Chapter III: Essays in Journalism

Even before I left the City I had already made some tentative excursions into the realm of journalism. My first experiment, I remember, had something of a grotesque conclusion.

An early friend of mine, Arthur O’Neil, the younger half-brother of Henry O’Neil, the painter of _Eastward Ho_, had somehow persuaded a modest capitalist to venture a small sum of money in the establishment of a weekly journal called the _Dramatic and Musical Review_. We were both keenly interested in the drama, and I had assisted at O’Neil’s first venture in the shape of a pantomime at the old Sadler’s Wells Theatre.

To judge by the scene that occurred during the later stages of the entertainment, it could not have been deemed wholly successful. I remember that the members of the orchestra had to divide their attention between the music of the harlequinade and the shower of stone ginger-beer bottles that were hurled like hail from a hypercritical gallery.

O’Neil, who was older than I, and who had already had some slight experiences as a journalist, with a desire to encourage my budding ambition, asked me to do a criticism on a recently published volume of Longfellow’s Poems for this same _Dramatic and Musical Review_, of which he was the proud editor. I duly received and duly corrected the printed proof of my article with feelings of exaltation only to be realised by those who, for the first time, see their ideas in printed type, and then waited with eager expectation for the day of publication.

The office was situated in that older part of the Strand near St. Clement Danes which is now no more, and the publisher owned the two-fold responsibility of also issuing another weekly journal entitled the _Labour News_. Twopence was, I think, the price of our artistic organ, and as early as I could on the Saturday morning I presented myself at the office and tendered the sum required. Almost overwhelmed with excitement I rapidly scanned the columns of this slender journal to find the first-fruits of my pen. But my search yielded nothing but disappointment. The article was not there. I stood in the tiny office crushed by a sense of failure and misfortune, and was just going out into the grey street when the enterprising boy behind the counter, actuated by the simple desire to do business, asked me if I wanted a copy of the _Labour News_.

As a fact I wanted nothing but some place to hide the sense of humiliation which overpowered me, but as he added, “It’s only a penny,” I took the journal and went out into the street, and, as I listlessly scanned its pages through, I found, to my astonishment, my lost article on Longfellow’s Poems.

It turned out afterwards that the _Dramatic and Musical Review_ in that particular week had more than its needed supply of “copy,” and the _Labour News_, on the other hand, finding itself short of material, a bright idea had come into the printer’s mind that the review of Longfellow’s Poems might be appropriately set beside advertisements as to the advantages of Canadian Emigration.

Little by little, from this first ludicrous start, I gained a modest footing in the world of journalism, at first as dramatic critic to the _Echo_, then edited by Arthur Arnold, brother of Sir Edwin Arnold, so long connected with the _Daily Telegraph_.

My services upon the _Echo_ were not particularly lucrative, the payment for an article being rarely more than six or seven shillings; and my fare to and from Clapham Junction, where we lived at the time, and the necessary modest meal before the theatre began, almost entirely absorbed the sum that I earned.

From the _Echo_ I drifted to the _Globe_, which was then under the editorship of Dr. Mortimer Granville, and here my work began in something like earnest. During my services as dramatic critic I had become acquainted with Thomas Purnell, and it was he who secured for me a regular position upon the staff of the _Globe_.

Our work there was sufficiently strenuous. There were three of us stationed in a room above the editorial sanctum, and here, between the hours of nine o’clock in the morning and twelve, we were engaged upon three columns of notes which formed the first page of the paper. The three of us were Purnell, Francillon the novelist, and myself; and the life, wholly new to me, was at the time strangely fascinating and attractive.

Purnell was himself one of the quaintest and most characteristic figures I have ever encountered. A regular Bohemian in a Bohemia that has long lost its sea-board, he had the Bohemian frank detestation of work and utter disregard of all social conventions, and yet with these peculiarities were linked a fine taste and a personality of real distinction.

When I first met him he had just completed a series of papers in the _Athenæum_ upon the drama under the signature of “Q,” winning some little renown in a sharp controversy with Charles Reade, in which he was certainly not worsted.

My other stable companion, Francillon, was of an exactly opposite temperament. Endowed with considerable imagination, which was happily exhibited in _Pearl and Emerald_, a novel which had been published in the _Cornhill Magazine_, he was by habit plodding and industrious, qualities which aroused in Purnell a degree of disapproval that sometimes almost verged on resentment.

