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Washington Irving. Go farther still go to the Moorish fountains, sparkling full in the moonlight; go among the water-carriers, and the village gossips, living still as in days of old, and who has travelled among them before you, and peopled the Alhambra, and made eloquent its shadows? Who awakes there a voice from every hill, and in every cavern, and bids legends which for centuries have slept a dreamless sleep start up and pass before you in all their life and glory? But leaving this again, who embarked with Columbus upon his gallant ship-traversed with him the dark and mighty ocean, leaped upon the land, and planted there the flag of Spain, but this same man, now sitting by my side? And being here at home again, who is a more fit companion for money-diggers? And what pen but his has made Rip van Winkle, playing at nine-pins on that thundering afternoon, as much part and parcel of the Catskill Mountains as any tree or crag that they can boast?"

ON POOR SICK CHILDREN.

"SOME years ago, being in Scotland, I went with one of the most humane members of the humane medical profession on a morning tour among some of the worst-lodged inhabitants of the old town of Edinburgh. In the closes and wynds of the picturesque place-I am sorry to remind you what fast friends picturesqueness and typhus often are-we saw more poverty and sickness in an hour than many people would believe in a life. Our way lay from one to another of the most wretched dwellings, reeking with horrible odours; shut out from the sky, shut out from the air, were pits and dens. In a room in one of these places, where there was an empty porridge-pot on the cold hearth, with a ragged woman and some ragged children crouching on the bare ground near it--where, I remember as I speak, that the very light refracted from a high, damp-stained, and time-stained house wall, came trembling in, as if the fever which had shaken everything else there had shaken it-there lay, in an old egg-box which the mother had begged from a shop, a little feeble, wasted, wan, sick child. With his little wasted face, and his little hot, worn hands folded over his breast, and his little bright attentive eyes, I can see him now, as I have seen him for several years, looking steadily at us. There' he lay, in his little frail box, which was not at all a bad emblem of the little body from which he was slowly parting-there he lay, quite quiet, quite patient, never saying a word. He seldom cried, the mother said; he seldom complained; 'he lay there, seemin' to wonder what it was a' aboot.'

"God knows, I thought, as I stood looking at him, he had his reasons for wondering reasons for wondering how it could possibly come to be that he lay there, left alone, feeble and full of pain, when he ought to have been as bright and as brisk as the birds that never got near him— reasons for wondering how he came to be left there, a little decrepit old man, pining to death, quite a thing of course, as if there were no crowds

of healthy and happy children playing on the grass under the summer's sun, within a stone's throw of him; as if there were no bright, moving sea on the other side of the great hill overhanging the city; as if there were no great clouds rushing over it; as if there were no life, and movement, and vigour anywhere in the world-nothing but stoppage and decay. There he lay looking at us, saying, in his silence, more pathetically than I have ever heard anything said by any orator in my life, 'Will you please to tell me what this means, strange man? Ard if you can give me any good reason why I should be soon so far advanced on my way to Him who said that children were to come into His presence, and were not to be forbidden, but who scarcely meant, I think, that they should come by this hard road by which I am travelling-pray give that reason to me, for I seek it very earnestly, and wonder about it very much.' And, to my mind, he has been wondering about it ever since. Many a poor child, sick and neglected, I have seen since that time in this London; many a poor sick child I have seen most affectionately and kindly tended by poor, poor people, in unwholesome and under untoward circumstances, wherein its recovery was quite impossible; but at all such times I have seen my poor little drooping friend in his egg-box, and he has always addressed his dumb speech to me, and I have always found him wondering what it meant, and why, in the name of a gracious God, such things should be."

DICKENS ON HIS EARLY LIFE AS A REPORTER.

“I HOPE I may be allowed in the very few closing words that I feel a desire to say in remembrance of some circumstances, rather special, attending my present occupation of this chair, to give those words something of a personal tone. I am not here advocating the case of a mere ordinary client, of whom I have little or no knowledge: I hold a brief tonight for my brothers. I went into the gallery of the House of Commons as a parliamentary reporter when I was a boy not eighteen, and I left it—I can hardly believe the inexorable truth-nigh thirty years ago. 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 a pelting rain, that I remember two good-natured colleagues who chanced to be at leisure held a pocket handkerchief over my notebook, after the manner of a state canopy in an ecclesiastical procession. I have worn my knees by writing on them on the whole back row of the old gallery of 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 on miry byroads, towards the small hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheelless carriage, with exhausted horses, and drunken postboys, and have got back in time for publication, to be received with never-forgotten compliments by the late Mr. Black, coming in the broadest of Scotch from the broadest of hearts I ever knew.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I mention these trivial things as an assurance to you that I have never forgotten the fascination of that old pursuit. The pleasure that I used to feel in the rapidity and dexterity of its exercise has never faded out of my breast. Whatever little cunning of hand or head I took to it, or acquired in it, I have so retained as that I fully believe I could resume it to-morrow, very little the worse from long disuse. To this present year of my life, when I sit in this hall, or where not, hearing a dull speech, the phenomenon does occur. I sometimes beguile the tedium of the moment by mentally following the speaker in the old, old way; and sometimes, if you can believe me, I even find my finger going on the tablecloth, taking an imaginary note of it all. Accept these little truths as a confirmation of what I know—as a confirmation of my undying interest in this old calling; accept them as a proof that my feeling for the vocation of my youth is not a sentiment taken up to-night to be thrown away to-morrow, but is a faithful sympathy, which is a part of myself. I verily believe--I am sure—that if I had never quitted my old calling, I should have been foremost and zealous in the interests of this institution, believing it to be a sound, a wholesome, and a good one. Ladies and gentlemen, I am to propose to you to drink 'Prosperity to the Newspaper Press Fund,' with which toast I will connect, as to its acknowledgment, a name that has shed new brilliancy on even the foremost newspaper in the world--the illustrious name of Mr. Russell."

