panies in the world and were imbued with a certain glamour: Apple had
reinvented itself as the manufacturer of what would become the world’s
most popular hardware device, the iPhone, Amazon stunned the stock
market with its continued growth and acquisitions, Facebook was on the
verge of launching the most expensive initial public offering (IPO) in his-
tory, and Google had shot into the top five of the best companies to work
for in the world, offering beanbags, pool tables, and polka dot walls.8
Unlike traditional multinationals, these were companies that were cool
and fun, and the omission of Microsoft from Schmidt’s “gang of four”
was deliberate: throughout the late 1990s, Microsoft had come to rep-
resent the aggressive, power-hungry aspects of big business that com-
panies such as Google defined themselves against, taking up the motto
“Don’t be evil” as a reminder of what not to turn into.
Within a decade, however, the Big Four had become the Big Five and
the return of Microsoft to the ranks of big tech demonstrated that there
was less to distinguish these major, multinational corporations that had
existed in the previous decade. It was Theodore Roosevelt who first be-
gan to label “big business” as an enemy of the people in 1906, when he
began to attack corporations and anti-labour decisions in the courts,
and throughout the twentieth century, the addition of “Big X” indi-
cated a general disillusion with an industry, whether Big Phama, Big To-
bacco, or Big Oil. Such descriptions indicated popular perceptions that a
 Introduction 5
particular industry was out of touch with its consumers, more interested
in its shareholders as in Jacky Law’s 2006 book Big Pharma, which por-
trayed the pharmaceutical industry as self-serving against the interests
of its customers – and this was a sector that was excoriated for earning
$200 billion among its ten largest players.9 By 2016, the Big Five had be-
come Big Tech, and, as with those other industries that were distrusted
by voters, taxpayers, and consumers, the epithet was not intended as a
positive one. As Olivia Solon could write at the end of 2017, this was
the period in which “the world turned on Silicon Valley”, blaming it
for poor working practices, extreme tax avoidance, and undermining
democracy.10 Whereas Amazon had been filled with titles such as Are
You Smart Enough to Work at Google? and The Google Resume: How
to Prepare for a Career and Land a Job at Apple, Microsoft, Google, or
Any Top Tech Company, now top selling titles are as likely to include
World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech or Antisocial
Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy.
This book shares much of the critical view of more recent titles regard-
ing tech giants – although the use of big tech is also intended to demon-
strate that my own scepticism is more concerned with exploring how
technology alters our patterns of behaviour, in particular with regard to
how we consume journalism. The shift from media producers (Big Me-
dia, if you like: certainly different media sectors such as music or pub-
lishing have their Big Fives or Sixes who monopolise content creation)
to distributors has incredibly important consequences for the future of
journalism, but this is not simply an intention by those major tech com-
panies to grind all media into the ground. As thoughtful writers such as
Franklin Foer and Scott Galloway frequently indicate, the current mo-
nopolisation of communication by the Big Five often stems from utopian
impulses as much as greed, although the consequences of those impulses
are frequently unintended. One such outcome has been a dramatic loss
of confidence in mainstream media which has demonstrates just how
unstable the public sphere – that loose conglomeration of public opinion
and influence – has become, notably in large-scale upsets for established
opinion as in votes for Brexit or to elect Donald Trump as the president.
As I shall argue in more detail throughout this book, the ultimate causes
of these problems within the public sphere often have their roots within
legacy media itself, not least its own rush towards monopolisation in the
late twentieth century, but the speed and efficiency with which big tech
has harnessed automation (the preferred term throughout this book for
what is commonly called artificial intelligence) have greatly influenced
changes in the public’s behaviour.
The role of technology in the public sphere has been a contentious
one since the 1990s, when the World Wide Web first attracted attention.
Initially, such discussions were largely positive: in 1995, for example,
Sclove sought to explore how technology could be used to liberate social
6 Introduction
activities as well as how it could increasingly restrict public freedoms,
while Kellner argued that the Internet, by encouraging participation,
had “the potential to invigorate democracy”.11 In more recent years, the
view has tended to be much more ambivalent, as much due to the mo-
nopolisation of digital technologies and spaces by big tech. Balnaves and
Willson welcomed the decreasing homogenisation of the Internet-using
community, but that the increasingly “black box” relations that users
had with digital technology meant that they could not understand it and
that this could result in a relative disempowerment for users in terms of
sociopolitical engagement, while Lee Salter began to question whether
the Internet could even be considered as a public sphere at all.12 Such
criticism was relatively gentle at that moment when the Big Five were
only starting to emerge as a techno-oligarchy, and more recently their
effects on the potential use of the Internet as a public sphere in the sense
discussed by Habermas have come increasingly under scrutiny. Thus,
Fenton more recently has described its effects as those of a “fake democ-
racy”, while Pfetsch draws attention to an increasingly disconnected au-
dience.13 Similarly, Nguyen observes that while online resources provide
a source of information undreamed of by previous generations, the prac-
tice of communication online via filter bubbles tends towards further
fragmentation and “the intensification and radicalisation of viewpoints”
as we are more likely to converse with those who think like us and hear
fewer and fewer oppositional points of view.14 Some commentators,
such as the contributors to Managing Democracy in the Digital Age,
explore practical considerations and challenges for encouraging partici-
pation, but are also fully aware of the dangers not simply of censorious,
authoritarian regimes but with a sense of growing disenfranchisement
among voters in liberal democracies.15
Some of the ways in which technology affects our patterns of be-
haviour are considered in Chapter 1, which explores in more detail
notions of media and technological determinism, the idea that new tech-
nologies shape human culture and society. In its widest form, it is clear
that the development of our societies has always been influenced by the
technological innovations we introduce, but a failure of much so-called
“hard” media determinism has been an assumption that technology is
somehow “outside” society, and that its introduction will implement
changes in a reductionist fashion. This is a common assumption among
those engaged in tech companies: for example, Mark Zuckerberg and
other founders of Facebook appear to have blithely assumed that so-
cial media was a tool that would bring people together through simpler
communication, applying a simplistic model of cause and effect that in
recent years has proved woefully inadequate to describe the actual con-
sequences of Facebook across a wide range of incidents. The impact of
technology is dynamic and frequently turbulent: just as the invention of
printing led to a whole series of consequences from the Reformation to
 Introduction 7
the rise of mass participation in democratic elections that its origina-
tors simply could not envisage, recent innovations in digital technologies
cannot be fully mapped out via any straightforward models of cause and
effect. One particular example has become evident to me while writing
this book. At the turn of the century, a wide range of commentators
believed that the widespread adoption of digital devices such as cam-
eras, laptop computers, and mobile phones, along with newly emerging
platforms to effortlessly distribute information, would give rise to a new
generation of “citizen” journalists, breaking down the barriers between
professionals and amateurs that had grown up in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries as the means of production had become ever more
expensive. Dan Gillmor famously described this transition to a grass-
roots journalism as the shift “from journalism as lecture to journalism
as a conversation”16 and I, like many, welcomed the opportunity that
new innovations presented to a variety of people who wished to get in-
volved in reporting their own circumstances and communities. What
none of us realised was another effect of this breakdown of barriers
to publication, that the simplicity of communicating with millions via
Twitter and Facebook would be even more effective in the service of
automated bots and trolls seeking not to report facts but to disseminate
fake news as widely as possible. As such, Chapter 1 posits a much more
complex approach to the issue of a media ecology which must never
forget the law of unintended consequences, particularly as developments
in artificial intelligence (or, more accurately, automation) will certainly
ripple outwards far beyond their original purposes.
Chapter 2 explores a major shift that has taken place within the media
ecosystem within which journalism operates, whereby financial rewards
have moved from the producer to the distributor. How we get the news
has traditionally been a somewhat dry subject, and media producers
have always relied on complex (and usually expensive) systems of distri-
bution. There are plenty of historical examples where such systems have
existed in a symbiotic relationship with media organisations, whether
it is train and transport networks for print or broadcast infrastructure
for television and radio. In the twenty-first century, however, the digi-
tal duopoly of Google and Facebook realised that the dissemination of
news online was ripe for disruption via its model of financing journal-
ism through advertising. Using automation on a massive level, these two
companies were able to drive down the costs of advertising and thus
monopolise digital spend to a level never seen by the older media monop-
olies, in part because legacy corporations were still trying to maximise
the investments they had made in print and broadcast even as more and
more readers were shifting to purely digital platforms. The disruption
caused by big tech is another example of unintended consequences, in
that while frequently seeking to avoid being labelled as media compa-
nies (because of the additional regulations this will bring), sites such as
8 Introduction
YouTube and Facebook are now responsible for more media consump-
tion than any other group.
The following two chapters are related insofar as they explore some
more of the consequences, intended or otherwise, of automation, first in
the role of gatekeeping and disseminating information, and then in the
form of robot or algorithmic journalism produced by software. With re-
gard to automated gatekeeping, Chapter 3 begins first by looking at how
simplicity of distribution online has affected journalism produced by
people, especially insofar as the lowering of the barriers to distribution
which were originally welcomed as a renaissance of citizen journalism
has also resulted in a surge in highly partisan “alt”-journalism or even
outright lies and propaganda as fake news. Because of the vast quanti-
ties of information that are shifted across their servers and networks,
big tech companies such as Facebook rely on software to manage that
flow of data and, as recent events such as the 2016 presidential election
and European Referendum vote demonstrated, that automated process
of gatekeeping has been very open to being gamed. This is not a case of
technology somehow being “outside” (and thus responsive to) social and
human decision-making: what came to light after these highly conten-
tious votes was the level to which large organisations were highly cul-
pable as they sought to monetise their systems. Chapter 4 concentrates
on the role which automation is taking in the production of news. For
practising journalists, this perhaps represents the greatest threat to their
profession personally, and certainly media organisations facing financial
pressures caused by the shift in such things as advertising are looking to
cut costs. However, the evidence as it currently stands draws attention
to the limitations as well as the successes of artificial intelligence: where
it is good – as in writing millions of articles to deadlines that no group
of professionals could ever match – algorithmic journalism is very good.
Yet, such journalism is highly dependent on structured information that
is not always presented in this format in the chaotic and messy environ-
ments in which journalists must frequently work. As in many other areas
of technological innovation, algorithmic journalism will probably drive
out humans in very restricted topics but, for the foreseeable future, it
simply cannot reproduce the vast range of cognitive tasks that we take
for granted.
Finally, in Chapter 5, we return to the impact of technology on jour-
nalism and the public sphere via three extended case studies which ex-
plore the relations between journalists and the citizens they purport to
serve. In the first instance, the recent high-profile example of Infowars,
this is an exploration of the dark, unintended consequences of the new
distribution systems for data, by which social media first allows fake
news to spread without interruption but then, in the space of a few days,
closes down such sites because of the monopolistic power of tech gi-
ants. Against this – and with much longer-lasting consequences – the
chapter continues to examine the changes wrought by Jeff Bezos, a
 Introduction 9
twenty-first-century Citizen Kane, at The Washington Post and how,
under his tenure, a flagship print newspaper became one of the ulti-
mate digital media companies just at that moment when Donald Trump
changed the news cycle completely. The fact that one of the most suc-
cessful news sites in the world is controlled by the world’s richest man
will also have a far-reaching effect on the reporting of the world’s most
powerful democracy. Finally, the chapter ends with a turn away from
the heavily American-centric focus of this book (inevitable when the
biggest technology companies are based in the USA) to examine some
of the ways in which various aspects of the media ecology considered in
this book come into play in smaller scale reporting in Africa. Big tech
may be viewed, rightly in my opinion, with ever-greater suspicion, but
the desire to use technology to communicate with others is fundamental
to the development and future of journalism.

