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.  Defoe was not insensible to the value of this element to a popular journal.  He knew, he said, that people liked to be amused; and he supplied this want in a section of his paper entitled “Mercure Scandale; or, Advice from the Scandalous Club, being a weekly history of Nonsense, Impertinence, Vice, and Debauchery.”  Under this attractive heading, Defoe noticed current scandals, his club being represented as a tribunal before which offenders were brought, their cases heard, and sentence passed upon them.  Slanderers of the True-Born Englishman frequently figure in its proceedings.  It was in this section also that Defoe exposed the errors of contemporary news-writers, the Post-man, the Post-Boy, the London Post, the Flying Post, and the Daily Courant.  He could not in his prison pretend to superior information regarding the events of the day; the errors which he exposed were chiefly blunders in geography and history.  The Mercure Scandale was avowedly intended to amuse the frivolous.  The lapse of time has made its artificial sprightliness dreary.  It was in the serious portion of the Review, the Review proper, that Defoe showed most of his genius.  The design of this was nothing less than to give a true picture, drawn with “an impartial and exact historical pen,” of the domestic and foreign affairs of all the States of Europe.  It was essential, he thought, that at such a time of commotion Englishmen should be thoroughly informed of the strength and the political interests and proclivities of the various European Powers.  He could not undertake to tell his readers what was passing from day to day, but he could explain to them the policy of the Continental Courts; he could show how that policy was affected by their past history and present interests; he could calculate the forces at their disposal, set forth the grounds of their alliances, and generally put people in a position to follow the great game that was being played on the European chess-board.  In the Review, in fact, as he himself described his task, he was writing a history sheet by sheet, and letting the world see it as it went on.