206 THE PRESS. 



it nothing more than an every-day business — so every 

 day indeed, that though failure in it would be attended 

 with blame, success is not accounted worthy of any of 

 the praise of merit. 



In the apartment — and it is sometimes neither a very 

 large nor a very wholesome apartment — where the re- 

 ports are written out, it may happen that there are ten 

 individuals all writing at the same instant ; and so 

 mingling their voices in jokes, tales, inquiries after 

 quotations, and so breaking the eloquence with pauses 

 for tankards of ale, and basins of tea, and mutton chops, 

 and German sausages, and all other materials for sup- 

 porting and strengthening the carnal man, that it would 

 puzzle all the conjurors in the world, except those 

 conjurors at the waving of whose wands the printed 

 eloquence makes its appearance, to find out how any 

 work of any kind could be done amid a confusion of 

 sound and of circumstances so perfectly Babylonian. 

 But it seems that if there be a stamina in the mmd, and 

 if the spur of necessity be apphed to it with sufficient 

 smartness, it can not only work, but work as orderly 

 as a mathematician and as strongly as a giant, even 

 when circumstances seem the least favourable for its 

 exercise. Notwithstanding all the wit, all the ribaldry, 

 and all the replenishing which the exhaustion of such 

 steam-engine-hke labour requires, each of them con- 

 trives, at the end of every minute or two, to toss from 

 him a slip of paper, so carefully written, that it requires 

 no future correction ; and so close to the subject, that 

 he of whose speech it forms a part has no disposition to 

 quarrel with it. In consequence of this promptitude 

 and division of labour, it very often happens that 

 before a parliamentary orator has got half way to his 

 peroration the editor or other director, is reading in 

 print the opening part of his speech, and cudgelling 

 his editorial intellect as to how he may give it effect 

 or answer, according as it happens to fall in or not 

 fall in with the view which it pleases or suits his edi- 

 torial ardour or his editorial policy to take of the 

 matter at issue. 