Notes
1 Chris Johnston, “Apple is the First Public Company Worth $1 Trillion”, BBC
News, 2 August 2018, www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45050213; Thomas
Heath, “Apple is the First $1 Trillion Company in History”, The Washington
Post, 2 August 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/apple-is-
the-first-1-trillion-company-in-history/2018/08/02/ea3e7a02-9599-11e8-a679-
b09212fb69c2_story.html; Mark Gurman, Mira Rojanasakul, and Cedric
Sam, “How Apple Overcame Fits and Flops to Grow Into a Trillion-Dollar
Company”, Bloomberg, 2 August 2018, www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-
apple-at-one-trillion-market-cap/; Kevin Kelleher, “As the Stock Market Closes,
Apple Is Officially the First Trillion-Dollar U.S. Company”, 2 August 2018,
http://fortune.com/2018/08/02/apple-trillion-dollar-stock-price/.
2 Lucinda Shen, “Apple Is Worth Over $900 Billion. But It Won’t Be the
World’s First Trillion-Dollar Company”, Fortune, 8 November 2017, http://
fortune.com/2017/11/08/apple-stock-amazon-trillion-aapl-iphone-x/.
3 Lucinda Shen, “Amazon and the Race to Be the First $1 Trillion Com-
pany”, Fortune, 31 March 2017, http://fortune.com/2017/03/31/amazon-
stock-trillion-dollar-company-apple-tesla-google/.
4 Ryan Derousseau, “Apple Isn’t the First to Hit $1 Trillion In Value. Here Are
5 Companies That Did It Earlier”, Money, 2 August 2018, http://time.com/
money/5282501/apple-trillion-biggest-companies-in-history/.
5 Jeff Desjardins, “Most Valuable U.S. Companies Over 100 Years”, Visual
Capitalist, 14 November 2017, www.visualcapitalist.com/most-valuable-
companies-100-years/.
6 Ben Bagdikian, The New Media Monopoly, Boston, MA: Beacon Press,
2004, p. 3.
7 Rafe Needleman, “Eric Schmidt: ‘Gang of four’ Rules Tech”, CNET, 31
May 2011, www.cnet.com/news/eric-schmidt-gang-of-four-rules-tech/.
8 Bryan Glick, “Beanbags 2.0 – The New Google Office”, Computer-
Weekly.com, 26 July 2012, www.computerweekly.com/blog/Downtime/
Beanbags-20-the-new-Google-office.
9 Jacky Law, Big Pharma: How the World’s Biggest Drug Companies Market
Illness, London: Constable, 2006.
10 Olivia Solon, “Tech’s Terrible Year: How the World Turned on Silicon Val-
ley in 2017”, The Guardian, 23 December 2017, www.theguardian.com/
technology/2017/dec/22/tech-year-in-review-2017.
10 Introduction
11 Richard E. Sclove, Democracy and Technology, New York: Guilford Press,
1995; Douglas Kellner, “Intellectuals, the New Public Spheres, and Techno-­
Politics”, in Chris Toulouse and Timothy W. Luke (eds.), The Politics of
Cyberspace: A New Political Science Reader, New York: Routledge, 1998,
p. 174.
12 Mark Balnaves, and Michele A. Willson, A New Theory of Information &
the Internet: Public Sphere Meets Protocol, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2011,
pp. 3–4; Lee Salter, Conflicting Forms of Use: The Potential of and Limits
to the Use of the Internet as a Public Sphere, Riga: VDM Verlag, 2010,
p. 10.
13 Natalie Fenton, “Fake Democracy: The Limits of Public Sphere Theory”,
in Slavko Splichal (ed.), The Liquefaction of Publicness: Communication,
Democracy and the Public Sphere in the Internet Age, New York: Rout-
ledge, 2018, pp. 28–34; Barbara Pfetsch, “Dissonant and Disconnected Pub-
lic Spheres as Challenge for Political Communication Research”, in Slavko
Splichal (ed.), The Liquefaction of Publicness: Communication, Democracy
and the Public Sphere in the Internet Age, New York: Routledge, 2018,
pp. 59–65.
14 Dennis Nguyen, Europe, the Crisis, and the Internet: A Web Sphere Analy-
sis, London: Palgrave, 2017, p. 271.
15 Julia Schwanholz, Todd Graham, and Peter-Tobias Stoll, Managing Democ-
racy in the Digital Age: Internet Regulation, Social Media Use, and Online
Civic Engagement, New York: Springer, 2017.
16 Dan Gillmor, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the
People. North Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2004, p. vi.
1 The New Ecology

