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ON HIS WAY THROUGH THE WORLD 277
when there was gold in plenty in his pocket, and never-failing
applause for his songs.
When Pendennis and his friends wrote in this newspaper, it was
impertinent enough, and many men must have heard the writers
laugh at the airs which they occasionally thought proper to assume.
The tone which they took amused, annoyed, tickled, was popular.
It was continued, and, of course, caricatured by their successors.
They worked for very moderate fees : but paid themselves by impertinence,
and the satisfaction of assailing their betters. Three
or four persons were reserved from their abuse ; but somebody was
sure every week to be tied up at their post, and the public made
sport of the victim's contortions. The writers were obscure
barristers, ushers, and college men, but they had omniscience at
their pen's end, and were ready to lay down the law on any given
subject—to teach any man his business, were it a bishop in his
pulpit, a Minister in his place in the House, a captain on his
quarter-deck, a tailor on his shopboard, or a jockey in his saddle.
Since those early days of the Pall Mall Gazette, when old
Shandon wielded his truculent tomahawk, and Messrs. W-rr-ngt-n
and P-nd-nn-s followed him in the war-path, the Gazette had
passed through several hands ; and the victims who were immolated
by the editors of to-day were very likely the objects of the best
puffery of the last dynasty. To be flogged in what was your own
schoolroom—that, surely, is a queer sensation; and when my
report was published on the decay of the sealing-wax trade in the
three kingdoms (owing to the prevalence of gummed envelopes,—
as you may see in that masterly document) I was horsed up and
smartly whipped in the Gazette by some of the rods which had
come out of pickle since my time. Was not good Dr. Guillotin
executed by his own neat invention 1 I don't know who was the
Monsieur Sanson who operated on me ; but have always had my
idea that Digges, of Corpus, was the man to whom my flagellation
was entrusted. His father keeps a ladies' school at Hackney ; but
there is an air of fashion in everything which Digges writes, and
a chivalrous conservatism which makes me pretty certain that D.
was my scarifier. All this, however, is naught. Let us turn away
from the author's private griefs and egotisms to those of the hero
of the story.
Does any one remember the appearance some twenty years
ago of a little book called " Trumpet Calls "—a book of songs and
poetry, dedicated to his brother officers by Cornet Canterton ? His
trumpet was very tolerably melodious, and the cornet played some
small airs on it with some little grace and skill. But this poor
Canterton belonged to the Life Guards Green, and Philip Firmin