“Now, Francillon,” he used to say, “loves work. I don’t. I hate it; I loathe it! People will tell you, my dear Carribus”--for so he often addressed me--“that to work is to pray. Well, of the two, _I_ find it easier to pray. Why should I work?” he used to add, with an air of deep and earnest conviction. “I want nothing, only my twopence. All I need is a herring and a glass of ale, and when I have earned that I like to be idle. Some men, so they say, like work. I don’t!” And he did not.

One fixed appointment which he held was to contribute a weekly article on Conservative Policy to the pages of an important provincial paper. Long before the day came when this article had to be despatched by the evening post he used to look upon the impending task with something like horror, and yet nothing could ever induce him to anticipate by an hour the execution of his labours.

Indeed, as a rule, he never wrote it at all. When the day came and we had finished our morning’s work on the _Globe_, he would generally invite Francillon and myself to a frugal lunch at the old Gaiety Restaurant, and when the invitation was issued we always knew what was in store for us. As the lunch neared its end he would breach the subject by imploring us to supply him with a topic.

“It’s the topic, my dear boy, there’s the devil of it. If I only had a topic I could do it in an hour”--a purely fallacious statement, seeing that no amount of topics would ever have induced him to do it single-handed at all.

Francillon would sometimes heave a sigh, and then with newly-lit cigars we would wend our way back to the old _Globe_ office, where our working-room overlooked the chapel of the Savoy. By that time either Francillon or I had found a topic, for although I was then, and have since remained, a Liberal in politics, I found it not difficult, and sometimes even diverting, to engage in the advocacy of Conservative Policy in the service of our indolent friend.

Perhaps it was I who generally found the subject for the article, and when I announced it Purnell would reply, “Then begin, my dear boy; begin it, Carribus; the thing’s done.”

In those days a leading article always consisted of three paragraphs, and the three paragraphs of this authoritative statement on Conservative ideas were on these happy occasions divided between the three of us, Purnell always reserving to himself the conclusion, not because I think he had any special aptitude in bringing the argument to an end, but because it gave him a longer time to smoke his pipe before his turn came to set upon his task.

And so it came about that I having opened the debate, Francillon at the same time would be busily engaged in the discussion necessary for the central paragraph, while Purnell, looking over our shoulders with chuckling glee, and passing contentedly from chair to chair as he saw his task nearing its end, would finally be persuaded to sit down at his own desk and scribble about eight sentences which were supposed, by their invincible logic, to confirm and strengthen the Tory convictions of the city to which the article was to be despatched.

But hurry and scurry as we would, this terrible task was scarcely ever finished till within a few minutes of the time for post, and even then it often happened that one of us had to come to Purnell’s rescue and try as best we could to adjust the scattered arguments which he had been vainly endeavouring to set in logical sequence.

His delight on these occasions was unbounded. The weekly price for these essays was three guineas, and I think he received it with all the greater zest from the consciousness that he had not rightly earned it.

Purnell’s social ambitions were few, and all social obligations he boldly repudiated. It was one of his most deeply seated convictions that no man was compelled to reply to any letter of invitation, whatever the source from which it might have come, and he defended this position with great show of legal force.

“If,” he said, “a lady had asked me whether in the event of her writing me an invitation I would reply to it, and I had answered in the affirmative, then, my dear Carribus, the agreement would be complete. But I never said anything of the kind, never would; and therefore, my dear boy, there’s no privity of contract.”

But there was one invitation he took care to answer, an invitation to pass a week-end with a certain noble lord in the country. I do not think that he was in any grave sense a “snob,” but he was deeply impressed with the sense of his powers of fascination over women, and his handsome picturesque face, I think, entitled him to the belief that it was not mere idle boasting.

At this particular party he happened to know that several charming ladies of the family would be present, and it was this fact, I think, which made him very eager, if he could, to accept the invitation. But the question of a fitting wardrobe raised a difficulty, and here again he threw himself in all candour upon Francillon and myself.

The rare letter of acceptance had been sent, and the day for his departure had arrived, but in this question of dress he was still lamentably unprepared. We met in hasty consultation in a little eating-house called the Coal Hole, which lay down a narrow court at the south side of the Strand.

It was Saturday. The shops would soon be closing, and there was no time to lose. He had money enough for his railway ticket, but none for such idle luxuries as clothes. His only proffered contribution to the necessities of the occasion was a tarnished disreputable bag which he had brought down empty to the office in view of the projected excursion. He had no great faith in it himself, and it was discarded with scorn by those whom he had pressed into his service. And so in the end Francillon and I had to provide a modest valise and stock it with a wardrobe that would suffice for the three days’ stay, and I can recall now the air of triumph with which he started upon his journey, robed in a new pilot-jacket which we had added as the final feature of his outfit.