In 1983, the American media company Knight Ridder, in conjunction

with AT&T, launched an online news service called Viewtron. Initially
a “videotex” service (similar to Ceefax, launched by the BBC in 1974),
Viewtron initially required a specialised terminal but very quickly
moved to being available on home computers. Launched in Florida first,
Knight Ridder began its news service offering The Miami Herald online
(the company itself was based at that time on the top floor of the Miami
Herald building), requiring subscribers to pay $600 for a terminal and,
according to company director Morton Goldstrom, offering “all the in-
formation I can imagine when I want it, the 21st century genie”1 Knight
Ridder’s original plans were to sign up 5,000 customers to the system:
in addition to purchasing the terminal, subscribers would pay $12 per
month to Viewtron and then $1 per hour to Southern Bell for access to
the system. All the information that Morton Goldstrom could imagine
came at a significant price, but once Viewtron had jettisoned its special-
ist terminals, the service managed to extend to some 15 states before
being closed in 1986: the service was extremely slow and people ceased
to use the system once the novelty wore off. As subscribers departed
the service, Knight Ridder lost approximately $50 million and James
­Batton, then president of the company, observed: “Videotex is not likely
to be a threat to newspapers in the foreseeable future.”2
Viewtron was an experiment a decade ahead of its time, and demon-
strates just how important it is that technology is viewed within a
wider context of financial and social operations. A recurrent theme
among Knight Ridder executives was that subscribers were not in-
corporating videotex news into their daily habits: as well as the con-
necting technology being slow and frustrating, users still relied on
television, radio, and print for their daily consumption of the news.
The entire ecosystem that would support an online publication did
not exist. By the late 1980s, Internet service providers such as Com-
puserve, America Online (later AOL), and Prodigy were beginning to
offer news services as part of their package, but it was not until the
wider adoption of Tim Berners Lee’s world wide web in the mid-1990s
12 The New Ecology
that news services really began to take off. The first pioneers included
CNN, The Chicago Tribune, and Time Inc’s Pathfinder website. Be-
fore this, there existed a specialist series of “fax papers”, which had
a limited period to gain a foothold in the market before the web re-
moved their reason for existence. Aimed at specialist (usually busi-
ness) audiences, fax papers took advantage of the proliferation of fax
machines in the late 1980s to send news highlights to subscribers for
prices ranging from $400 per year (the cost of Tribfax, a product
of the Chicago Tribune) to $2,500 for the one-page fax paper sent
out daily by the Hartford Courant. 3 This hybrid of print and digital
cultures was doomed to failure as soon as general-purpose comput-
ers with Internet connections replaced the fax machines, as well as
American news sites web pages for international services such as the
Electronic Telegraph (1994) and BBC (1997) in the UK began to ap-
pear, although the Anglo-American dominance of the web meant that
sites in other countries only emerged more slowly: indeed, France’s
own national videotex service – Minitel – was incredibly successful
after its introduction in 1982, with 26 per cent of French homes hav-
ing access to a Minitel terminal in 1993 (bringing in revenues of $1.3
billion) compared to 13 per cent with a PC and 11 per cent with cable
access.4
By the early 2000s, online news services were becoming ubiquitous
across many parts of the globe, although the grip of news websites was
felt most keenly in the English-speaking world. In 1999, John Pavlik
was predicting that news junkies had “never had it so good” with news
available at the touch of a button, 5 but as the new millennium began
plenty of legacy media companies, such as ABC, were still very tenta-
tive when it came to rolling out truly multimedia programming6: at
that stage, connections were still not fast enough and there were still
too few users online to justify a wholesale shift online. By 2007, when
Apple unveiled the first iPhone, faster Internet and mobile connections
and eventually cheaper devices allowed the number of connected users
to explode: while online news at the end of the twentieth century had
been a novelty, by the beginning of the second decade it had become
the norm, with consequences that completely transformed the relation-
ships between news sites and readers. In its annual Digital News Report
for 2018, for example, Reuters reported that social media – the prime
driver of news consumption growth for much of the previous decade –
had finally begun to decline in the face of mistrust surrounding fake
news; yet in many countries, it remained the primary source of infor-
mation for many users.7 Television and radio remain a significant part
of the mix for our consumption of news, but the rapid decline of print
in the past ten to fifteen years means that for many of us, our mobile
devices are the primary means by which we discover what is taking
place around us.
 The New Ecology 13
Digital Ecosystems, Media Ecologies, and
Technological Determinism
“Digital ecosystem” has become something of a buzzword in recent
years. The business research organisation, Gartner, for example, offers
its services to support organisations that wish to use “digital busi-
ness ecosystems & the platform economy” to gain the “leverage or-
ganizations need to monetize, manage, and measure information as
an asset for competitive advantage”.8 Beyond such trite phrases, in
the field of information management the notion of digital ecosystems
provides important tools for setting up the architecture required to
sustain technological innovations in cloud computing and the Internet
of things, as discussed by Skilton and Brady among others.9 Between
2007 and 2013, the concept of a digital business ecosystem formed
an important part of the work of the IEEE Digital EcoSystems and
Technologies Conference (IEEE DEST), covering a wide array of is-
sues including sustainable infrastructure for businesses, healthcare,
and the digital humanities.10 Nigel Shadbolt, alongside other research-
ers, has argued that artificial intelligence is contributing to a rise of
social machines, in which the persistent environment of mobile and
wearable technology, as well as sensors, is increasingly orchestrating
human interactions and leading to the emergence of what he calls “so-
cial computational power”.11 Shadbolt offers Wikipedia as an example
of such social computational power at work, whereby the activity of
thousands of volunteers across the globe is co-ordinated not by human
agents in traditional terms (editors with a sole prerogative over gate-
keeping), but rather the interaction of those people via the software
platform itself. Likewise, within the field of digital humanities, the-
orists such as Sheila Anderson and Tobias Blanke have demonstrated
some of the ways in which big data and high-performance computing
can transform scholarship in the field by transferring some of the char-
acteristics of e-Science to arts and humanities research. Drawing on
the ideas of Thomas Hughes regarding complex systems – in which
interacting, interconnected large technology systems can grow from
relatively simple components – such an approach may be even more
important as an increasing amount of content is commodified behind
paywalls: more than ever, scholars in the field must explore and open
up the connections between such large technology systems as business
seeks to compartmentalise them.12
This tension between large technology systems that enable the kind
of social computational power discussed by Shadbolt and proprietary,
more restrictive ones are very much at play in the confrontations be-
tween the Big Five. Although more recently some of these players have
begun to recognise the opportunities present in embracing open digi-
tal ecosystems – typically because of a failure to monopolise important
14 The New Ecology
sectors, as in the case of Microsoft which sought to make its Office
software available on as many platforms as possible when its Windows
Mobile operating system collapsed – the more prevalent tendency of the
past ten years has been to lock users into proprietary systems. The most
successful company in this regard is Apple which, in terms of mobile
considered from the vantage of profitability, is far ahead of the competi-
tion. Yet even the much-vaunted openness of Google’s Android platform
still seeks to establish other Google services such as search and maps as
primary for users, while Amazon is ruthless in its attempts to hook all
users onto itself as the main gateway into a vast range of commercial and
entertainment opportunities.
When discussing digital ecosystems, the technology and business
press tends not to consider the phrase in terms of complex, large-scale
technology systems which, theoretically at least, are open-ended and
capable of evolving far beyond the plans of those who establish them.
Instead, there is a tendency on the part of journalists to accept the defi-
nitions offered by the big tech companies themselves and treat platforms
as a series of increasingly closed, proprietary systems. Thus, for exam-
ple, Michelle Evans at Forbes can argue that integration between things
such as iOS, the iPhone X, Apple Watch, and Apple Pay is transforming
digital commerce (all the time keeping consumers within the Apple eco-
system), while John Thornhill observes that iOS can provide an import-
ant hub between a huge variety of “digital capitalism” services such as
Uber and AirBnB;13 and yet, as Antonia Villas-Boas observes in the
kind of article that has almost become a trope in recent years, “leaving
the Apple ecosystem can be a tough thing to do”14 – intentionally so. If
Web 2.0 was intended, among other things, to break down the walled
garden between producers and consumers, the Big Five have devoted a
great deal of time and effort wherever possible to rebuilding those walls,
tempting users to return to a carefully regulated Eden where everything
“just works”.
As such, this chapter tends to distinguish between digital ecosystems
and media ecologies. This is not that the digital ecosystem is not a useful
concept – it is – but that its increasingly prevailing use with regard to big
tech tends to allow Google, Apple, Amazon, and others to define it in the
more restrictive sense rather than as a true ecosystem; by the latter, this
book means a system that considers the operations of such companies
within a much wider context of interactions between a plurality of struc-
tures, economics, regulatory frameworks, organisations, and people. In
many ways, the tension is between an assumption that, with enough
data, any system can be perfectly determined versus the notion that any
ecological system is always inherently complex. The development of
complexity theory from the 1990s onwards deals with nonlinear systems
capable of exhibiting emergent, self-organised and adaptive behaviour.15
Such theory is especially suited to the concepts of digital ecosystems
 The New Ecology 15
outlined by Shadbolt and others, particularly with great advances in
computing power. Yet, the desire of big tech to move towards monopo-
lisation of information flows seeks to limit emergent behaviours among
consumers so as better to guide them towards a particular ­platform –
aided, as Franklin Foer observes, by governmental tendencies to view
antitrust legislation through the eyes of Thurman Arnold’s distrust of
inefficiency rather than Louis Brandeis’s attempts to combat monopolies
as antithetical to public values.16 Because of a tendency to use the phrase
“digital ecosystem” in a restrictive sense, media ecology is better suited
for my purposes to describing large technology systems that are open to
emergent and complex behaviour.
