We dined at all possible and impossible
places together. We walked round and round the glittering court of the
Palais Royal, gazing in at the windows of the jewellers' shops, and all
my efforts were necessary to restrain him from rushing in and ordering a
pocketful of diamonds and "other trifles," as he called them; "for,"
said he, "how can I spend the princely income which Smith allows me for
editing the Cornhill, unless I begin instantly somewhere?" If he saw a
group of three or four persons talking together in an excited way, after
the manner of that then riant Parisian people, he would whisper to me
with immense gesticulation: "There, there, you see the news has reached
Paris, and perhaps the number has gone up since my last accounts from
London." His spirits during those few days were colossal, and he told me
that he found it impossible to sleep, "for counting up his subscribers."
I happened to know personally (and let me modestly add, with some degree
of sympathy) what he suffered editorially, when he had the charge and
responsibility of a magazine. With first-class contributors he got on
very well, he said, but the extortioners and revilers bothered the very
life out of him. He gave me some amusing accounts of his
misunderstandings with the "fair" (as he loved to call them), some of
whom followed him up so closely with their poetical compositions, that
his house (he was then living in Onslow Square) was never free of
interruption.
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