commission, if it be to be dreaded at all, is far more likely on
the part of some recreant camp-follower of a scattered, disunited,
and half-recognized profession, than when there is a public opinion
established in it, by the union of all classes of its members for
the common good: the tendency of which union must in the nature of
things be to raise the lower members of the press towards the
higher, and never to bring the higher members to the lower level.
I hope I may be allowed in the very few closing words that I feel a
desire to say in remembrance of some circumstances, rather special,
attending my present occupation of this chair, to give those words
something of a personal tone. I am not here advocating the case of
a mere ordinary client of whom I have little or no knowledge. I
hold a brief to-night for my brothers. 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. I have pursued the calling of a
reporter under circumstances of which many of my brethren at home
in England here, many of my modern 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 post-chaise and four, galloping
through a wild country, and 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 a pelting
rain, that I remember two goodnatured colleagues, who chanced to be
at leisure, held a pocket-handkerchief over my notebook, 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 together like so many sheep – kept in
waiting, say, until 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 wheelless carriage, with
exhausted horses and drunken postboys, and have got back in time
for publication, to be received with never-forgotten compliments by
the late Mr. Black, coming in the broadest of Scotch from the
broadest of hearts I ever knew.
Ladies and gentlemen, 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, very little the worse from long disuse. 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, taking an imaginary note of it all.