Media ecology as a concept is older than complexity theory: its roots
lie, as with so much media theory, in the work of Marshall McLuhan and
Walter Benjamin, but in the 1970s, Christine Nystrom and Neil Post-
man used the term to draw together observations by Kenneth Boulding,
Thomas Kuhn, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that, during the twentieth
century, a fundamental shift had taken place in mankind’s world view.
As such, media ecology began to be formulated at in the early seventies
as a metadiscipline engaged in the study of media and complex communi-
cation systems as environments.17 Lance Strate has recently outlined how
the work of figures such as McLuhan and Postman, as well as other schol-
ars such as Walter Ong, has created a rich context for artists, creatives,
managers, executives, and even politicians in which the media operates
within a field rather than a discipline and a well-defined subject, being
fundamentally interdisciplinary.18 An essential tenet of media ecology,
as Dennis Cali, drawing on Postman, observes is that “the introduction
of any new agent into an environment changes that environment”.19 Al-
though not discussed by Cali, this approach is particularly fruitful when
viewed from the perspective of actor-network theory (ANT) as outlined
by theorists such as Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, and John Law, espe-
cially insofar as it demonstrates the capacity of nonhuman actors to ef-
fect change in a network.20 While ANT theorists have been criticised for
attributing intentionality to nonhuman actors (for example, by Langdon
Winner21), the demonstrable effects on a whole range of complex sys-
tems by nonhuman agents – whether the impact of Milankovitch cycles
on climate change or a botnet distributed denial of service (DDoS) – are
particularly important to considering the role of technological agents
within contemporary media ecologies. Indeed, the recognition that non-
human agents can function as mediators allows us to bracket off one of
the thorny philosophical issues surrounding artificial intelligence, that is
whether it needs to be conscious (and thus intentional) to be considered
truly intelligent. Termites may lack those attributes we would recognise
as demonstrating consciousness, but that has not stopped one group of
researchers classifying them as “soil engineers”, capable of effecting ma-
jor changes in tropical and subtropical ecosystems. 22
16 The New Ecology
As the approach to media ecologies espoused here draws upon ANT,
an important addition is the notion of object-oriented ontology, or flat
ontology (the latter being the preferred term here). Drawing upon a range
of philosophers working in the first decades of the twenty-first century,
including Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, Ian Bogost, and Timothy Mor-
ton, as well as Manuel DeLanda (who coined the term “flat ontology”),
this approach rejects the privileging of human subjects over nonhuman
objects, as well as the notion of “undermining” or “overmining” ob-
jects. The latter is usually encountered when thinkers argue that objects
are manifestations of some deeper, underlying substance or force: this
is not necessarily metaphysical in the usual sense, although historically
this is where it has been most commonly encountered, as in Plato’s no-
tion that physical objects were manifestations of the ideal world, but can
also apply to modern physical notions that the perceptual objects of the
world – stars, planets, dogs, coffee cups – are better understood via the
underlying relations between atoms and forces. This is what is referred
to as undermining, whereas overmining deals with nineteenth-century
idealism or twentieth-century theories of social constructivism, which
holds either that there is nothing beyond what is perceived by the mind
or that objects cannot be perceived outside language or the power struc-
tures of discourse. 23 The roots of flat ontological thinking lie in the
phenomenology of Heidegger and Husserl, and, alongside ANT, the ap-
proach is especially important in establishing the reality of nonhuman
objects that have agency within a system. A typical criticism of such flat
ontologies is that they display a tendency towards nihilism, degrading
meaning by reducing human values to “a fluke in an uncaring and fun-
damentally entropic universe”. 24 Such a criticism does not necessarily
invalidate the notion of flat ontologies: instead, the assumption that is
made in this book is that human values are not essentialist and self-­
evident, but must always be critiqued and worked through in a system.
While media ecological theories, as espoused here, draw together
media theorists and sociological/phenomenological philosophies, they
will not completely neglect approaches to ecology more generally which
provide the underlying model for the metaphor. As Pablo Marquet et al
argue, there is something of a mistrust of theory in ecological thinking
because theories such as those dealing with island bio-geographies or
optimal foraging tend to focus on one or two hypotheses and models
and thus fail in the overarching aim of theoretical work, which is to
extrapolate from empirical data to advances via deductions from those
data. 25 The authors argue that there are some efficient theories that are
genuinely useful for environmental extrapolation, such as the optimal
foraging theory and the MTE (whereby interplay among processes is
affected by individual metabolic rates) – as well as a great many inef-
ficient ones. They also note that deductive models based on inductive
approaches will become more important, not less, in understanding
 The New Ecology 17
biodiversity in an age of big data, and that correlations are not sufficient
in themselves. Correlation alone was the approach suggested by Chris
Anderson, based on the assumption that big data are rendering s­ cientific
method obsolete: in such an approach – what Anderson refers to as the
“Petabyte age” – the ability to search, read, and analyse data does not
require a visualisation of the data “as a whole” (which is, in any case,
impossible). Given a large enough corpus, we can find correlations with-
out “knowing” what the underlying model is – something that, prior
to the massive power of contemporary computing, would have been
considered just noise. 26 Marquet et al acknowledge the inefficiencies
of many theoretical approaches to ecology, but still hold that efficient
models are important for helping us make predictions dealing with our
current global environmental crises. The metabolic theory of ecology
(MTE) and the neutral theory of biodiversity (NTB), which deals with
the ­stochastic – or random probability – distribution of data, have
demonstrated themselves capable of making accurate predictions. Large
populations allow themselves to be studied deterministically, ignoring
chance factors such as accidental births or deaths – as with the famous
predator–prey population cycles outlined in the Lotka–Volterra model
of the 1920s, which showed fluctuations in populations according to the
density of prey and predators, respectively. 27 Such deterministic models
are much more difficult with small populations, and are more likely to
be affected by socially constructed patterns as Shaffer demonstrated in
1978 when examining the effects of the United States National Forest
Management Act of 1976, which mandated the maintenance of viable
populations of native and desirable non-native species and his own stud-
ies of the grizzly bear population in Yellowstone: for small populations,
a chance fluctuation can result in extinction and so stochastic models
began to emerge to predict the probabilities of such extinctions within
a given time frame. 28 What should be becoming clear from these obser-
vations is that an appropriate theory of media ecology that can help to
explain factors affecting journalism is much more intertwined than the
desiccated “digital ecosystem” hype that is bandied around iOS, Ama-
zon’s market place, or Android (important as all these elements are to a
deeper understanding of media ecologies).
Certain elements of the approach to media ecology considered here
mitigate against common notions of media or technological determin-
ism. The strongest forms of technological determinism, for example the
assumptions by Thorstein Veblen that capitalism represents a struggle
between technology and “ceremonial” culture (the so-called Veblenian
dichotomy whereby institutions adjust technologies to make them more
instrumental – and thus wasteful 29) or Jacques Ellul’s notion that tech-
nologies operate along a form of natural selection, 30 tend to be viewed
as simplistic among media theorists today. Among those more heavily in-
vested in the digital economy of the twenty-first century, unsurprisingly,
18 The New Ecology
the opposite is true. For them, the notion that technology is the key
driver of transformations of human society and culture are self-­evident
truths, whereby as technologies stabilise so they determine users’ be-
haviours. To give merely one example, though an important one, in
an ambitious post in February 2017, Mark Zuckerberg argued that by
building a global network, by providing the infrastructure that allowed
people to communicate more immediately, Facebook is “bringing us
closer together and building a global community”. 31 Tools for faster –
effectively ­instantaneous – communication will encourage us to behave
as though we are part of a worldwide community. This approach, in
the form of hard determinism, tends towards what Claude Fischer calls
a “billiard ball” impact analysis of such relations: as a technology is
introduced and adopted, so user behaviour ricochets away in a clearly
defined response. 32 Fischer is right to draw attention to critics of such
hard determinism, who point out that the assumption that technology
is somehow “outside” society and thus able to have a clean and obvious
impact upon that society is a flawed one. Nor is this something nec-
essarily new. Merrit Roe Smith argues that the belief in technological
determinism dates back to the industrial revolution at least, an assump-
tion whose European roots grew more deeply in America so that by the
early twentieth century, advertisers and industrialists “quickly mastered
the idea of the technological fix”33 The folly of Zuckerberg’s particular
technological fix in the light of the presidential election of 2016 will be
the subject of a later chapter, but it is also worth commenting on that
he suffers from this misconception of technology as separate to society,
to history, as something outside which operates on culture and human
behaviour, the billiard ball which can ricochet us into the right pocket if
only we can control the levers of that technology. As Nicholas Carr cor-
rectly observes, Zuckerberg can only entertain the notion of a planetary
community because he fundamentally misunderstands what community
means, that communities nearly always comprise groups of individu-
als who have found a way to get along despite sometimes fundamental
differences of opinion and belief, or which, as in the case of religious
communities, may be oppositional to the communities in which they
find themselves.34 In order for his technological fix around community
to have the remotest chance of working, Zuckerberg must reduce it – as
indeed many theorists of online communities have since the 1990s – to
being synonymous with communication. If community equals commu-
nication, then enhancing communication will ricochet into a superior
community and Zuckerberg’s ideal is perhaps best referred to as the field
of dreams model: build it and he will come. 35
Such comments are not intended necessarily to fixate upon Zucker-
berg alone: it is a common mindset among the masters of the new digital
universe, and Martin Bauer observes that the digital economy relies on
a “hall of heroes” whereby the “fables” of billionaire philanthropists
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 THE BOGLE OF ANNESLIE;

