NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO

Dan Stuart once told us, that he did not remember that he ever deliberately walked into the Exhibition at Somerset House in his life.  He might occasionally have escorted a party of ladies across the way that were going in; but he never went in of his own head.  Yet the office of the Morning Post newspaper stood then just where it does now—­we are carrying you back, Reader, some thirty years or more—­with its gilt-globe-topt front facing that emporium of our artists’ grand Annual Exposure.  We sometimes wish, that we had observed the same abstinence with Daniel.

A word or two of D.S.  He ever appeared to us one of the finest tempered of Editors.  Perry, of the Morning Chronicle, was equally pleasant, with a dash, no slight one either, of the courtier.  S. was frank, plain, and English all over.  We have worked for both these gentlemen.

It is soothing to contemplate the head of the Ganges; to trace the first little bubblings of a mighty river;

  With holy reverence to approach the rocks,
  Whence glide the streams renowned in ancient song.

Fired with a perusal of the Abyssinian Pilgrim’s exploratory ramblings after the cradle of the infant Nilus, we well remember on one fine summer holyday (a “whole day’s leave” we called it at Christ’s Hospital) sallying forth at rise of sun, not very well provisioned either for such an undertaking, to trace the current of the New River—­Middletonian stream!—­to its scaturient source, as we had read, in meadows by fair Amwell.  Gallantly did we commence our solitary quest—­for it was essential to the dignity of a DISCOVERY, that no eye of schoolboy, save our own, should beam on the detection.  By flowery spots, and verdant lanes, skirting Hornsey, Hope trained us on in many a baffling turn; endless, hopeless meanders, as it seemed; or as if the jealous waters had dodged us, reluctant to have the humble spot of their nativity revealed; till spent, and nigh famished, before set of the same sun, we sate down somewhere by Bowes Farm, near Tottenham, with a tithe of our proposed labours only yet accomplished; sorely convinced in spirit, that that Brucian enterprise was as yet too arduous for our young shoulders.

Not more refreshing to the thirsty curiosity of the traveller is the tracing of some mighty waters up to their shallow fontlet, than it is to a pleased and candid reader to go back to the inexperienced essays, the first callow flights in authorship, of some established name in literature; from the Gnat which preluded to the AEneid, to the Duck which Samuel Johnson trod on.

In those days every Morning Paper, as an essential retainer to its establishment, kept an author, who was bound to furnish daily a quantum of witty paragraphs.  Sixpence a joke—­and it was thought pretty high too—­was Dan Stuart’s settled remuneration in these cases.  The chat of the day, scandle, but, above all, dress, furnished the material.  The length of no paragraph was to exceed seven lines.  Shorter they might be, but they must be poignant.