CHAPTER IV.
THE REVIEW OF THE AFFAIRS OF FRANCE.
It was a bold undertaking for a prisoner in Newgate to engage to furnish a newspaper written wholly by himself, "purged from the errors and partiality of news-writers and petty statesmen of all sides." It would, of course, have been an impossible undertaking if the _Review_ had been, either in size or in contents, like a newspaper of the present time.

The _Review_ was, in its first stage, a sheet of eight small quarto pages.
After the first two numbers, it was reduced in size to four pages, but a smaller type was used, so that the amount of matter remained nearly the same--about equal in bulk to two modern leading articles.

At first the issue was weekly; after four numbers it became bi-weekly, and so remained for a year.
For the character of the _Review_ it is difficult to find a parallel.
There was nothing like it at the time, and nothing exactly like it has been attempted since.

The nearest approach to it among its predecessors was the _Observator_, a small weekly journal written by the erratic John Tutchin, in which passing topics, political and social, were discussed in dialogues.

Personal scandals were a prominent feature in the _Observator_.