OR, THE THREE-CORNERED HAT.

A TALE.
“An’ ye winna believe i’ the bogle?” said a pretty young lassie to her
sweetheart, as they sat in the door of her father’s cottage one fine autumn
evening. “Do you hear that, mither? Andrew ’ll no believe i’ the bogle.”
“Gude be wi’ us, Effie!” exclaimed Andrew, a slender and delicate youth
of about two-and-twenty, “a bonny time I wad hae o’t, gin I were to heed
every auld wife’s clatter.”
The words “auld wife” had a manifest effect on Effie, and she bit her lips
in silence. Her mother immediately opened a battery upon the young man’s
prejudices, narrating how that on Anneslie Heath, at ten o’clock at night, a
certain apparition was wont to appear, in the form of a maiden above the
usual size, with a wide three-cornered hat. Sundry other particulars were
mentioned, but Andrew was still incredulous. “He’ll rue that, dearly will he
rue’t!” said Effie, as he departed.
Many days, however, passed away, and Effie was evidently much
disappointed to find that the scepticism of her lover gathered strength. Nay,
he had the audacity to insult, by gibes and jests, the true believers, and to
call upon them for the reasons of their faith. Effie was in a terrible passion.
At last, however, her prophecy was fulfilled. Andrew was passing over
the moor, while the clock struck ten; for it was his usual practice to walk at
that hour, in order to mock the fears of his future bride. He was just winding
round the thicket which opened to him a view of the cottage where Effie
dwelt, when he heard a light step behind him, and, in an instant, his feet
were tripped up, and he was laid prostrate on the turf. Upon looking up he
beheld a tall muscular man standing over him, who, in no courteous
manner, desired to see the contents of his pocket. “De’il be on ye!”
exclaimed the young forester, “I hae but ae coin i’ the warld.” “That coin
maun I hae,” said his assailant. “Faith! I’se show ye play for’t then,” said
Andrew, and sprang upon his feet.
Andrew was esteemed the best cudgel-player for twenty miles round, so
that in brief space he cooled the ardour of his antagonist, and dealt such
visitations upon his skull as might have made a much firmer head ache for a
fortnight. The man stepped back, and, pausing in his assault, raised his hand
to his forehead, and buried it among his dark locks. It returned covered with
blood. “Thou hast cracked my crown,” he said, “but yet ye sha’ na gang
scatheless;” and, flinging down his cudgel, he flew on his young foe, and,
grasping his body before he was aware of the attack, whirled him to the
earth with an appalling impetus. “The Lord hae mercy on me!” said
Andrew, “I’m a dead man.”
He was not far from it, for his rude foe was preparing to put the finishing
stroke to his victory. Suddenly something stirred in the bushes, and the
conqueror, turning away from his victim, cried out, “The bogle! the bogle!”
and fled precipitately. Andrew ventured to look up. He saw the figure which
had been described to him approaching; it came nearer and nearer; its face
was very pale, and its step was not heard on the grass. At last it stood by his
side, and looked down upon him. Andrew buried his face in his cloak:
presently the apparition spoke—indistinctly indeed, for its teeth seemed to
chatter with cold:
“This is a cauld an’ an eerie night to be sae late on Anneslie Muir!” and
immediately it glided away. Andrew lay a few minutes in a trance; and then,
arising from his cold bed, ran hastily towards the cottage of his mistress.
His hair stood on end, and the vapours of the night sunk chill upon his brow
as he lifted up the latch and flung himself upon an oaken seat.
“Preserve us!” cried the old woman. “Why, ye are mair than aneugh to
frighten a body out o’ her wits! To come in wi’ sic a flaunt and a fling, bare-
sconced, and the red bluid spatter’d a’ o’er your new leather jerkin! Shame
on you, Andrew! in what mishanter hast thou broken that fule’s head o’
thine?”
“Peace, mither!” said the young man, taking breath, “I hae seen the
bogle!”
The old lady had a long line of reproaches, drawn up in order of march,
between her lips; but the mention of the bogle was the signal for disbanding
them. A thousand questions poured in, in rapid succession. “How old was
she? How was she dressed? Who was she like? What did she say?”
“She was a tall thin woman, about seven feet high!”
“Oh Andrew!” cried Effie.
“As ugly as sin!”
“Other people tell a different story,” said Effie.
“True, on my Bible oath! And then her beard——”
“A beard, Andrew!” shrieked Effie: “a woman with a beard! For shame,
Andrew!”
“Nay, I’ll swear it upon my soul’s salvation! She had seen saxty winters
and mair, afore e’er she died to trouble us!”
“I’ll wager my best new goun,” said the maiden, “that saxteen would be
nearer the mark.”
“But wha was she like, Andrew?” said the old woman. “Was she like
auld Janet that was drowned in the burn forenaint? or that auld witch that
your maister hanged for stealing his pet lamb? or was she like——”
“Are you sure she was na like me, Andrew?” said Effie, looking archly
in his face.
“You—pshaw! Faith, guid mither, she was like to naebody that I ken,
unless it be auld Elspeth, the cobbler’s wife, that was blamed for a’ the
mischief or misfortunes o’ the kintra roun’, and was drowned at last for
having ‘sense aboon the lave.’”
“And how was she dressed, Andrew?”
“In that horrible three-cornered hat, which may I be blinded if ever I
seek to look upon again!—an’ in a lang blue apron——”
“Green, Andrew!” cried Effie, twirling her own green apron round her
thumb.
“How you like to tease ane!” said the lover. Poor Andrew did not at all
enter into his mistress’s pleasantry, for he laboured under a great depression
of spirits, and never lifted his eyes from the ground.
“But ye hae na tauld us what she said, lad!” said the old woman,
assuming an air of deeper mystery as each question was put and answered
in its turn.
 “Lord! what signifies it whether she said this or that! Haud your tongue,
and get me some comfort; for, to speak truth, I’m vera cauld.”
“Weel mayest thou be sae,” said Effie, “for indeed,” she continued, in a
feigned voice, “it was a cauld an’ an eerie night to be sae late on Anneslie
Muir.”
Andrew started, and a doubt seemed to pass over his mind. He looked up
at the damsel, and perceived, for the first time, that her large blue eyes were
laughing at him from under the shade of a huge three-cornered hat. The
next moment he hung over her in an ecstasy of gratitude, and smothered
with his kisses the ridicule which she forced upon him as the penalty of his
preservation.
“Seven feet high, Andrew?”
“My dear Effie!”
“As ugly as sin?”
“My darling lassie!”
“And a beard?”
“Na! na! now you carry the jest o’er far!”
“And saxty winters?”
“Saxteen springs, Effie! Dear, delightfu’, smiling springs!”
“And Elspeth, the cobbler’s wife! Oh, Andrew, Andrew! I never can
forgie you for the cobbler’s wife! And what say you now, Andrew—is there
nae bogle on the muir?”
“My dear Effie, for your sake I’ll believe in a’ the bogles in
Christendie!”
“That is,” said Effie, at the conclusion of a long and vehement fit of
risibility, “that is, in a’ that wear ‘three-cornered hats.’”
 ON THE PROPOSED ESTABLISHMENT OF A
PUBLIC LIBRARY AT ETON.
We are very glad to be able to announce that, after the Easter holidays, a
public library for the use of the school will be established by subscription,
at Mr. Williams’s. We are very glad of it, not for our own sake, for before it
shall rise to any degree of importance we shall be inhabitants of this spot no
longer; our very names will be forgotten among its more recent inmates.
But we hail with joy this institution, for the sake of the school we love and
reverence, to which we hope it will prove, at some future period, a valuable
addition.
The plan admits of one hundred subscribers—viz., the one hundred
senior members of the school. If any of these decline to become members,
the option will descend to the next in gradation. The subscription for the
first year will be 10s. 6d. after the Easter, Election, and Christmas holidays;
in future 10s. 6d. will be paid after the two latter vacations only. The library
will consist of the classics, history, &c.; and subscribers will be allowed,
under certain regulations, to take books from the room. Of course a thing of
this kind has not been set on foot without the concurrence of the higher
powers; and the head-master has assisted the promoters of it by his
approbation, as well as by liberality of another description. We trust that
Eton will not long continue to experience the want of an advantage which
many other public schools enjoy.
We had intended to send the foregoing loose remarks to press, in order to
request as many of our schoolfellows in the upper division as are willing to
become subscribers to leave their names with Mr. Williams, at whose house
the library will be established. But as we were preparing to send off the
manuscript, an old gentleman, for whom we have a great respect, called in,
and looked over our shoulder. He then took a chair, and observed to us:
“This will never do!” He took off his spectacles, wiped them, put them on
again, and repeated: “This will never do!
“I, sir, was an Etonian in the year 17—, and, being a bit of a speculator
in those days, had a mind to do what you are now dreaming of doing. I
addressed myself forthwith to various friends, all of them distinguished for
rank, or talent, or influence, among their companions. I began with Sir
Roger Gandy, expatiated on the sad want of books which many
experienced, and asked whether he did not think a public library would be a
very fine thing? ‘A circulating one,’ he said; ‘oh yes, very!’—and he
yawned. There was taste!
“The next to whom I made application was Tom Luny, the fat son of a
fat merchant on Ludgate Hill. Poor Tom! He died last week, by-the-by, of a
surfeit. Well, sir, I harangued him for some time upon the advantages of my
scheme, to which he gave his cordial assent. Finally I observed that, of
course, it would not be very expensive. ‘Expensive!’ he said; ‘oh yes,
very!’—and he walked off. There was liberality!
“Next I besieged Will Wingham. I made my approaches as before, with
great caution, and at last summoned the garrison to surrender. ‘Books!’ he
exclaimed, ‘I haven’t one but a Greek Grammar, with all syntax out.’ ‘And
do you think,’ I resumed, ‘that an Etonian can do well without them?’ ‘Do
well!’ he said; ‘oh yes, very!’—and he laughed. There was a wish for
improvement!
“Now, my good Peregrine,” continued the old gentleman, putting his feet
up upon the hobs of my fire, and looking very argumentative, “what do you
say to all this?”
The old gentleman is
 Laudator temporis acti
Se puero.

