a description contained in one of those charming felicitous speeches
of his which are almost as unique in kind as his novels. Speaking in
May, 1865, as chairman of a public dinner on behalf of the Newspaper
Press Fund, he said: "I have pursued the calling of a reporter under
circumstances of which many of my brethren at home in England here,
many of my modern successors, can form no adequate conception. I have
often transcribed for the printer, from my shorthand notes, important
public speeches, in which the strictest accuracy was required, and a
mistake in which would have been, to a young man, severely
compromising, writing on the palm of my hand, by the light of a dark
lantern, in a post-chaise and four, galloping through a wild country,
and through the dead of the night, at the then surprising rate of
fifteen miles an hour. The very last time I was at Exeter, I strolled
into the castle-yard there to identify, for the amusement of a friend,
the spot on which I once took, as we used to call it, an election
speech of my noble friend Lord Russell, in the midst of a lively fight
maintained by all the vagabonds in that division of the county, and
under such pelting rain, that I remember two good-natured colleagues,
who chanced to be at leisure, held a pocket-handkerchief over my
note-book, after the manner of a State canopy in an ecclesiastical
procession. I have worn my knees by writing on them on the old back
row of the old gallery in the old House of Commons; and I have worn my
feet by standing to write in a preposterous pen in the old House of
Lords, where we used to be huddled together like so many sheep, kept
in waiting, say, until the woolsack might want re-stuffing. Returning
home from excited political meetings in the country to the waiting
press in London, I do verily believe I have been upset in almost every
description of vehicle known in this country. I have been, in my
time, belated in miry by-roads, towards the small hours, forty or
fifty miles from London, in a wheel-less carriage, with exhausted