One meets with curious characters among the gentlemen of the Press. I recall the memory of one who was often to be seen in Fleet Street at the time I was in Mr. Cassell’s employ. He was fair-haired, short and stout in figure, very good-natured, with an amount of cheek only equalled by his ignorance. Originally, I think he had been a printer, till his ambition soon led him to fly at higher game, and under a military _nom-de-plume_ he compiled several handbooks of popular games—games of which, by the bye, he knew as little as a Hottentot—and, I believe, came to be the sporting correspondent of a London paper—a position he held at the time of his death. For statements that were rather unreliable he had a capacity which almost bordered on the sublime. On one occasion he walked up Ludgate Hill with an acquaintance of my own, and nodded familiarly to certain individuals. That was Dickens, he said to my friend, after one of these friendly encounters. Of another he explained, that was Thackeray, and so on. Unfortunately, however, my friend knew that the individual thus pointed was engaged as a bookseller’s assistant in the Row. Once when I happened to meet him he was rather seedy, which he accounted for to me by the remark that he had been dining with a lord—a statement about as true as the generality of his remarks. He was very good-natured—it was impossible to offend him—and wrote touching poems in cheap journals about this “fog-dotted earth,” which never did anybody any harm so far as I was aware of. He was one of the numerous tribe who impose on publishers by their swagger till they are found out. Another of the same class was a gentleman of a higher station and with scholarly pretensions. On one occasion he served me rather a scurvy trick. I had published a volume of sketches of British statesmen. One of the characters, a very distinguished politician, died soon after. My gentleman at that time was engaged to write biographical sketches of such exalted personages when they died, and accordingly he wrote an article which appeared the next day in one of the morning papers. On reading it, I found it was almost word for word the sketch which I had written in my own book, without the slightest acknowledgment. On my remonstrating, he complained that the absence of acknowledgment was quite accidental. Owing to the hurry in which he wrote, he had quite forgotten to mention my name, and if I would say nothing about it, he would do me a good service at the first opportunity. My friend failed to do so. Indeed, I may say that as a literary man his career was somewhat of a failure, though he managed for a time to secure appointments on good newspapers, and became connected with more than one or two distinguished firms of publishers. He was known to many, yet I never heard any one say a good word on his behalf.