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From that instant I was lost. Like St. Augustine on the gridiron, no sooner was I nicely toasted on one side than I was turned on to the other. That grinning penny-a-liner, Peters, too, helped as assistant torturer. Wait till he asks me for a 'pointer' in this or any other case. He sold me a pup to-day, but I'll land him with a full-sized mastiff." "No, you won't. He's done you a lot of good.
"Yes, reporter." And, as one proud of his great connection, he named the King's favorite journal. Never it is to be hoped to his dying day did that poor penny-a-liner know what a piece of news he allowed in that moment to slip by news which to him would have meant almost a fortune; and here he was actually rubbing shoulders with it; and making no profit. "How many arrested?" he inquired.
His teeming brain took in raw suggestions and threw off the completed product in the form of epigrams, phrases, orphics, symbols. To have caught these crumbs of truth that fell from the rich man's table might have placed many a penny-a-liner beyond the reach of mental avarice. One man, indeed, swept up the crumbs into a book that is not half crumby.
As a compound of vulgar pomp, crawling adulation, and hard selfishness, presented under the guise of piety, there are few things in literature to surpass the Ninth Night, entitled “Consolation,” especially in the pages where he describes the last judgment—a subject to which, with naïve self-betrayal, he applies phraseology, favored by the exuberant penny-a-liner.
"Mais, si tu crois qu'il est coupable, Il ne veut point être innocent." Two years of prison had not broken him down to this point of self-abasement. Could any Sultan, or even the "Oriental Despot" of a radical penny-a-liner, be implored in more abject terms? Madame de Sévigné, Madame de Scudéry, Le Fèvre, talked, wrote, and spared no expense for their dear friend.
The penny-a-liner of the Kenminster paper outdid himself in the polysyllables of his description, while Colonel Brownlow briefly wrote that "all was as insolent as might be expected, and he was happy to say that most of the county people and some of the tenants showed their good feeling by their absence." Over this Mrs. Brownlow would not rejoice.
He passed it over as casually as he did the markets, or a grudging, conservative item from the police courts, all that the blue pencil had left of the hopeful efforts of some poor penny-a-liner.
Years afterwards I was fighting my way in London, and had charge of a journal which made a name in its day. Sometimes I had to deal with a message from a Minister of State, sometimes with a petition from a starving penny-a-liner. One day a little man was shown into my room, which room was instantly scented with whisky.
They have long been the butt of every penny-a-liner who can talk of a helmet as a tin pot, of every caricaturist on a comic paper who can draw a fat man falling off a bucking horse; of every pushing professional politician who can talk about the superstitions of the Middle Ages.
The press is powerful, and governments are obliged now-a-days to throw in a certain amount of spectacle to keep it in a good temper. We are sent off to perform somewhere, and after us come the penny-a-liner and the cinematograph." "Oh! my dear, much more than a penny-a-liner," corrected the Queen; "I heard of one correspondent who makes £5,000 a year. And think how good for trade!
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