I was still waiting for that promised invitation to Rickmansworth when Dawson died. He had suffered for some years, though he did not know it, from an aneurism of the aorta, and the bursting of the aneurism into the larynx was the cause of death. He used to say that he should pray to be taken suddenly and to be spared the misery of a prolonged deathbed. He had his wish, for it was all over in a few minutes and was absolutely painless. I was staying with a chum of mine in his chambers in Dane's Inn--long since gone the way of all stone, bricks and mortar. My host came in with a newspaper and laid it on the table before me with his finger on a cross-headed paragraph, "Death of George Dawson, M.A." Nothing in all my experience had ever hit me so before, and whatever may be held in reserve for me, nothing can ever so profoundly affect me again. The whole world went dark and empty--George Dawson dead! He had been my man of men, for years my dearest friend and helper, my Moses in the spiritual wilderness through which it is the doom of every young and ardent soul to travel, and with his going, everything seemed blank and waste.
If you search all the professions round, you will not find one in which men display such an extraordinary divergence of intellect and acquirement as you will if you turn to journalism. There are men employed in that craft who are better qualified for Cabinet rank than half the men who ever hold it, and there are, or used to be in my time, hundreds of intelligences as purely mechanical as if they had been born to be hodmen. With one of the latter species I was officially associated for a year. He is now dead and no truth can hurt his feelings any more, but I think he was about as ignorant and self-satisfied an ass as I can remember to have encountered anywhere. There was one thing to be said for him: he had mastered the intricacies of Pitman's shorthand system and wrote it almost to perfection. You might rely upon him to get down in his note-book every word he heard, or thought he heard, but in transcription he sometimes achieved a most extraordinary and unlooked-for effect, as for example: A meeting of the Licensed Victuallers' Association was held in the lower grounds at Aston, and Mr Newdigate--the member for North Warwickshire--presided over it, and during the annual address--what else the right honourable gentleman had to say I have long since forgotten--he wound up by quoting a verse from Lord Tennyson's "Lady Clara Vere de Vere ":--