Our little circle on the staff of the _Globe_ was later joined by Churton Collins, now the Professor of English Literature at the University at Birmingham, then only a boy fresh from Oxford, but a boy whose mind was already stored with a knowledge of English literature such as I suppose few men of his generation can boast. His prodigious memory both in prose and poetry I certainly have never encountered in another; and through many an evening, when he dined quietly with us in our rooms in Great Russell Street, did we wonder and delight to listen to him as he passed from author to author, not always reciting things of his own choice, but responding with equal readiness to any call that might be made upon him when the choice was made by others.

But this wondrous memory sometimes played him tricks in his first essays as a journalist. For as there was no time and no opportunity in the _Globe_ office to verify any quotation, his literary articles, which were always packed with quotations from the poets, were generally subject to correction in some small particular, and for this reason evoked a shower of correspondence which irritated and annoyed our worthy editor.

This same editor, on the other hand, was often a source of annoyance to _us_. Our time was short for the work we had to do during the morning, and we resented the constant pencil-notes which he used to send up from the room below, or the repeated calls up the speaking-tube, the whistle of which stood next to Purnell’s desk.

One day we determined to mark our disapproval of this vexatious and harassing policy. We were accustomed sometimes, when money was short, to be content with a lunch of cocoa and biscuits prepared by ourselves. A kettle on this occasion stood puffing on the fire, and when the whistle of the speaking-tube had gone for about the thirtieth time, a demoniacal idea of vengeance entered into the mind of Purnell. The call this time was for me, and Purnell having answered that I was coming to speak in answer, went with stealthy steps towards the fireplace and seizing the kettle poured the whole of its contents down the tube.

It is not perhaps wonderful that this resulted in something like a crisis in the internal arrangements of the office, and very nearly ended in the dismissal of the entire literary staff.

Another comrade of those days, though he rarely wrote in the _Globe_, was Camille Barrère, now the distinguished Ambassador of the French Republic at Rome. Barrère and I were for many years close allies. I had assisted him in his first essay in English journalism when he contributed to the _Pall Mall Gazette_ a series of articles on the Commune, with which he had been in some sense associated. He was always a brilliant and gifted creature, and his rapid advancement from the hour when he was first befriended by Gambetta could never have been any surprise to those who knew him well.

At that time, like the rest of us, he was having a hard struggle for life. We were together on the _Echo_, and together on the _Pall Mall Gazette_, and I can remember in the old days of the Arts Club how often we sat and planned vague, large schemes for the reorganisation of journalism, which should yield us more complacent editors and a rate of higher remuneration, which we fancied our merits deserved.

Barrère had passed some of his earlier years in England, and his knowledge and power over our tongue were remarkable, but now and then some small idiomatic fault would slip out unawares, and one day, when he had just received what he considered an inadequate cheque from the _Echo_, he cried out indignantly that he “would like to wring the throat of Arnold.”

Unlike poor Purnell, the choice of a topic never presented any difficulty to him. Almost any subject served him for a light and graceful essay, and the fertility of his invention in this regard was more than remarkable. Happily for his own sake, and for the sake of the nation which he has served with so much distinction, he need no longer rack his brains, as in the old days, for the material that would fill a column in the _Echo_; and though it is many years since we met, I know, through many messages that I have received from him, that he looks back with kindly remembrances to those times when we struggled side by side.

It is a strange thing about a journalist’s career, when it is successful, that at the first it seems so hard to get the work to do, and then later so hard to do the work that comes. In those early days every new opening was only won after a struggle, yet within a very few years I found myself almost overwhelmed by the tasks that were laid upon me.

From the _Globe_ I passed to the _Pall Mall Gazette_, where I succeeded Professor Colvin as its Art Critic; from the _Pall Mall_ to the _Saturday Review_ and the _Examiner_; and then a little later I joined the staff of the _World_, which had recently been founded by Edmund Yates.

These different changes of occupation brought many new friends and many new editors, but of all those under whom I have served I think I should signalise Mr. Frederic Greenwood as by far the most inspiring to his contributors. Not that to be numbered among Mr. Greenwood’s contributors always implied a peaceful career; he was an autocratic commander, whose powerful personality loved to assert itself in every department of his paper, and he and I in those days had sharp encounters with regard to that particular arena of art criticism over which I thought I was entitled to exercise independent control.

