“First of all realise it, as the Yankees say, that neither a government nor a public will want either of us. When the wires have told that the Grand-Duke Strong-grog-enofif was assassinated last night, or that Prince Damisseisen has divorced his wife and married a milliner, Downing Street and Printing-house Square will agree that all the moral reflections the events inspire can be written just as well in Piccadilly as from a palace on the Neva, or a den on the Danube. Gladstone will be the better pleased, and take another farthing off ‘divi-divi,’ or some other commodity in general use and of universal appreciation. Don’t you agree to that?” “I don’t know.” “You don’t know,” drawled he out, in mimicry of my tone: “are you so conceited about your paltry craft that you fancy the world cares for the manner of it, or that there is really any excellence in the cookery? Not a bit of it, man. We are bores both of us; and what’s worse--far worse--we are bygones. Can’t you see that when a man buys a canister of prepared beef-tea, he never asks any one to pour on the boiling water--he brews his broth for himself? This is what people do with the telegrams. They don’t want you or me to come in with the kettle: besides, all tastes are not alike; one man may like his Bombardment of Charleston weaker; another might prefer his Polish Massacre more highly flavoured. This is purely a personal matter. How can you suit the capricious likings of the million, and of the million--for that’s the worst of it--the million that don’t want you? What a practical rebuke, besides, to prosy talkers and the whole long-winded race, the sharp, short tap of the telegraph! Who would listen to a narrative of Federal finance when he has read ‘Gold at 204--Chase rigged the market’? Who asks for strategical reasons in presence of ‘Almighty whipping--lost eighty thousand--Fourth Michigan skedaddled ‘? “How graphic will description become--how laconic all comment! You will no more listen to one of the old circumlocutionary conversers than you would travel by the waggon, or make a voyage in a collier. “How, I would ask, could the business of life go on in an age active as ours if all coinage was in copper, and vast transactions in money should be all conducted in the base metal? Imagine the great Kings of Finance counting over the debts of whole nations in penny-pieces, and you have at once a picture of what, until a few years ago, was our intellectual condition. How nobly Demosthenic our table-talk will be!--how grandly abrupt and forensic! “There is nothing, however, over which I rejoice more than in the utter extinction of the anecdote-mongers--the insufferable monsters who related Joe Millers as personal experiences, or gave you their own versions of something in the morning papers. Thank heaven they are done for!