Recollections by David Christie Murray — Read

For two or three bright and happy months I acted as George Dawson's amanuensis after a rather curious and unusual fashion. In his unclerical suit of Irish homespun and his beaded slippers, with a well-blacked clay between his lips, he would roam up and down the Turkey carpet of the editorial room and talk about some topic of the day, and in that fashion he would make his daily leader. "Now," he would say, "take that to your own room and get as much as you can of it into a column. " I made no notes, for I had a verbal memory in those days like a steel rat-trap. But I used to go away charged sometimes with matter enough for a newspaper budget, or nearly, and it was my business to condense and select from this material that which seemed worthiest of preservation. I offer here a fragment or two of the kind of thing he used to say at these times.

Talking of Disraeli, whom he hated vehemently, he said: "The man has been writing all his life of the great Asian mystery without guessing that he is the greatest Asian mystery alive. His politics are romantic, his romances are political, and he himself is a fiction founded on fact. " Of another person whom I will not name, he said: "You put the man into a book as you put a sponge into a bucket. You take him out and squeeze him, and he returns the stream uncoloured. He is a sort of _Half Hours with the Best Authors_, bound in man's skin; he is intellectually impotent, he never begot an idea."