DAN STUART oold us, that he did not remember the he ever deliberately walked into the Exhibition at Somerset House in his life. He might occasionally have escorted a party of ladies across the way that were going in; but he never went in of his own head. Yet the office of the M Post neer stood then just where it does now -- we are carrying you back, Reader, some thirty years or more -- with its gilt-globe-topt front fag that emporium of our artists grand Annual Exposure. We sometimes wish, that we had observed the same abstih Daniel.
A word or two of D. S. He ever appeared to us one of the fiempered of Editors. Perry, of the M icle, was equally pleasant, with a dash, no slight oher, of the courtier. S. was frank, plain, and English all over. We have worked for both these gentlemen.
It is soothing to plate the head of the Gao trace the first little bubblings of a mighty river;
With holy revereo approach the rocks,
Whence glide the Streams renowned in a song.
Fired with a perusal of the Abyssinian Pilgrims explorator ramblings after the cradle of the infant Nilus, we well remember on one fine summer holyday (a "whole days leave" we called at Christs Hospital) sallying forth at rise of sun, not very well-provisioher for su uaking, to trace the current the New River -- Middletonian stream ! -- to its scaturient source, as we had read, in meadows by fair Amwell. Gallantly did we ence our solitary quest -- for it was essential to the dignity, of a Discovery, that no eye of schoolboy, save our own, should beam oe. By flowery spots, and verdant lanes, skirting Hornsey, Hope trained us on in many a baffling turn; endless hopeless meanders, as it seemed; or as if the jealous waters had dodged us, relut to have the humble spot of their nativity revealed; till spent, and nigh famished, before set of the same sue down somewhere by Bowes Farm, ottenham, with a tithe of our proposed labours only yet aplished; sorely vinced in spirit, that that Bru enterprise was as yet too arduous for our young shoulders.
Not more refreshing to the thirsty curiosity of the traveller is the trag of some mighty waters up to their shallow fohan it is to a pleased and did reader to go back to the inexperienced essays, the first callow flights in authorship, of some established name in literature; from the Gnat which preluded to the Aeneid, to the Duck which Samuel Johnson trod on.
In those days every M Paper, as an essential retaio its establishment, kept an author, who was bound to furnish daily a quantum of witty paragraphs. Sixpence a joke -- and it was thought pretty high too -- was Dan Stuarts settled remuion in these cases. The chat of the day, sdal, but, above all, dress, furhe material. The length of nraph was to exceed seven lines. Shorter they might be, but they must he poignant.
A fashion of flesh, or rather pink-coloured hose for the ladies, luckily ing up at the juncture, when we were on our probation for the place of Chief Jester to S.s Paper, established our reputation in that line. We were pronounced a "capital hand." O the ceits which we varied upon red in all its prismatic differences! from the trite and obvious flower of Cytherea, to the flaming e of the lady that has her sitting upon "many waters." Then there was the collateral topic of ancles. What an occasion to a truly chaste writer, like ourself, of toug that nice brink, a umbling over it, of a seemingly ever approximating something "not quite pro