in twenty is capable. His reports were not merely faithful as to facts, they were elegant as to language; for, having a fine taste of his own, the speaker always appeared to advantage in the dress in which Proby clothed him. The public, who know nothing of the details of a newspaper, have a false notion of the mode in which reports are given. They imagine that they are taken in short-hand, and then faithfully transcribed from notes of the reporter. Short-hand is, however, little used by good reporters, except for striking passages of a speech which are to be given verbatim. Were the whole of a long debate in the House of Commons to be given from shorthand notes, the quantity would fill a paper three times as large as The Times, and neither the speaker nor the reader would be the gainer. Verbatim speeches would contain a great deal of useless verbiage; and, in many cases, much nonsense, which the speakers themselves would be sorry to see in print. Reporters generally take the leading points of a debate; and, when they write out their report, they fill up the chasms partly from recollection, and partly by the necessary connexion of words which the passages themselves supply, and which are the more or less those which the speaker would have used according to the intimacy of the reporter with his style. In France, where the newspapers are much smaller than in England, the reporters are compelled to confine themselves still more to the leading passages of a speech; and the consequence is, that a French debate on any subject of importance, always appears more spirited in the French journals, than a debate in the House of Lords or the House of Commons does in the English papers.

The

Moniteur is the only paper in France in which the debates are given at much length. In order to make it answer the purpose of the proprietors of the paper to report the speeches more fully than the other journals, the government subscribes for as many copies as there are peers and deputies, each of whom receives a paper gratuitously. It is absolutely necessary that there should be something of this kind, as there is not in France, as in England, a paper specially devoted to reports of the sittings of the Chambers; and, without this mode of proceeding, there

would be nothing like a work of reference for debates on subjects of local interest, which the papers generally pay no attention to; but which, for the members themselves, and for a portion of the public, have great importance.

Proby was not a short-hand reporter. I do not know whether he could even write three words in shorthand; yet I never saw better reports, or more faithful ones, where it was necessary to give the very words used by the speaker. The editor of the Alfred newspaper, which was started many years ago, and had but a short existence, and who was for some time editor of the Sun, had a similar facility. There never were better reporters than these persons, but they were both equally ignorant of the principles of short-hand; or, if acquainted with them, they never adopted them. Such was the facility with which Proby wrote, and so great were the resources of his memory, that, on the occasion of the death of George IV., he wrote a history of the life of that monarch, which occupied twelve columns of a newspaper, between eight in the morning and two in the afternoon, and it rarely occurred that any revision of his manuscript was necessary. The appearance of Proby when he was a reporter of the Chronicle, was more than respectable. There was something of the true old English gentleman about it. As he walked to the House of Lords, with his umbrella under his arm (for, like Philippe in his days of citizen-kingship, Proby always carried an umbrella in fine as in foul weather), his portly figure and his powdered hair gave him the look of a peer of the old school. His rubicund countenance indicated good living and good humour, and there was something aristocratic even in the tone of his voice.

sluices are opened, is seen even where prudence and economy attempt to stem its fury; where no effort is made to weaken its force by letting it off through side-channels, it rolls like a torrent, and carries all before it. Proby was not the man to make head against the storm by energy, or to submit partially to privation until its fury had been spent: When the breeze lulled, he revelled; when it blew fresh, he was buffeted by the waves without rudder or canvass to reach a port. I had lost sight of him for some months, when, suddenly, his portly figure stood before me-but how altered in dress! The umbrella was still under his arm, but the twenty-shilling silk protector had been exchanged for the secondhand sixpenny cotton full of holes. His hair was still whitened, not powdered, for flour begged from some scullery-maid had supplied the former luxury of pulverised starch. He wore a hat which had once been that of a gentleman, but which had at last been thrown aside by some hackneycoach-driver as unfit for further use. Coat, waistcoat, and trousers, were all of canvass, scarcely finer than the mainsail of a coal-brig; and in his shoes, which, for months, probably, had been strangers to a visit from Warren's jet, bits of rope looked forth from sockets which had once been graced by black silk. Yet the face of Proby was as round, and his general appearance almost as plump, as in his days of prosperity. There was neither despondency nor humility in his manner; and, in asking me for employment, he made no allusion to his forlorn state. Having told him that I would see what I could do for him, and required his address, he replied that he was for the moment domiciled at the workhouse of Norwood. The workhouse! The fumes of coffee and the delightful reeking of hot rolls, exchanged for water-gruel or pea-broth; the rump-steak with its garnish of horse-radish, flanked with potatoes and brown-stout, followed by the juice of the Oporto grape, replaced by suetdumpling and sour small-beer; and the social, the inspiring meal of tea and toast, existing only in remembrance, to make still less savoury the workhouse-supper of bad bread and worse cheese!

