Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/464

12, 1860.] could have done that. At the same time, I certainly did inform F. that I had it upon excellent authority, that there was scarcely an instance upon record of any great actor or actress who had not upon his or her first appearance made a complete break-down. The preliminary failure seemed to be the inevitable condition of ultimate success. Surely, if this theory were correct, I was entitled to look forward to the highest offices in the state.

Ambition had fairly fastened upon my mind, and I soon found that the simple pleasures which had before been sufficient to afford me contentment had now utterly lost their savour. A few days after the drive home from Mrs. Smith’s I was fairly overwhelmed by the weight of public affairs. There was but one moment of intense happiness for me in the day, and that was when the various newspapers were placed on the breakfast table in the morning. And these were the men who guided the public opinion of the country! The paltry scribblers! I could have done better whilst I was shaving. There was a total want of earnestness about them which disgusted, whilst it surprised, me. Their chief effort seemed to be to make a series of low jokes upon matters of the gravest importance to the destinies of the world; or, in the absence of any true and fixed ideas upon the subjects on which they were writing, to pile up one rhetorical phrase upon another. The partisan writers one could see through, and despise. The miserable tools were simply doing the dirty work for which they were hired—but here were men who affected to be expressing the honest convictions of their minds. One or two articles which I addressed under cover to the editor of a very leading journal were treated with perfect disregard. Miserable man! What a chance he was throwing away! In these papers—they were upon the extension of the suffrage to lodgers—I had endeavoured to combine the sparkling epigrammatic vein of, with the sarcasm of , and the robust common-sense of —not as I flatter myself wholly in vain. The editor burked them; but, of course, had he permitted them to see the light, there was an end for ever of the painful efforts of his hired band of literary gladiators.

There was clearly nothing for it but to take the political world boldly by the horns. I would obtain a seat in the House, and when once there, I would see if a man could not run a clear and