r to-morrow, and occasionally are put to hard shifts.
Hence it is sub-editors have to be on their guard with their dealings
with them. Their powers of imagination and description are great. They
are prone to harrow up your souls with horrors that never existed; and as
they are paid by the line, a harsh prosaic brevity is by no means their
fault. Occasionally they take in the papers. Not long since a most
extraordinary breach of promise case went the round of the evening
papers, which was entirely a fiction of the penny-a-liners. Yet let us
not think disparagingly of them--of a daily newspaper no small part is
the result of their diligent research. And if they do occasionally
indulge in fiction, their fictions are generally founded on fact. The
reader, if he be a wise man, will smile and pass on--a dull dog will take
the matter seriously and make an ass of himself. For instance, only this
very year, there was a serious controversy about Disraeli's literary
piracies, as they were called in the _Manchester Examiner_. It appears a
paragraph was inserted in an obscure London journal giving an account of
an evening party at Mr. Gladstone's, at which Mr. Disraeli had been
present--an event just as probable as that the Bishop of Oxford would
take tea at Mr. Spurgeon's. Mr. Disraeli's remarks were reported, and
the paragraph--notwithstanding its glaring absurdity--was quoted in the
_Manchester Examiner_. Some acute reader remembered to have read a
similar conversation attributed to Coleridge, and immediately wrote to
the _Examiner_ to that effect. The letter was unhandsomely inserted with
a bold heading,--several letters were inserted on the same subject, and
hence, just because a poor penny-a-liner at his wits' end doctored up a
little par, and attributed a very old conversation to Mr. Disraeli, the
latter is believed in Cottonopolis guilty of a piracy, Cottonopolis being
all the more ready to believe this of Mr. Disraeli, as the latter
gentleman is at the head of a party not supposed to be particularly
attached to the doctrines of what are termed the Manchester School.
Really editors and correspondents should be up to these little dodges,
and not believe all they see in print.

I would also speak of another class of newspaper people--the newspaper
boy, agile as a lamp-lighter, sharp in his glances as a cat. The
newspaper boy is of all ages, from twelve to forty, but they are all
alike, very disorderly, and very ard