I did not allow Proby

quaintance with a good piece of beef and a glass of port wine, and had given him an assurance that he should hear from me in a few days. In a week he was sitting in my room dressed in a suit of black, which I had enabled him to purchase by an advance of salary, and with his paste and scissors before him in all the dignity of sub-editorship. For three years the old gentleman performed his duties with diligence and zeal. He was regular at his work, cheerful in the execution of it, and the life of conversation when the work was done. Sickness, however, came over him; and, for three months, he kept his bed with an attack of dropsy. He recovered, in spite of the doctors; and as if for the purpose of giving them the lie, for they had condemned him to death. Ile resumed his editorial duties, but not with his former vigour ; and, in a few months, he was again in bed with another attack of the same disease. During his illness his appetite never forsook him; he ate a pound of meat, and drank a pint of wine daily; and, within two hours of his death, drank a large basin of tea, and ate two rounds of toast. When I last visited him in company with the physician whom I had called in, he was breathing heavily, and spoke with difficulty. The doctor felt his pulse; and, in what he intended to be a whisper, said to me, "It is all over; he has not twelve hours to live!" We quitted, after having given instructions to the nurse to make the necessary preparations for death; but we had not been gone ten minutes, when Proby, rousing himself, and speaking with a firm voice, said, "Nurse, I heard what the doctor said, but he was never more mistaken; I cheated him the last time, and I shall do so this." These were his last words; in half an hour he was a corpse. Brother, sister, son, daughter, cousin, or relation, there was none to cheer him in sickness, or to weep for him when gone; but, oh, how merciful had God been where there were no earthly ties of love and affection! His illness was almost without pain, and death came upon him amid the hopes and expectations of life. The living poverty of Proby may have excited scorn and ridicule, but kings may envy the smooth and quiet passage of his death. Another of my reporters was C.

cམང་ of

King's Bench. He had been a shepherd's boy; but, by study and perseverance, had lifted himself out of the sphere in which he was born; and, grappling boldly with society, had forced it to do him justice. The shepherd's boy attracted the notice of the bishop of the diocess in which he lived, and was sent to college as a servitor. Here he soon distinguished himself by his acquirements and the originality of his genius, and carried off those honours of which even Sir Robert Peel has reason to be proud. But C, who, on the quiet of a college professorship, might have soon attained all the worldly wealth which such a framed mind as his could desire, was anxious to try his fortune on a larger stage. He left college, and entered boldly into public life. Alas! he had not learned at college the arts and contrivances by which men move in the world until they find an opportunity of pushing others from their seats. The days are gone, if they ever did exist, when scholars could pay for their dinner with a Latin verse, or purchase a night's lodging by the recital of a Greek ode. C- found that the talents which had won the highest honours of the university from rich and titled competitors, would not procure for him the esteem and confidence which he had believed they would command. He was often dinnerless, and bedless, and shirtless, and but for a magazine he must have starved. In a moment of depression he sent an account of his wanderings and his misfortunes to a monthly periodical. His style was beautiful his

tale was

affecting. He had drained the cup of poverty to its dregs, and had been the unarmed victim of the beastly pride and insulting insolence of the uneducated, or half-educated, mass. What indignity was there that he had not experienced? What privations that he had not undergone? Poor Chad even stood at the bar before an upstart county justice, and heard an order given for his committal to prison in virtue of the Vagrant Act. Oh! what a burst of eloquence was that with which the poor student met the appalling insult; with what glorious dignity he bearded the heartless wretch, and compelled him to recall the sentence that he had pronounced! Ten times, at least, have I

