now, and I am obliged to add
Paris to my residence! Great heavens," said he, throwing up his long
arms, "where will this tremendous circulation stop! Who knows but that I
shall have to add Vienna and Rome to my whereabouts? If the worst comes
to the worst, New York, also, may fall into my clutches, and only the
Rocky Mountains may be able to stop my progress!" Those days in Paris
with him were simply tremendous. We dined at all possible and impossible
places together. We walked round and round the glittering court of the
Palais Royal, gazing in at the windows of the jewellers' shops, and all
my efforts were necessary to restrain him from rushing in and ordering a
pocketful of diamonds and "other trifles," as he called them; "for,"
said he, "how can I spend the princely income which Smith allows me for
editing the Cornhill, unless I begin instantly somewhere?" If he saw a
group of three or four persons talking together in an excited way, after
the manner of that then riant Parisian people, he would whisper to me
with immense gesticulation: "There, there, you see the news has reached
Paris, and perhaps the number has gone up since my last accounts from
London." His spirits during those few days were colossal, and he told me
that he found it impossible to sleep, "for counting up his subscribers."

I happened to know personally (and let me modestly add, with some degree
of sympathy) what he suffered editorially, when he had the charge and
responsibility of a magazine. With first-class contributors he got on
very well, he said, but the extortioners and revilers bothered the very
life out of him. He gave me some amusing accounts of his
misunderstandings with the "fair" (as he loved to call them), some of
whom followed him up so closely with their poetical compositions, that
his house (he was then living in Onslow Square) was never free of
interruption. "The darlings demanded," said he, "that I should re-write,
if I could not understand their ---- nonsense and put their halting
lines into proper form." "I was so appalled," said he, "when they set
upon me with their 'ipics and their ipecacs,' that you might have
knocked me down with a feather, sir. It was insupportable, and I fled
away into France." As he went on, waxing drolly furious at the
recollection of various editorial scenes, I could not help remembering
Mr. Yellowplush's recommendation, thus characteristically expressed:
"Take my advice, honrabble sir,--listen to a humb