But those differences are long forgotten, and the remembrance that survives is of a keen and ardent intelligence that communicated its own warmth of purpose to all who served under his banner.

Very different in type was Mr. Harwood, the editor of the _Saturday Review_. On the quiet evenings that I sometimes passed at his house in Regent’s Park, when he would spend most of the time after dinner in playing on his violoncello, it seemed hardly possible to realise that he was the capable conductor of what was even then a mighty organ of public opinion.

I suppose that hardly any British journal has ever boasted among its contributors so many eminent men in so many varied ways of life as one could see gathered at the great annual dinner of the _Review_ in the “Trafalgar” at Greenwich, presided over by Mr. Beresford Hope.

Mr. Harwood had succeeded Mr. Cook, and had inherited many of the traditions of the great founder of the _Review_. His editorial office at the time I joined him was situated in The Albany, where he was assisted as sub-editor by my old friend, Mr. Walter Herries Pollock, who afterwards succeeded to the editorial chair.

I did little of the more serious work upon the paper, my duties, as a rule, being confined to those middle articles, as they were called, which formed at that time one of its salient features. I suppose the aptitude for finding and treating such lighter subjects was not too common; at any rate, I know that my contributions of that sort always met with a generous welcome, and Mr. Harwood himself, despite his grave exterior, was sometimes singularly happy in the choice of subjects for fit treatment in this lighter vein.

A young man who has gained an entry into the journalistic world can sometimes get through a prodigious amount of work, and at the time I am speaking of it often happened that within the week, besides my morning duties upon the _Globe_, I would furnish one, and sometimes two, articles to the _Saturday Review_, an article to the _Examiner_, another to the _World_, and, in addition, three or four columns of art criticism to the _Pall Mall Gazette_, apart from regular work in the same department for the _Manchester Guardian_, and occasional articles in other daily or weekly journals.

Mr. Edmund Yates, the founder and editor of the _World_, had given me a generous welcome from the first, and I recall an incident in connection with a series of articles I had done for him which at the time filled me with no little pride. In this series I had dealt week by week with the more important organs of the British press, and I was fortunate enough to win for these papers a considerable amount of attention. But, for the time, Edmund Yates had carefully withheld the secret of their authorship, and one day when I was visiting my old master at Bruce Castle School the subject came into our conversation, and he told me that the report was about that they were written by a prominent leader-writer of the _Times_.

At this my pride could no longer contain itself, and his incredulity and astonishment when I announced myself as the author gave me a moment of the keenest pleasure.

Yates had many enemies in those days, and the new features which he had introduced into English journalism were in many quarters profoundly resented. But he was generous and warm-hearted to his friends, and beneath those lighter gifts which made for immediate success he possessed a deep, sincere love of literature. It was at his house that I first met the late Mr. Archibald Forbes, a man of rare force and grit, and possessed, as a writer, of a style of trenchant sincerity and power that in my opinion placed him easily at the head of that great race of special war-correspondents which may be said to have been founded by the late Sir William Russell. None of them all, however, could equal Sir William in social grace and readiness of wit. His store of anecdotes garnered from a rich experience of many men and many lands seemed ever inexhaustible and ever new.

Forbes was of a widely different type. His experience had been won in a harder school, but his rapid and vivid powers of expression, his ability to set forth in picturesque presentment events which had only just happened, were, I think, altogether unrivalled. When it is remembered that many of these descriptions were sent rushing over the wires at the close of a day when other men of less energy would have been exhausted after many hours spent in the saddle, and when it is observed with what potent directness of narrative, often rising to real greatness of style, the story he had to tell was presented to his readers, it will be conceded, I think, that he had no equal in the particular branch of journalistic literature to which he had devoted himself.

We became close friends almost from our first meeting, which, as I remember, was on the occasion of a dinner given by Edmund Yates to the contributors to the _World_, and later, when I became editor to the _English Illustrated Magazine_, he rekindled some of the earlier memories of his fighting days in a series of articles that included a delightful account of the struggles which preceded his appointment as a special correspondent to the _Daily News_.

It was during the Franco-German War that the _Daily News_ leapt into sudden prominence, in virtue of its splendid correspondence yielding a vivid picture of the conflict from both sides of the campaign, and it was incontestably to the energy and judgment of the late Sir John Robinson that this immediate success was due.

