He
talked very quickly and softly, with words, and even sentences,
imperfectly formed; there was a certain amiable flatness in his tone,
and he abounded in exclamations--"Goodness gracious!" and "Mercy on
us!"--not much in use among the sex whose profanity is apt to be coarse.
He had small, fair features, remarkably neat, and pretty eyes, and a
moustache that he caressed, and an air of juvenility much at variance
with his grizzled locks, and the free familiar reference in which he was
apt to indulge to his career as a journalist. His friends knew that in
spite of his delicacy and his prattle he was what they called a live
man; his appearance was perfectly reconcilable with a large degree of
literary enterprise. It should be explained that for the most part they
attached to this idea the same meaning as Selah Tarrant--a state of
intimacy with the newspapers, the cultivation of the great arts of
publicity. For this ingenuous son of his age all distinction between the
person and the artist had ceased to exist; the writer was personal, the
person food for newsboys, and everything and every one were every one's
business. All things, with him, referred themselves to print, and print
meant simply infinite reporting, a promptitude of announcement, abusive
when necessary, or even when not, about his fellow-citizens.
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