book after many years, and while I find nearly all the comic parts admirable, some of the serious portions strike me as being so curiously stilted and bad that I can hardly bring myself to believe that Dickens touched them.  An affectionate student of his books can almost always account for the bad patches in Dickens by collating the novels with the letters and diary.  Much of the totally nauseating gush of the Brothers Cheeryble must have been turned out only by way of stop-gap; and there are passages in “Little Dorrit” which may have been done speedily enough by the author, but which no one of my acquaintance can reckon as bearable.  Dickens saw the danger of exhausting himself before he reached fifty-four years of age, and tried to repair damages inflicted by past excesses; but he was too late, and though “Edwin Drood” was quite in his best manner, he could not keep up the effort—­and we lost him.

As for the dismal hacks who sometimes call themselves journalists, I cannot grow angry with them; but they do test the patience of the most stolid of men.  To call them writers—­ecrivains—­would be worse than flattery; they are paper-stainers, and every fresh dribble of their incompetence shows how utterly written out they are.  Let them have a noble action to describe, or let them have a world-shaking event given them as subject for comment, the same deadly mechanical dulness marks the description and the article.  Look at an article by Forbes or McGahan or Burleigh—­an article wherein the words seem alive—­and then run over a doleful production of some complacent hack, and the astounding range that divides the zenith of journalism from the nadir may at once be seen.  The poor hack has all his little bundle of phrases tied up ready to his hand; but he has no brain left, and he cannot rearrange his verbal stock-in-trade in fresh and vivid combinations.  The old, old sentences trickle out in the old, old way.  Our friends, “the breach than the observance,” “the cynosure of all eyes,” “the light fantastic toe,” “beauty when unadorned,” “the poor Indian,” and all the venerable army come out on parade.  The weariful writer fills up his allotted space; but he does not give one single new idea, and we forget within a few minutes what the article pretended to say—­in an hour we have forgotten even the name of the subject treated.

As one looks around on the corps of writers now living, one feels inclined to ask the old stale question, “And pray what time do you give yourself for thinking?” The hurrying reporter or special correspondent needs only to describe in good prose the pictures that pass before his eye; but what is required of the man who stays at home and spins out his thoughts as the spider spins his thread?  He must take means to preserve his own freshness, or he grows more and more unreadable with a rapidity which lands him at last among the helpless, hopeless dullards; if he persists in expending the last remnants of his ideas, he may at last be reduced to such extremities