CHARLES DICKENS AND DOUGLAS JERROLD.

HEN I was writing the life of my father, Dickens made the following notes for me-the lines being blurred and corrected and re-written-so unlike Dickens. He wrote to me from Tavistock House, Nov. 26, 1858 :—

"It has been a gloomy task, and has made my heart heavy. It is not likely that I can furnish you with any new particulars of interest concerning your lamented father. Such details of his life and struggles as I have often heard from himself are better known to you than to me; and my praises of him can make no new sound in your ears.

"But as you wish me to note down for you my last remembrance and experience of him, I proceed to do so. It is natural that my thoughts should first rush back (as they instantly do) to the days when he began to be known to me, and to the many happy hours I afterwards passed in his society.

"Few of his friends, I think, can have had more favourable opportunities of knowing him, in his gentlest and most affectionate aspect, than I have had. He was one of the gentlest and most affectionate of men. I remember very well that when I first saw him, in or about the year 1835-when I went into his sick room in St. Michael's Grove, Brompton, and found him propped up in a great chair, bright-eyed, and eager and quick in spirit, but very lame in body—he gave me an impression of tenderness. It never became dissociated from him. There was nothing cynical or sour in his heart as I knew it. In the company of children and young people he was particularly happy, and showed to extraordinary advantage. He never was so gay, so sweet-tempered, so pleasing, and so pleased as then. Among my own children I had observed this many and many a time. When they and I came home from Italy in 1845, your father went to Brussels to meet us in company with our friends, Mr. Forster and Mr. Maclise. We all travelled together about Belgium for a little while, and all came home together. the delight of the children all the time, and they were his delight. He was in his most brilliant spirits, and I doubt if he were ever more humorous in his life. But the most enduring impression that he left upon us who are grown up-and we have all often spoken of it since--

He was

was that JERROLD, in his amiable capacity of being easily pleased, in his freshness, in his good-nature, in his cordiality, and in the unrestrained openness of his heart, had quite captivated us.

"Of his generosity I had a proof, within these two or three years, which it saddens me to think of now. There had been an estrangement between us-not on any personal subject, and not involving an angry word and a good many months had passed without my once seeing him in the street, when it fell out that we dined, each with his own separate party, in the strangers' room of a club. Our chairs were almost back to back, and I took mine after he was seated and át dinner. said not a word (I am sorry to remember) and did not look that way. Before we had sat so long he openly wheeled his chair round, stretched out both his hands in a most engaging manner, and said aloud, with a bright and loving face that I can see as I write to you- ' For God's sake, let us be friends again! Life's not long enough for this!'

I

"On Sunday, May 31st, 1857, I had made an appointment to meet him at the Gallery of Illustration, in Regent Street. We had been advising our friend, Mr. Russell, in the condensation of his lectures on the war in the Crimea, and we had engaged with him to go over the last of the series there at one o'clock that day. Arriving some minutes before the time, I found your father sitting alone in the hall. 'There must be some mistake,' he said: no one else was there; the place was locked up; he had tried all the doors; and he had been waiting there a quarter of an hour by himself. I sat down by him in a niche in the

staircase, and he told me that he had been very unwell for three or four days. A window in his study had been newly painted, and the smell of the paint (he thought it must be that) had filled him with nausea and turned him sick, and he felt quite weak and giddy through not having been able to retain any food. He was a little subdued at first and out of spirits; but we sat there half an hour talking, and when we came out together he was quite himself.

"In the shadow I had not observed him closely; but when we got into the sunshine of the streets, I saw that he looked ill. We were both engaged to dine with Mr. Russell at Greenwich, and I thought him so ill then that I advised him not to go, but to let me take him or send him home in a cab. He complained, however, of having turned so weakwe had now strolled as far as Leicester Square-that he was fearful he might faint in the cab, unless I could get him some restorative, and unless he could 'keep it down.' I deliberated for a moment whether to turn back to the Athenæum, where I could have got a little brandy for him, or to take him on into Covent Garden for the purpose; meanwhile, he stood leaning against the rails of the enclosure, looking for the moment very ill indeed. Finally, we walked on to Covent Garden, and before we had gone fifty yards he was very much better. On our way Mr. Russell joined us. He was then better still, and walked between us unassisted. I got him a hard biscuit and a little weak cold brandy and water, and begged him by all means to try to eat. He broke up

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