ter--Archibald Forbes--Out of Work--
Edmund Yates and _The World_--The Hangman-Human Oddities--
A Mislaid Cheque--Hero Worship--Three Stories of Carlyle--
Journalism.

For two or three bright and happy months I acted as George Dawson's
amanuensis after a rather curious and unusual fashion. In his unclerical
suit of Irish homespun and his beaded slippers, with a well-blacked clay
between his lips, he would roam up and down the Turkey carpet of the
editorial room and talk about some topic of the day, and in that fashion
he would make his daily leader. "Now," he would say, "take that to your
own room and get as much as you can of it into a column." I made no
notes, for I had a verbal memory in those days like a steel rat-trap.
But I used to go away charged sometimes with matter enough for a
newspaper budget, or nearly, and it was my business to condense and
select from this material that which seemed worthiest of preservation.
I offer here a fragment or two of the kind of thing he used to say at
these times. Talking of Disraeli, whom he hated vehemently, he said:
"The man has been writing all his life of the great Asian mystery
without guessing that he is the greatest Asian mystery alive. His
politics are romantic, his romances are political, and he himself is
a fiction founded on fact." Of another person whom I will not name, he
said: "You put the man into a book as you put a sponge into a bucket.
You take him out and squeeze him, and he returns the stream uncoloured.
He is a sort of _Half Hours with the Best Authors_, bound in man's skin;
he is intellectually impotent, he never begot an idea."

But he could be as generous in praise as savage in condemnation, and his
occasional lapses into tenderness of mood were very sweet and touching.
I recall one night at the Church of the Saviour, after his return from
a holiday in Rome, when he told us how he had purposely lost himself in
the viler quarters of the city. The noon-day sun beat down, eliciting
abominable stenches and revealing, without compromise, the ugly squalors
of the region. He walked on right into the country, strolled on the
Campagna, and at night-fall regained the city by something like the same
route he had chosen in leaving it. The garish sun was down. The evening
dews had laid the foul odours. The moon was at the full. Every ugliness
was turned to beauty. Vile things were transfigured in that softening
light. "Christianity," he said, "is the