ickmansworth when
Dawson died. He had suffered for some years, though he did not know it,
from an aneurism of the aorta, and the bursting of the aneurism into the
larynx was the cause of death. He used to say that he should pray to be
taken suddenly and to be spared the misery of a prolonged deathbed. He
had his wish, for it was all over in a few minutes and was absolutely
painless. I was staying with a chum of mine in his chambers in Dane's
Inn--long since gone the way of all stone, bricks and mortar. My host
came in with a newspaper and laid it on the table before me with his
finger on a cross-headed paragraph, "Death of George Dawson, M.A."
Nothing in all my experience had ever hit me so before, and whatever
may be held in reserve for me, nothing can ever so profoundly affect me
again. The whole world went dark and empty--George Dawson dead! He had
been my man of men, for years my dearest friend and helper, my Moses in
the spiritual wilderness through which it is the doom of every young and
ardent soul to travel, and with his going, everything seemed blank and
waste.

If you search all the professions round, you will not find one in
which men display such an extraordinary divergence of intellect and
acquirement as you will if you turn to journalism. There are men
employed in that craft who are better qualified for Cabinet rank than
half the men who ever hold it, and there are, or used to be in my time,
hundreds of intelligences as purely mechanical as if they had been born
to be hodmen. With one of the latter species I was officially associated
for a year. He is now dead and no truth can hurt his feelings any more,
but I think he was about as ignorant and self-satisfied an ass as I can
remember to have encountered anywhere. There was one thing to be said
for him: he had mastered the intricacies of Pitman's shorthand system
and wrote it almost to perfection. You might rely upon him to get
down in his note-book every word he heard, or thought he heard, but
in transcription he sometimes achieved a most extraordinary and
unlooked-for effect, as for example: A meeting of the Licensed
Victuallers' Association was held in the lower grounds at Aston, and
Mr Newdigate--the member for North Warwickshire--presided over it, and
during the annual address--what else the right honourable gentleman had
to say I have long since forgotten--he wound up by quoting a verse from
Lord Tennyson's "Lady Clara Vere de Vere ":--

"Howe'