Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/545

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In October last, we did ourselves the immortal credit of recording, at an enormous expense, and by dint of exertions unparalleled in the history of periodical publications, the proceedings of the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Every Thing, which in that month held its first great half-yearly meeting, to the wonder and delight of the whole empire. We announced, at the conclusion of that extraordinary and most remarkable report, that when the second meeting of the society should take place, we should be found again at our post renewing our gigantic and spirited endeavors, and once more making the world ring with the accuracy, authenticity, immeasurable superiority, and intense remarkability of our account of its proceedings. In redemption of this pledge, we caused to be dispatched, per steam, to Oldcastle, at which place this second meeting of the society was held on the 20th instant, the same superhumanly endowed gentleman who furnished the former report, and who—gifted by nature with transcendent abilities, and furnished by us with a body of assistants scarcely inferior to himself—has forwarded a series of letters, which for faithfulness of description, power of language, fervor of thought, happiness of expression, and importance of subject-matter, have no equal in the epistolary literature of any age or country. We give this gentleman's correspondence entire, and in the order in which it reached our office.

", Thursday night, half-past eight.

"When I left New Burlington Street this evening in the hackney cabriolet, number four thousand two hundred and eighty-five, I experienced sensations as novel as they were oppressive. A sense of importance of the task I had undertaken; a consciousness that I was leaving London, and stranger still, going somewhere else; a feeling of loneliness, and a sensation of jolting quite