The quiet, kindly personality of Sir John would scarcely have suggested the sure and rapid power of organisation he undoubtedly possessed, and his quickness of insight in the selection of the fit man for the work to be done was vividly illustrated in the account which Mr. Forbes wrote for the _English Illustrated Magazine_ of his first meeting with the genial manager of the _Daily News_.

It is possible that Forbes had somewhat embroidered the sober facts of the situation in order to heighten its picturesque effect, for I remember that on my next meeting with Sir John, after the publication of the article, he was somewhat whimsically annoyed to find that his own share in this historical transaction had been slightly disfigured to suit the exigencies of Mr. Forbes’s narrative.

Forbes had asserted that at a point in the negotiations he conceived the idea that his services were not desired, and was leaving the office in disgust when Robinson ran after him and brought him back. It was this little piece of added embroidery that Sir John declared to be not absolutely historical, but I feel sure, at least, that Forbes never intended to do injustice to the manager of the _Daily News_, for in our many talks concerning his struggles at this time he always acknowledged how deeply he had been indebted to his great employer.

Another of the staff of the _Daily News_ war-correspondents was Hilary Skinner, whose younger brother had been the dearest friend of my youth, from the time when we were schoolmates at Bruce Castle School.

Alan Skinner afterwards rose to a distinguished official position in the Straits Settlements, but at the time I am thinking of he had just been called to the Bar; and when I, at a later date, left school to begin my life in London, he and I passed many a long evening in the little set of chambers he occupied in Old Square, Lincoln’s Inn. In those days he was a versifier like myself, and, failing a wider audience, we used to delight to read to one another our first essays in poetry.

The friendship between us was of the closest, and when he finally went abroad to take up his official duties, the separation, I think, was felt keenly by both. His elder brother, Mr. Hilary Skinner, was of a lighter temperament, though he must have possessed strong force of character to have endured the strenuous labours of a war-correspondent. A voluble and insatiable talker, his conversation never needed the provocation of a reply. In an endless stream of anecdote he would wander over a wide world of men and things, never halting for a word, and rarely halting at all. And yet the trials of the life he had adopted must have been a severe strain upon a constitution that was by no means robust, and I think the wear and tear of that life, though it was not long continued, set a permanent mark upon his health.

Certainly this was so in the case of Archibald Forbes, who suffered much during the later years of his life, suffering that had its origin, as he told me, in a terrible two days’ ride in South Africa when he was racing against time to reach the telegraph-office to cable his news home.

Among others of this special race of correspondents who came into my life at this time were George Augustus Sala and William Beatty-Kingston. With both, however, the record of war was only a passing incident in their journalistic career.

Sala, I think, possessed a larger assortment of odd scraps of knowledge than any man I have ever met, and although his chequered career presented many vicissitudes, he had cultivated, as he told me, from boyhood the habit of keeping a series of most carefully compiled commonplace books, in which were recorded, under headings sometimes quaintly chosen, every bit of information or historical allusion which even remotely bore upon the subject in hand.

He told me that in the wildest and most disordered periods in his career this habit had never deserted him, and one evening, when I was dining with him in Mecklenburg Square, he showed me one entire shelf packed with these little volumes, all written in the neatest of monkish hands, and almost without a blot or scar.

I have often wondered what has become of those note-books from which he drew such varied allusions for his characteristic articles in the _Daily Telegraph_. They would be a treasure-store to many a budding journalist, and as far as I could gather, from a rapid review of them during that one evening at his house, a delight even to the casual reader.

Sala, like his friend Yates, was an accomplished speaker, and a keen critic on all presumptuous pretenders in that department.

I remember one evening, coming away from a public banquet at which he had admirably distinguished himself, I ventured to ask him what he thought of the performance of a gentleman who had followed him, and who I knew rather prided himself upon his achievements in this particular direction.

“Oh!” said Sala in reply, “you mean so-and-so. Ah yes! Damned fluent, damned fool!” The comment sounds harsh, but I do not think it was unjust. He used to tell me that in the preparation and delivery of his speeches there was always present to his mind the image of a furnished house, and that he kept his material in order and sequence by suggesting to himself, as he spoke, that he was inspecting the various apartments, from the dining-room to the attic, and that in this way he could always avoid any halt or confusion in the arrangement of the matter upon which he was speaking.

Yates, I fancy, though his delivery was always admirable in effect, was accustomed to learn his speeches by heart, and in this respect resembled the late Sir Frederick Leighton, though with the latter the secret was not so well kept.

