immed with joy and pride that they could not bear the
street, and were not fit to be seen there." He had purchased the
magazine at a shop in the Strand; and exactly two years afterwards, in
the younger member of a publishing firm who had called, at the chambers
in Furnival's Inn to which he had moved soon after entering the
gallery, with the proposal that originated _Pickwick_, he recognized the
person he had bought that magazine from, and whom before or since he had
never seen.

This interval of two years more than comprised what remained of his
career in the gallery and the engagements connected with it; but that
this occupation was of the utmost importance in its influence on his
life, in the discipline of his powers as well as of his character, there
can be no doubt whatever. "To the wholesome training of severe newspaper
work, when I was a very young man, I constantly refer my first
successes," he said to the New York editors when he last took leave of
them. It opened to him a wide and varied range of experience, which his
wonderful observation, exact as it was humorous, made entirely his own.
He saw the last of the old coaching-days, and of the old inns that were
a part of them; but it will be long before the readers of his living
page see the last of the life of either. "There never was," he once
wrote to me (in 1845), "anybody connected with newspapers who, in the
same space of time, had so much express and post-chaise experience as I.
And what gentlemen they were to serve, in such things, at the old
_Morning Chronicle_! Great or small it did not matter. I have had to
charge for half a dozen break-downs in half a dozen times as many miles.
I have had to charge for the damage of a great-coat from the drippings
of a blazing wax candle, in writing through the smallest hours of the
night in a swift-flying carriage-and-pair. I have had to charge for all
sorts of breakages fifty times in a journey without question, such being
the ordinary results of the pace which we went at. I have charged for
broken hats, broken luggage, broken chaises, broken harness--everything
but a broken head, which is the only thing they would have grumbled to
pay for."

Something to the same effect he said publicly twenty years later, on the
occasion of his presiding, in May, 1865, at the second annual dinner of
the Newspaper Press Fund, when he condensed within the compass of his
speech a summary of the whole of his reporting life. "I am no