read the speech and admired it. It must be eloquence, indeed, which can reach the heart of a coarse-minded man, and make him ashamed of an unworthy act. The publication of C's struggles brought him not only the usual magazine remuneration, but, within a few days, an anonymous letter was received for him, addressed according to the signature that he had given to his article under cover to the editor, enclosing a cheque for 201. on a London banker; and desiring that, if he should ever be in want, he might, without scruple, apply at the same place, but without seeking to know the name of the donor. C- took the 201. but never applied again, for shortly afterwards he was in the receipt of a regular income as a reporter. He entered himself as a student of -Inn, with the intention of qualifying himself for the bar, but some domestic misfortunes assailed him, and he was unable to pay up his terms. Whilst in the height of his pecuniary difficulties, he called, by mere chance, one day at the office of the magazine to which he had sent the relation alluded to, and found a letter, which had been lying there nearly six months, the publisher being ignorant of his address. It was from his unknown friend, requesting that he would call on a certain person in the city. As C-, looking at the date of the letter, did not see that there would be much good in complying with the instructions that it contained, I offered to go for him. The person referred to was a highly respectable merchant. He told me that his brother, who resided in the country, had been deeply interested in C's communication in the magazine, and was most anxious to serve him if he should still be in want of assistance. I did not, of course, conceal C's position from the brother of this benevolent man. In a few weeks his terms were paid up; and when he was called to the bar, his generous friend, who no longer concealed himself, paid the expenses and was present at the feast. kindness did not cease here. enabled C to take convenient chambers, and to provide for his support, after having relinquished his connexion with the press, as he was compelled to do in order to devote himself to practice.

His

He

noon to the inviolable privacy of his apartment. But this period of diurnal retirement had gradually changed its destination. It had originally been set apart for the purpose of intellectual cultivation; but idleness had marked and appropriated it as her own. And with his person enveloped in a cumbrous wrapper, a book spread out before him, his shaving and writing materials disposed upon one table, and his tea and rolls upon another, the reverend gentleman might be detected, morning after morning, seated at the window of his apartment, and occupied in reconnoitring every object that was passing in the street below, from behind the scanty muslin curtain, till his dilatory breakfast was dismissed, and the protracted operations of his toilet were completed. In the days of his bloom-but that was more than twenty years anterior to the time I am writing of-be had been a very favourite partner at all the balls and dances of the neighbourhood, and was rather a distinguished object of female jealousy and speculation. The curious eye might still discover in his manner and his habiliments the lingering signs of his successes in this way. The immaculate brightness of his shoes, the orderly arrangement of his gray and scanty curls, the neat plaiting of his stock and shirt-frill, indicated, even at the extreme middle-age of fifty-five, an unwillingness to believe that his powers to charm had become impaired, and that his personal attractions had been involved in the waste and ruin of his intellectual accomplishments. He would fain have kept his place among the young, the gay, the gallant, and the fair. But another and another generation had sprung up around him. They had insisted on his receiving his due share of the respect and reverence which they rendered his contemporaries. They had modestly retreated from all his tenders of equality; they had gently urged the necessity of his migrating from the dance to the cardtable; and they had at last succeeded in promoting his loath humility from their giddy and unworthy society to the honour of being classed as the agreeable companion of their mammas, and the sedulous attendant on their

aunts. Such was the gentleman whose soul had suddenly been endowed with a capacity of appreciating the charms, and sympathising with the virtues, of Miss Simmons. But at a certain time of life, such attachments very readily arise under the cheering prospect of some substantial, personal advantages. Miss Edgeworth tells us that "Tenterden steeple was the cause of Goodwin Sands."' And the steeple of East Nore was indisputably the exciting cause of the love which had been enkindled in the breast of the Rev. Samson Brett. My brother informed me, in a letter, that he had witnessed the birth and developement of this passion. The process was most orthodox. The attachment was sown, and sprung up, and very rapidly attained maturity, during a conversation at the Alresford ball, as Miss Simmons delivered her favourable responses to the following interrogatories of her clerical admirer:

"I think, madam," said Mr. Brett, on that eventful evening," that your friend, Mr. Howard, is the patron of the valuable living of East Nore?"

"He is, sir, and also of many others of inferior or superior emolument." "Pray, madam, what may be the age of the present incumbent?"

"Really, sir, I cannot speak decidedly on the subject. I should not like, in such a matter, to have my statement quoted; but I rather think I have heard that he is eighty-four."

Eighty-four, indeed! Pray, madam, had Mr. Edward Howard any private tutor?"

"Oh, dear, no, sir! Till Mr. Edward went to Oxford, Mr. Ioward took the entire direction of his son's education on himself."

"I presume, madam, that your highly respected friend has some nephew in orders, or some niece who is married to a gentleman in the church?"

"I have never, sir, understood Mr. Howard to have any such connexions."

"Whom, then, madam, should you conceive likely to succeed to the rectory of East Nore, on the demise of the present extremely aged and infirm incumbent ?"

66

Really, sir, I do not believe that