it. It was dead, but it had served as a wall to re-echo my own
voice. Excepting these two occasions, I don't think that one
solitary human being ever applauded or condemned one solitary word of
which I was the author. All my friends knew where my contributions
were to be found, but I never heard that they looked at them. They
were never worth reading, and yet such complete silence was rather
lonely. The tradesman who makes a good coat enjoys the satisfaction
of having fitted and pleased his customer, and a bricklayer, if he be
diligent, is rewarded by knowing that his master understands his
value, but I never knew what it was to receive a single response. I
wrote for an abstraction; and spoke to empty space. I cannot help
claiming some pity and even respect for the class to which I
belonged. I have heard them called all kinds of hard names, hacks,
drudges, and something even more contemptible, but the injustice done
to them is monstrous. Their wage is hardly earned; it is peculiarly
precarious, depending altogether upon their health, and no matter how
ill they may be they must maintain the liveliness of manner which is
necessary to procure acceptance. I fell in with one poor fellow
whose line was something like my own. I became acquainted with him
through sitting side by side with him at the House. He lived in
lodgings in Goodge Street, and occasionally I walked with him as far
as the corner of Tottenham Court Road, where I caught the last
omnibus northward. He wrote like me a "descriptive article" for the
country, but he also wrote every now and then--a dignity to which I
never attained--a "special" for London. His "descriptive articles"
were more political than mine, and he was obliged to be violently
Tory. His creed, however, was such a pure piece of professionalism,
that though I was Radical, and was expected to be so, we never
jarred, and often, as we wandered homewards, we exchanged notes, and
were mutually useful, his observations appearing in my paper, and