had recently been the object of a long-resounding letter in the
"Times." The diplomatist who sat opposite me spoke freely of the
Munster episode, which was then entertaining the whole of Europe, save
the person most concerned.

"M. de Blowitz," said he, "is our only peer. But there should be honor
even among thieves. He has 'cooked Count Munster's goose.'"

"Yes," I replied, "but with fuel of Count Munster's own providing."

"Quite so," he continued; "but of course we are paid to deny just such
things as this. And I have heard of licensed jesters, but the world
has come to a pretty pass if we are to be at the mercy of licensed
truth-tellers. What will become, this side of the Orient, of our
profession?"

"I agree with you," interrupted our host; "but what does it matter so
only diplomacy may be the bay-leaves of poets, and you may have time
to take the world into your confidence in verse?"

This estimate, implied in the ambassador's somewhat cynical words,
has always been shared by all M. de Blowitz's _confreres_. It would
be more than amusing, it would be curiously instructive, to
corroborate this anecdote by comparison with the hundred others that
tremble in the ink of my pen. But fortunately it is many years before
"Blowitziana" will be written, while now there are Hawaii and
Panama and the Papal ambassador to the United States to occupy our
attention. Yet because of the existence of just this assurance in
the foreign offices of all the European powers, it seems necessary to
set the average reader on his guard against a natural error. What
it all comes to is this--M. Jules Simon has said it--"Newspapers are
better served than kings and peoples."

Everybody has been recently talking of an extraordinary scheme of M.
de Blowitz for the reformation of journalism. That article, crackling
with anathema against the ignorance and irresponsibility of most
modern journalism, and warm with generous and high notions of what
constitutes the duty and privilege of the journalist, had about it a
surprising flavor of detachment and idealism which recalled the famous
Utopian schemes familiar in the pedantic idiom of scholars. It was a
dream, a warning--a vision of a kind of journalistic "City of God."
But the air of that city is, after all, the air of the world in which
M. de Blowitz, the most surprisingly unprofessional of men, seems
eternally to live.

Not that he is always an idealist. He was not, for instance, when,
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