write the word might!-have risen to literary distinction. Dicky was the original discoverer -he kept the discovery to himself-of the pamphlet. He loved it of all ages, but he loved it most for practical purposes a hundred years old; for then it was sure to possess some of the graces of modern writing. He would transfer anything he pleased simply by copying it out. Now, in earlier work there was often a passage, a turn of thought, or a phrase, too majestic in its roundness, or too involved, for the modern scribe. In such cases, Dicky had all the trouble of taking the idea and writing it over again himself. But the pamphlet kept for fifty or a hundred years in the wood, so to speak, acquired a fullness, a mellowness, and a delicacy of flavour quite unknown in the ephemeral productions of the day. He felt safe even with pamphlets thirty years old. They were quite sure to have been written by a man whose age would be somewhere about forty, so that the probability was very much in favour of his having gone to a world where plagiarisms are not sharply looked after-where, indeed, such things are impossible. Armed with one of these, Dicky boldly dipped

his pen in the ink, and copied whole paragraphs, regardless of possible consequences.

On this day he wrote a careful and elaborate argument, from the Anglican point of view-i.e., from a modern pamphlet dated about the year 1843-in favour of Church Establishments. The writer of the pamphlet from which he cribbed, one of the Oxford movement of that date, had not yet become convinced of the desirability of Church freedom with a view to reducing the laity to Church discipline, and therefore advocated Church and State. His successors have learned better. Nor had he yet, as those of the following generation have done, taught himself that overweening respect for authority which enables the Ritualist to see a friend and certain protector in Rome. Therefore he talked about the "errors" of the Roman Catholic Church. Dicky modernized his work to suit what he understood to be the latest phase of thought. At the close of his argument he allowed himself a few phrases of a really eloquent piety, with texts which he found at the end of the pamphlet. They were of the kind he likedsonorous, well rounded, eminently Christian, and

dogmatic. When Dicky folded up his papers in two parcels that evening, addressing one to the printer of the Weekly Intelligence and the other to the printer of the Christian Clerk, he felt that he had done a good day's work, and earned the humble stipend which he was receiving for labours of such great importance. The one envelope was full of blasphemy against all authority, divine or worldly; the other was, as hotel advertisers say, "replete" with the sweetest, the most sentimental, the most pious adhesion to all constituted authority, and especially to the Anglican bishops.

It was then five o'clock, and it must not be supposed that the day's work had been conducted entirely without refreshment. Not so. A select circle, comprising half a dozen of the choicer spirits, were wont to meet at one, and after the simple dinner of a chop or a sausage, with half a pint of stout, discuss the more abstruse literary topics over pipes and gin-andwater. Those who were in funds sometimes carried on these Tusculan disputations with such ardour, and so long, as to be too late to return to the Museum, in which case they would find

their MSS. and the books from which they had last been stealing kept for them the next morning by their friends the attendants.

They were a seedy and generally a morose crew. Dicky alone among them preserved a cheerfulness which was mostly due to his splendid constitution. They were engaged in copying for scholars, in compiling for third-rate publishers, in inventing blood and thunder stories for the lowest periodicals, or, like Dicky himself, in writing for the papers which appeal to the class just removed from pauperdom. How they drifted into the calling of "letters" it is hard to say. Perhaps one or two of them had been gentlemen, and had been scholars. Possibly most of them had deserted the lower ranks of clerks, or begun, like Dicky, as ushers in commercial academies. Not one of them deserved better pay or higher consideration than he got; not one had a right to complain that he served a hard master, because all were such bad servants.

Among these friends Dicky drank a modest allowance-three glasses-and returned to his duties. It was the third glass which inspired

him with the happy thought of adding the final clauses of pious ejaculation above referred to. Perhaps it was the same glass which confused the keenness of his vision to a certain extent, and made it possible for him to commit the most fatal mistake of his life; for when he addressed the manuscript, folded and neatly tied up, by an inadvertence that he was destined to regret all his life, he sent off the packet destined for the radical and even atheistic Weekly Intelligence to the mild and religious Christian Clerk, while that intended for the Clerk was addressed to the Intelligence.

He then made the best of his way to the offices of Clerk and Intelligence, which were in two neighbouring streets, left his copy, marked "immediate," for the printer, and then began to think what he could do with himself till seven, the earliest hour possible for the commencement of a "night." Dicky especially disliked walking, because it wore out the heels of his boots, and yet he generally found himself condemned to pace the stony-hearted streets alone with his thoughts for nearly two hours every day, the time between the closing of the Mu