William Beatty-Kingston, the last of the special correspondents to whom I referred, had no aptitude for public speaking, but he was in many ways highly accomplished. As an amateur musician I should think he had few equals, and his absolute enjoyment when he was seated at the piano, passing from the work of one great master to another, was a delight to witness. I remember that one evening my wife and I had invited to meet him a very gifted young Italian violinist, and it was a suggestion of ours that after dinner they should try over some of the duets of the great composers.

It was easy to see that at first they took no liking for one another. The Italian, as a recognised professional, hardly concealed his sense of superiority over the amateur, and Kingston, I knew, harboured a lurking suspicion that the violinist would not be deeply interested in the work of the great German composers to whom he was enthusiastically attached.

The brief passage of the dinner was for this reason a period of armed neutrality, amusing enough to watch; and when afterwards they were persuaded to make an adventure together it was done reluctantly, and with no great hope on the part of either that the evening would present any real enjoyment. It so happened, as they both knew, that my wife and I were bound to make an early departure for a great fancy-dress ball which had been organised by some of the foremost painters of the day, but of course we invited Kingston and his companion to stay as long as they liked, and leaving them with a sufficient store of whisky and soda and cigars, we set out upon our more frivolous excursion.

The ball was kept up till late; it was past five o’clock before we returned, little thinking to find our guests still in possession; and our surprise was the greater when, on mounting to our single sitting-room in Great Russell Street, we found, in the light of the sunshine that was streaming into the room, Kingston and his companion, both with coat and waistcoat removed, pounding away as hard as they could go at some difficult composition which they were trying over for the third time. The two artists, whom we had left with some misgiving in an attitude of veiled hostility towards each other, were now, as we discovered to our surprise, the closest friends, and, although the morning was well advanced, Kingston insisted that we should sit down and listen to one or two of the gems which they had been performing, and which were now repeated once more for our benefit--the most persuasive plea he urged being that in half an hour the public-houses would be open, and that we could then replenish our slender store of whisky which they had already exhausted.

Kingston had been for some time a special correspondent to the _Daily Telegraph_ in Berlin, and afterwards came to London as its foreign editor. Apart from his musical talent, he spoke with ease many foreign languages, and in this respect resembled Sala, whose facilities as a linguist were great, though, as he once confessed, he inclined by preference to the languages of the Latin races. As he himself picturesquely put it, “My tongue is hung in a Southern belfry.”

Of all the editors with whom my journalistic experience brought me into contact, the man who stood nearest to me as a friend was Professor Minto of the _Examiner_.

On the _Examiner_ I felt free and unfettered, free to choose any topic that pleased me, and to treat it in whatever way seemed to me best. I have always thought that Minto’s great powers as a critic of literature have never been sufficiently recognised. His separate volumes on the Poetic Writers and the Prose Writers of England contain some of the best criticism of our time, and, in especial, the section in the former devoted to the tragedies of Shakespeare has hardly been equalled in fineness of perception and in sustained eloquence of style.

Though in many ways characteristically Scotch, he had a liberal and supple mind, with a wide grasp and a generous outlook on political affairs, and an appreciation even of lighter works of literature that was hardly to be suspected from his grave and sober personality.

Very delightful were the little smoking evenings he instituted in the offices of the _Examiner_, which were then situated near Wellington Street in the Strand. There it was that I first met the late Bishop Creighton, who was at the time a constant contributor to the paper. Theodore Watts-Dunton was also a pretty regular visitor on these simple social occasions, and there, too, I met that strangest of accomplished scholars, “Student Williams,” who had long been known as an Oxford coach, and who was now devoting himself to a journalistic career.

It is strange to reflect what a complete revolution has overtaken English journalism in the period of thirty years that has passed since the time of which I am speaking. Literature and journalism have now almost parted company, and although the older tradition still honourably survives in individual instances, it is impossible not to be conscious that the function of a journalist, as it is now most widely accepted, has entirely changed its character.

The sort of article that was eagerly sought for then is now rarely welcomed, and when we recall the names of the men who wrote for the _Saturday Review_, and the great body of accomplished writers who lifted the _Pall Matt Gazette_ in its earlier days into a foremost position among English journals, it will readily be conceded that the revolution is already complete. Reporting has largely taken the place of criticism, and the modern newspaper office, ordered on popular lines, more nearly approaches day by day to a powerful agency for private inquiry and detection.