reporting it in some stale phrase which had been used by everybody.  This refusal to take the trouble to watch the presentment to the mind of anything which had been placed before it, and to reproduce it in its own lines and colours was, as he said, nothing but falsehood, and he maintained that the principal reason why people are so uninteresting is not that they have nothing to say.  It is rather that they will not face the labour of saying in their own tongue what they have to say, but cover it up and conceal it in commonplace, so that we get, not what they themselves behold and what they think, but a hieroglyphic or symbol invented as the representative of a certain class of objects or emotions, and as inefficient to represent a particular object or emotion as x or y to set forth the relation of Hamlet to Ophelia.  He would even exercise his children in this art of the higher truthfulness, and would purposely make them give him an account of something which he had seen and they had seen, checking them the moment he saw a lapse from originality.  Such was the Tory correspondent of the Gazette.

I ought to say, by way of apology for him, that in his day it signified little or nothing whether Tory or Whig was in power.  Politics had not become what they will one day become, a matter of life or death, dividing men with really private love and hate.  What a mockery controversy was in the House!  How often I have seen members, who were furious at one another across the floor, quietly shaking hands outside, and inviting one another to dinner!  I have heard them say that we ought to congratulate ourselves that parliamentary differences do not in this country breed personal animosities.  To me this seemed anything but a subject of congratulation.  Men who are totally at variance ought not to be friends, and if Radical and Tory are not totally, but merely superficially at variance, so much the worse for their Radicalism and Toryism.

It is possible, and even probable, that the public fury and the subsequent amity were equally absurd.  Most of us have no real loves and no real hatreds.  Blessed is love, less blessed is hatred, but thrice accursed is that indifference which is neither one nor the other, the muddy mess which men call friendship.

M’Kay—­for that was his name—­lived, as I have said, in Goodge Street, where he had unfurnished apartments.  I often spent part of the Sunday with him, and I may forestall obvious criticism by saying that I do not pretend for a moment to defend myself from inconsistency in denouncing members of Parliament for their duplicity, M’Kay and myself being also guilty of something very much like it.  But there was this difference between us and our parliamentary friends, that we always divested ourselves of all hypocrisy when we were alone.  We then dropped the stage costume which members continued to wear in the streets and at the dinner-table, and in which some of them even slept and said their prayers.