genial critics. I was once in the
lobby when our London Correspondent of a paper published in a large
manufacturing town came up to me. I had not seen him for some years.
After the usual inquiries, said he, "What a capital cutting that was in
the --- of your book!" "You are mistaken," said I; "the book was by so
and so." Our friend, very crest-fallen, immediately rushed off without
bidding us goodbye. Once upon a time one of them produced a great
sensation. Our readers will remember, when Lord John Russell dismissed
Lord Palmerston, what a cry was raised about German influences by a
certain morning print which seems to exist merely for the sake of
disgusting intelligent people with a righteous cause. A German paper was
referred to. Well, the gentleman to whom I have alluded was the
correspondent of that paper, and one day, in the absence of anything of
importance, he had manufactured the article very innocently out of the
extraordinary paragraphs in which the morning print aforesaid rejoices,
little dreaming, that in Parliament and out his letter would be quoted as
evidence of a deeply-laid conspiracy to weaken the power of Lord
Palmerston and undermine European liberty.

But I have not yet said who our London Correspondent is. The better
class of them I think are Parliamentary reporters. There was a paper
published in London kept alive merely by its Paris Correspondent. No
other paper had such a correspondent, or abounded in such extraordinary
tales and scandal. Yet the correspondent's plan was very simple. Every
new tale and drama which came out in Paris was worked up and sent to
London as a reality, that was all. In a less degree our London
Correspondent does the same, and in quiet country towns there is great
wonder and lifting up of hands, especially if, as was once the case, the
wrong letter is sent, and the Tory paper abounds with sneers at Lord
Derby and the squirearchy, a _contretemps_ which is avoided if the plan
of one London Correspondent be adopted, who supplies thirteen different
papers with the same letter at five shillings each--a plan, however, not
sanctioned by respectable papers, who pay a good price and get often a
good article, and for whose letters, if a little too highly coloured and
seasoned, the public taste is more to blame than the newspaper
proprietor, or his painstaking London Correspondent. I believe _the_ Mr.
Russell, of the _Times_, was the London Correspondent of one of th