resulted from marks like fly's legs; the tremendous effects from a curve in the wrong place; not only troubled my waking hours, but reappeared before me in my sleep. When I had groped my way blindly through these difficulties, and had mastered the alphabet, which was an Egyptian temple in itself, there then appeared a procession of new horrors, called arbitrary characters-the most despotic characters I had ever known; who insisted, for instance, that the thing like the beginning of a cobweb meant expectation, that a pen-and-ink sky-rocket stood for disadvantageous. When I had fixed these wretches in my mind, I found that they had driven everything else out of it; then, beginning again, I forgot them; while I was picking them up, I dropped the other fragments of the system; in short, it was almost heart-breaking."

Occupying the chair at the second anniversary of the Newspaper Press Fund, on 20th May, 1865, and referring to his early reporting days, he said:

"I went into the gallery of the House of Commons as a parliamentary reporter when I was a boy not eighteen, and I left it-I can hardly believe the inexorable truth-nigh thirty years ago; and I have pursued the calling of a reporter under circumstances of which many of my brethren at home in England here-many of my brethren's successors-can form no adequate conception. I have often transcribed for the printer from my shorthand notes important public speeches in which the strictest accuracy was required,

and a mistake in which would have been to a young man severely compromising; writing on the palm of my hand by the light of a dark lantern in a postchaise and four, galloping through a wild country, through the dead of the night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour. The very last time I was at Exeter I strolled into the castle-yard there to identify, for the amusement of a friend, the spot on which I once 'took,' as we used to call it, an election speech of my noble friend Lord Russell, in the midst of a lively fight maintained by all the vagabonds in that division of the county, and under such pelting rain, that I remember two good-natured colleagues, who chanced to be at leisure, held a pocket-handkerchief over my note-book after the manner of a state canopy in an ecclesiastical procession. I have worn my knees by writing on them on the old back row of the old gallery of the old House of Commons; and I have worn my feet by standing to write in a preposterous pen in the old House of Lords, where we used to be huddled like so many sheep kept in waiting till the woolsack might want re-stuffing. Returning home from excited political meetings in the country to the waiting press in London, I do verily believe I have been upset in almost every description of vehicle known in this country. I have been, in my time, belated on miry by-roads towards the small hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a rickety carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken postboys, and have got back in time before publication,

to be received with never-forgotten compliments by Mr. Black, in the broadest of Scotch, coming from the broadest of hearts I ever knew. I mention these trivial things as an assurance to you that I never have forgotten the fascination of that old pursuit. The pleasure that I used to feel in the rapidity and dexterity of its exercise has never faded out of my breast. Whatever little cunning of hand or head I took to it, or acquired in it, I have so retained as that I fully believe I could resume it to-morrow. To this present year of my life, when I sit in this hall, or where not, hearing a dull speech-the phenomenon does occur-I sometimes beguile the tedium of the moment by mentally following the speaker in the old, old way; and sometimes, if you can believe me, I even find my hand going on the table-cloth. Accept these little truths as a confirmation of what I know, as a confirmation of my interest in this old calling. I verily believe, I am sure, that if I had never quitted my old calling, I should have been foremost and zealous in the interest of this institution, believing it to be a sound, a wholesome, and a good one."

"That there was no exaggeration in this statement," writes a personal friend,* "he proved in the course of that very year by giving a series of lessons in shorthand to a young man, a connection of his, when his fluency and perspicuity were found to be as great as ever." To the same writer he once told a

In the Observer, 12th June, 1870.

curious anecdote of his reporting days:-"The late Earl of Derby, then Lord Stanley, had on some important occasion made a grand speech in the House of Commons. This speech, of immense length, it was found necessary to compress, but so admirably had its pith and marrow been given in the Morning Chronicle, that Lord Stanley sent to the office, requesting that the gentleman who had reported it would wait upon him at his residence in CarltonHouse Terrace, that he might then and there take down the speech in its entirety from his lordship's lips, Lord Stanley being desirous of having a perfect transcript of it. The reporter was Charles Dickens. He attended, took down the speech, and received Lord Stanley's compliments on his work. Many years after, Mr. Dickens, dining for the first time with a friend in Carlton-House Terrace, found the aspect of the dining-room strangely familiar to him, and on making inquiries, discovered that the house had previously belonged to Lord Derby, and that that was the very room in which he had taken down Lord Stanley's speech." It is understood that our author practised reporting in the Law Courts before going to the Houses of Parliament.

The first paper he obtained an engagement on was The True Sun, with the managers of which he soon became noted for the succinctness of his reports, and the judicious, though somewhat ruthless, style with which he cut down unnecessary verbiage, displaying the substance to the best advantage, and exemplifying

the well-known maxim of Perry, the famous chief of the Morning Chronicle, that "Speeches cannot be made long enough for the speakers, nor short enough for the readers."

Remaining for a brief period on the staff of The True Sun, he seceded to the Mirror of Parliament, which had started with the express object of reporting the debates verbatim. Mr. Barrow, Dickens's uncle, was the conductor; its downfall, however, was rapid, as it only existed two sessions.

Through his father's influence he was next secured an appointment on the Morning Chronicle, a newspaper originally established on Whig principles, by Woodfall, in 1769. By a remarkable coincidence, three of its chief parliamentary reporters afterwards attained to eminent positions. The late Lord Chancellor Campbell commenced his career on its staff; on his resignation William Hazlitt (the celebrated essayist) supplied his place, who was in turn succeeded by Mr. Charles Dickens.

Whilst Dickens was reporting for the Morning Chronicle, it fell in the way of his duty to go down into Devonshire, where Lord John Russell-who had accepted the post of Secretary of State in the new Melbourne cabinet-was seeking re-election (May, 1835) from his old constituency. As his Lordship had been instrumental in getting Peel and the tories out of office, his constituents resented the act by returning another member in his place. It is to this noisy election that Dickens alludes in the extract