He left the room piqued, when we hurt his prejudices by replying,

“Nothing, sir, but that the Etonians of 1821 are not, we will hope, the
Etonians of 17—.”
 THE MISTAKE; OR, SIXES AND SEVENS.

“Be particular to observe that the name on the door is——.”

Morning Chronicle, April 1821.

It is a point which has often been advanced and contested by the learned,
that the world grows worse as it grows older; arguments have been
advanced, and treatises written, in support of Horace’s opinion—
Ætas parentum pejor avis tulit
Nos nequiores, mox daturos
Progeniem vitiosiorem.

The supporters of this idea rest their sentence upon various grounds: they
mention the frequency of crim. con. cases, the increase of the poor-rate, the
licentiousness of the press, the celebrity of rouge et noir.
There is, however, one circumstance corroborative of their judgment, to
which we think the public opinion has not yet been sufficiently called. We
mean the indisputable fact that persons of all descriptions are growing
ashamed of their own names. We remember that when we were dragged in
our childhood to walk with our nurse, we were accustomed to beguile our
sense of weariness and disgust by studying the names, which, in their neat
brass plates, decorated the doors by which we passed. Now the case is
altered. We have observed elsewhere that the tradesmen have removed their
signs; it is equally true that the gentlemen have removed their names. The
simple numerical distinction, which is now alone emblazoned upon the
doors of our dwellings, but ill replaces that more gratifying custom, which,
in a literal sense, held up great names for our emulation, and made the
streets of the metropolis a muster-roll of examples for our conduct.
But a very serious inconvenience is also occasioned by this departure
from ancient observances. How is the visitor from the country to discover
the patron of his fortunes, the friend of his bosom, or the mistress of his
heart, if, in lieu of the above-mentioned edifying brass plates, his eye
glances upon the unsatisfactory information contained in 1, 2, or 3? In some
cases even this assistance is denied to him, and he wanders upon his dark
and comfortless voyage, like an ancient mariner deprived of the assistance
of the stars.
Our poor friend, Mr. Nichol Loaming, has treated us with a long and
eloquent dissertation upon this symptom of degeneracy; and certainly, if the
advice experto crede be of any weight, Mr. Nichol’s testimony ought to
induce all persons to hang out upon the exterior of their residences some
more convincing enunciation of their name and calling than it is at present
the fashion to produce.
Nichol came up to town with letters of introduction to several friends of
his family, whom it was his first duty and wish to discover. But his first
adventure so dispirited him, that, after having spent two mornings at an
hotel, he set out upon his homeward voyage, and left the metropolis an
unexplored region.
He purposed to make his first visit to Sir William Knowell, and, having
with some difficulty discovered the street to which he had been directed, he
proceeded to investigate the doors, in order to find out the object of his
search. The doors presented nothing but a blank! He made inquiries, was
directed to a house, heard that Sir William was at home, was shown into an
empty room, and waited for some time with patience.
The furniture of the house rather surprised him. It was handsomer than
he had expected to find it; and on the table were the Morning Chronicle and
the Edinburgh Review, although Sir William was a violent Tory. At length
the door opened, and a gentleman made his appearance. Nichol asked, in a
studied speech, whether he had the honour to address Sir William Knowell?
The gentleman replied that he believed there had been a little mistake, but
that he was an intimate friend of Sir W. Knowell’s, and expected him in the
course of a few minutes. Nichol resumed his seat, although he did not quite
perceive what mistake had taken place. He was unfortunately urged by his
evil genius to attempt conversation.
He observed that Sir W. Knowell had a delightful house, and inquired
whether the neighbourhood was pleasant. “His next neighbour,” said the
stranger, with a most incomprehensible smile, “is Sir William Morley.”
Nichol shook his head; was surprised to hear Sir William kept such
company—had heard strange stories of Sir W. Morley—hoped there was no
foundation—indeed had received no good report of the family! “The
mother rather weak in the head—to say the truth under confinement; the
sister a professed coquette—went off to Gretna last week with a Scotch
officer; Sir William himself a gambler by habit, a drunkard by inclination—
at present in the King’s Bench, without the possibility of an adjustment
——”
Here he was stopped by the entrance of an elderly lady leaning on the
arm of an interesting girl of sixteen or seventeen. Upon looking up, Nichol
perceived the gentleman he had been addressing rather embarrassed; and
“hoped that he had not said anything which could give offence.” “Not in the
least,” replied the stranger; “I am more amused by an account of the foibles
of Sir W. Morley than any one else can be; and of this I will immediately
convince you. Sir William Knowell resides at No. Six—you have stepped
by mistake into No. Seven. Before you leave it, allow me to introduce you
to Lady Morley—who is rather weak in the head, and, to say the truth,
under confinement; to Miss Ellen Morley, a professed coquette, who went
off to Gretna last week with a half-pay officer; finally”—(with a very low
bow)—“to Sir William Morley himself, a gambler by habit, and a drunkard
by inclination—who is at present in the King’s Bench, without the
possibility of an adjustment!”
 SENSE AND SENSIBILITY.

“Hâc in re scilicet unâ

Multum dissimiles.” Hor.

