He has no time to read the newspapers. His knowledge
of them is derived from abstracts prepared for him by a clerk in the
Governor's office,--containing, therefore, what the minister allows to
be put there, and nothing more; while their living pictures, those
columns of advertisements which bring before you day by day the wants
and hopes and pursuits of so many of your fellow-creatures, carrying
you, as it were, into hundreds of families, and laying open to your
scrutiny hundreds of human hearts, the different lights in which men and
things appear to the organs of different parties, and the proof which,
in the midst of their contradictions, they all concur in giving that
there is a spirit abroad which cannot be lulled to sleep, are lessons
all lost for him, and which, perhaps, would be equally lost, even if he
had the leisure and the knowledge to study them.
He dines alone,--for in the city, in the dearth of publicans and
sinners, no one can sit at table with the Vicar of Christ; and thus
dinner-hour, the open-hearted hour, puts him almost more absolutely in
the hands of his immediate attendants than any hour of the twenty-four.
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