In a visit which we paid some time ago to our worthy contributor, Morris
Gowan, we became acquainted with two characters; upon whom, as they
afford a perfect counterpart to Messrs. “Rhyme and Reason,” recorded in a
former paper, we have bestowed the names of Sense and Sensibility.
The Misses Lowrie, of whom we are about to give our readers an
account, are both young, both handsome, both amiable: Nature made the
outline of their characters the same, but Education has varied the colouring.
Their mother died almost before they were able to profit by her example or
instruction. Emily, the eldest of the sisters, was brought up under the
immediate care of her father. He was a man of strong and temperate
judgment, obliging to his neighbours, and affectionate to his children; but
certainly rather calculated to educate a son than a daughter. Emily profited
abundantly by his assistance, as far as moral duties or literary
accomplishments were concerned; but for all the lesser agrémens of society,
she had nothing to depend upon but the suggestions of a kind heart and a
quiet temper. Matilda, on the contrary, spent her childhood in England, at
the house of a relation, who, having imbibed her notions of propriety at a
fashionable boarding-school, and made a love-match very early in life, was
but ill-prepared to regulate a warm disposition and check a natural tendency
to romance. The consequence has been such as might have been expected.
Matilda pities the distressed, and Emily relieves them; Matilda has more of
the love of the neighbourhood, although Emily is more entitled to its
gratitude; Matilda is very agreeable, while Emily is very useful; and two or
three old ladies, who talk scandal over their tea, and murder grammar and
reputations together, consider Matilda a practised heroine, and laugh at
Emily as an inveterate Blue.
The incident which first introduced us to them afforded us a tolerable
specimen of their different qualities. While on a long pedestrian excursion
with Morris, we met the two ladies returning from their walk; and, as our
companion had already the privileges of an intimate acquaintance, we
became their companions. An accurate observer of human manners knows
well how decisively character is marked by trifles, and how wide is the
distinction which is frequently made by circumstances apparently the most
insignificant.
In spite, therefore, of the similarity of age and person which existed
between the two sisters, the first glance at their dress and manner, the first
tones of their voice, were sufficient to distinguish the one from the other. It
was whimsical enough to observe how every object which attracted our
attention exhibited their respective peculiarities in a new and entertaining
light. Sense entered into a learned discussion on the nature of a plant, while
Sensibility talked enchantingly of the fading of its flower. From Matilda we
had a rapturous eulogium upon the surrounding scenery; from Emily we
derived much information relative to the state of its cultivation. When we
listened to the one, we seemed to be reading a novel, but a clever and an
interesting novel; when we turned to the other, we found only real life, but
real life in its most pleasant and engaging form.
Suddenly one of those rapid storms, which so frequently disturb for a
time the tranquillity of the finest weather, appeared to be gathering over our
heads. Dark clouds were driven impetuously over the clear sky, and the
refreshing coolness of the atmosphere was changed to a close and
overpowering heat. Matilda looked up in admiration—Emily in alarm;
Sensibility was thinking of a landscape—Sense of a wet pelisse. “This
would make a fine sketch,” said the first. “We had better make haste,” said
the second. The tempest continued to grow gloomier above us: we passed a
ruined hut, which had been long deserted by its inhabitants. “Suppose we
take refuge here for the evening,” said Morris. “It would be very romantic,”
said Sensibility. “It would be very disagreeable,” said Sense. “How it would
astonish my father!” said the heroine. “How it would alarm him!” said her
sister.
As yet we had only observed distant prognostics of the tumult of the
elements which was about to take place. Now, however, the collected fury
of the storm burst at once upon us. A long and bright flash of lightning,
together with a continued roll of thunder, accompanied one of the heaviest
rains that we have ever experienced. “We shall have an adventure!” cried
Matilda. “We shall be very late,” observed Emily. “I wish we were a
hundred miles off,” said the one hyperbolically. “I wish we were at home,”
replied the other soberly. “Alas! we shall never get home to-night,” sighed
Sensibility pathetically. “Possibly,” returned Sense dryly. The fact was that
the eldest of the sisters was quite calm, although she was aware of all the
inconveniences of their situation; and the youngest was terribly frightened,
although she began quoting poetry. There was another and a brighter flash,
another and a louder peal: Sense quickened her steps—Sensibility fainted.
With some difficulty, and not without the aid of a conveyance from a
neighbouring farmer, we brought our companions in safety to their father’s
door. We were of course received with an invitation to remain under shelter
till the weather should clear up; and of course we felt no reluctance to
accept the offer. The house was very neatly furnished, principally by the
care of the two young ladies; but here again the diversity of their manners
showed itself very plainly. The useful was produced by the labour of Emily;
the ornamental was the fruit of the leisure hours of Matilda. The skill of the
former was visible in the sofa-covers and the curtains, but the latter had
decorated the card-racks and painted the roses on the hand-screens. The
neat little bookcases, too, which contained their respective libraries,
suggested a similar remark. In that of the eldest we observed our native
English worthies—Milton, Shakespeare, Dryden, and Pope; on the shelves
of her sister reclined the more effeminate Italians—Tasso, Ariosto,
Metastasio, and Petrarch. It was a delightful thing to see two amiable beings
with tastes so widely different, yet with hearts so closely united.
It is not to be wondered at that we paid a longer visit than we had
originally intended. The conversation turned, at one time, upon the late
revolutions. Matilda was a terrible Radical, and spoke most enthusiastically
of tyranny and patriotism, the righteous cause, and the Holy Alliance:
Emily, however, declined to join in commiseration or invective, and pleaded
ignorance in excuse for her indifference. We fancy she was apprehensive of
blundering against a stranger’s political prejudices. However that may be,
Matilda sighed and talked, and Emily smiled and held her tongue. We
believe the silence was the most judicious; but we are sure the loquacity
was the most interesting.
We took up the newspaper. There was an account of a young man who
had gone out alone to the rescue of a vessel in distress. The design had been
utterly hopeless, and he had lost his life in the attempt. His fate struck our
fair friends in very different lights. “He ought to have had a better fortune,”
murmured Matilda. “Or more prudence,” added Emily. “He must have been
a hero,” said the first. “Or a madman,” rejoined the second.
The storm now died away in the distance, and a tranquil evening
approached. We set out on our return. The old gentleman, with his
daughters, accompanied us a small part of the way. The scene around us
was beautiful; the birds and the cattle seemed to be rejoicing in the return of
the sunshine, and every herb and leaf had derived a brighter tint from the
rain-drops with which it was spangled. As we lingered for a few moments
by the side of a beautiful piece of water, the mellowed sound of a flute was
conveyed to us over its clear surface. The instrument was delightfully
played: at such an hour, on such a spot, and with such companions, we
could have listened to it for ever. “That is George Mervyn,” said Morris to
us. “How very clever he is!” exclaimed Matilda. “How very imprudent,”
replied Emily. “He will catch all the hearts in the place!” said Sensibility,
with a sigh. “He will catch nothing but a cold!” said Sense, with a shiver.
We were reminded that our companions were running the same risk, and we
parted from them reluctantly.
After this introduction we had many opportunities of seeing them; we
became every day more pleased with the acquaintance, and looked forward
with regret to the day on which we were finally to leave so enchanting a
neighbourhood. The preceding night it was discovered that the cottage of
Mr. Lowrie was on fire. The destructive element was soon checked, and the
alarm quieted; but it produced a circumstance which illustrated, in a very
affecting manner, the observations we have been making. As the family
were greatly beloved by all who knew them, every one used the most
affectionate exertions in their behalf. When the father had been brought
safely from the house, several hastened to the relief of the daughters. They
were dressed, and were descending the stairs. The eldest, who had behaved
with great presence of mind, was supporting her sister, who trembled with
agitation. “Take care of this box,” said Emily: it contained her father’s title-
deeds. “For Heaven’s sake preserve this locket!” sobbed Matilda; it was a
miniature of her mother!
We have left, but not forgotten you, beautiful creatures! Often, when we
are sitting in solitude, with a pen behind our ear and a proof before our
eyes, you come, hand in hand, to our imagination! Some, indeed, enjoin us
to prefer esteem to fascination—to write sonnets to Sensibility, and to look
for a wife in Sense. These are the suggestions of age; perhaps of prudence.
We are young, and may be allowed to shake our heads as we listen!
 MR. LOZELL’S
ESSAY ON WEATHERCOCKS.

“Round he spun.”—Byron.

We have a great respect for a Weathercock! There is something about it so

springy, so sprightly, and, at the same time, so complying and so
accommodating, that we are not ashamed to confess that we have long
taken it for our model. It changes sides perpetually, yet always preserves
one unvaried elevation; it is always in motion, yet always remains the same.
We could look at a Weathercock for hours!
To us, however, it has another charm, independent of its intrinsic good
qualities. Its name, not less than its character, recalls to our recollection a
family which is entitled, in the highest degree, to our esteem; of which we
should never cease to think, even if our memory were not daily sharpened
by the little remembrancer, which is at once their namesake, their crest, and
their model.
The family of the Weathercocks is one of considerable antiquity. The
first of the name, whom we find distinguishing himself in any extraordinary
degree, is Sir Anthony Weathercock of Fetherly, Staffordshire; who
changed his party seven times during the unfortunate dissensions between
the houses of York and Lancaster. And this he contrived to do with so much
tact, that he was a considerable gainer by his six first defections. By his
seventh he certainly sustained a trifling loss—he lost his head!
It is a well-known observation, that the descendants of surpassingly great
men are often either blockheads or idiots. The present instance certainly
affords us an exemplification of the truth of the remark. The successor of
this genuine Weathercock was a poor weak fellow, who had no more idea of
turning to the rightabout, without compulsion, than he had of breakfasting
without beef. Upon his refusing to deliver up the castle of Nounhame to the
celebrated Warwick, he was besieged, compelled to surrender, and
immediately hung up upon the gates of the fort, to learn to behave like his
forefathers.
 The religious prosecutions which followed the union of the White and
Red Roses afforded fresh opportunity for the manifestation of the merits of
the Weathercocks. Theirs was almost the only family of any note in
England which did not lose one or other of its members from the
indiscriminate fury of superstition. The head of the house appears to have
embraced as many religions, and more wives, than Henry himself; and a
younger branch is said to have been, within a week, a serving-man in the
train of Gardiner and a clerk in the household of Cranmer. But we are
forgetting that we and our friends live in 1821, and that we shall weary the
patience of our reader by tracing those dry historical facts ab ovo.
The Weathercock family, or rather that branch of it with which we are at
present concerned, resides on a large and productive estate in
Leicestershire. We have spent much time with them, and have had several
opportunities of studying their peculiar merits. Their mansion affords a
perfect college for mutability; everything is kept in readiness to be
destroyed or refitted, removed or replaced, at a minute’s warning. It is quite
delightful to see how new fashions of furniture come in and go out; how the
faces of the servants are continually altered; how the hour of meals, the
regulation of the parterres—in short, the whole system of domestic
economy is always subjected to some new ephemeral arrangement, which
must soon give way to another equally new and equally ephemeral. To us,
we say, this is delightful. But one seldom finds two tastes alike. Many
pronounce the Weathercocks to be quite crazed; and many decide that “they
are mighty good kind of people, but have very odd whimsies!”
The disposition for change, which is inherent in the family, has produced
very strange effects upon their place of residence. The house was originally
a good stout old-fashioned house, remarkable for nothing but the antiquity
of its pictures and the size of its dining-hall. But its name and character
have shifted considerably since it came into the possession of my worthy
friends. It has been alternately a Hall, an Abbey, a Castle, and a Lodge; nay,
during the life of the late Sir Adonis Weathercock, it became, for a few
months, a Cottage. The proprietor, however, in this instance, gave up his
design before it had affected anything beyond the windows. The mansion
bears more permanent marks of its other metamorphoses. On one side it has
the square turrets and battlements of the feudal system; on another, the
flowery-pointed arch of a Gothic cathedral. One of the owners of the place
thought proper to sink a moat round his habitation; but he afterwards filled
it up, and converted it into a circular gravel walk. Another had a fancy for
erecting some solid Doric pillars; he, doubtless, much improved their
appearance, by placing upon them a beautiful Chinese veranda. Similar
observations are suggested by an inspection of the interior of the building.
You may almost read a history of two or three centuries in the reliques of
their manners which are scattered in every apartment. War has been carried
on with tolerably equal success between Lely’s portraits, Gainsborough’s
landscapes, and Bunbury’s caricatures. A cast of a Hercules looks
somewhat angrily upon a mandarin, who is his next neighbour; and a
timorous Venus maintains her post with great obstinacy, although her divine
presence is invaded by the scaly folds of an enormous dragon. There are
bronzes and Cupids, oaken tables and mahogany tables, drab papering and
crimson papering, high mantelpieces and low mantelpieces, Dresden china
and French china; everything is superb, everything incongruous, everything
unfinished.
The old park has been reduced to the same state. A scrupulous homage
has been paid to every new mode of cultivation; a thousand emendations,
and additions, and improvements have been successively introduced. But it
is easier to plant new customs than to eradicate the old. Lycaon was turned
into a beast, but he retained his old habits of atrocity. Arachne was
transformed into a spider, but she did not forget her spinning. The park of
the Weathercocks has, in like manner, assumed various novel shapes,
without losing the traces of its old ones. At one time it was dressed out in
all the stiff regularity of alleys and arcades; at another, it was dubbed a
“wilderness,” and was immediately laid waste by a terrible inroad of shrubs
and weeds without number. In one part your eye rests upon the muddy
vestiges of an artificial cascade; in another, your foot stumbles over a heap
of rubbish, which has been produced by the demolition of an artificial ruin.
Some people object to these things; for my part, I own I am delighted with
them. They show a proper distrust of one’s own opinion, a decorous
compliance with the unstable will of the world, an eager spirit of enterprise;
in short, they prove that the Weathercocks have not an ounce of obstinacy in
their composition.
Sir Wilfrid Weathercock, the present head of the family, is a cheerful and
hale man, between forty and fifty years of age. He is about the middle
stature, although, upon some occasions, by the affectation of a fashionable
stoop, he appears somewhat dwarfish; while, upon others, by the
assumption of a military gait and a pair of high heels, he bids fair to be
accounted a giant. With a self-denial worthy of a Cincinnatus, he has
avoided all offers of place or pension, all invitations to embark in public
life; he has confined his manifold talents and his extraordinary versatility to
the limits of his own estate. Perhaps, indeed, his determination, in this
respect, may have been a prudent one; for, although any ministry would
have been benefited by the unusual facility with which Sir Wilfrid would
have flown from patriotic speeches to taxation and gagging bills, from
prayers for peace to declarations of war, from professions of economy to
measures of profusion; yet it must be confessed that his reluctance to
remain a minute stationary would have driven him from one side of the
House to the other oftener than is seemly in a public man. Let it be
understood that we speak with all due deference and respect for the
numerous precedents which are to be found in our English history. Leaving
great statesmen to settle this point, we can only express our opinion that our
friend has certainly acted best for his own comfort, by choosing a quiet
privacy, where he may “change every hour,” undisturbed by the
malevolence of envy or the violence of faction.
His education was, in his youth, sadly neglected. Indeed, his father
fluctuated so long, first between Eton and Westminster, and afterwards
between Cambridge and Oxford, that it is marvellous to me how little
Wilfrid picked up any education at all. He has, however, obtained just so
much learning as enables him to cry up the Greeks and the Latins
alternately, and to flirt with all the nine Muses in succession. He escaped
the fatigue of deliberation in the choice of a profession, by the death of his
father; who left him, in very early life, the heir to all his fortune, all his
friendships, and all his follies. He spent his first two years upon the estate,
occupied in reflections of no very serious import: such as, whether his coat
should be red or green, whether his hunter should be bay or brown, whether
his equipage should be a barouche or a curricle. So far all was sunshine; but
some tempestuous days were approaching. It was suggested to him that the
ancient family of the Weathercocks ought to have an heir to its honours and
possessions. No evasion would serve; Sir Wilfrid must take a wife. He was
now in a novel and a disagreeable dilemma. In any trifling part of his
domestic economy, in the livery of his servants, in the arrangement of his
dinner-table, in the fashion of his plate, he would have bowed without a
murmur to the decision of his friends; but to inflict upon himself a wife was
a thing so utterly unlooked for and unprepared for, that Sir Wilfrid paused.
He hesitated and decided, and hesitated again, through three years; at the
termination of which he broke his leg in a fox-chase, grew quiet in
consequence, sold his hounds, and looked out for a wife. Then another
perplexity occurred. Who was to be the happy woman? He could never
resolve to make so invidious a distinction.
“It is very true,” said poor Sir Wilfrid, “that Miss Dormer has a very fine
face, but then I never much admired her nose. I certainly have always
preferred her cousin, although that unfortunate cast of the eye—well, well, I
am a young man, and, as my aunt says, ‘there is no hurry!’ Miss Rayner is
very beautiful, and has such charming dark hair—I always liked dark hair;
yet I don’t know if light is not as pretty—prettier sometimes, as for instance
Miss Chevier’s—only she is so insipid; I think Lady Mary is more
fascinating, but then she is so terribly satirical. Perhaps her sister would
make a better wife—if she was not such a fool!”
He consulted in this manner with himself for a long time: half the belles
of the county were ready to pull caps for him, but he “prattled with fifty fair
maids, and changed them as oft.” At last, in a fit of courage, he flung
himself at the feet of his chosen one, talked some rhapsodies, sighed some
sighs, and awaited his sentence. The lady was sorry, very sorry—and she
was flattered, highly flattered—and she was sure, quite sure—it would only
be attributed to her own want of discernment, that she declined the favour,
the honour, the distinction, the—— He heard no more; he hesitated! Should
he leave the room? Yes!—no!—yes! And he escaped as well as he could.
He has continued to this day a bachelor. In spite of all intrigue, all
solicitation, all persecution, he has remained, in this one instance, obstinate.
In all others he is a real Weathercock. He builds cottages, apparently with
no object but pulling them down; and pulls them down, apparently with no
object but that of building them up: he is a Tory one hour and a Whig the
next, and takes in the Chronicle and Courier alternately; he seldom reads
more than half a number of a periodical work, and never wears the same
coat above a month. In his conversation he pursues the same plan—or
rather want of plan—