GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA.

Globe, Volume IX, Issue 1250, 9 March 1878, Page 3

GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA.

Mr Sala can hardly be described as a novelist. He is rather the representative journal st; the man pursued by the spectre Copy, and yielding his soul in a vain attempt to satisfy the gruesome visitant. As a journalist he has many remarkable qualities. He does not shine in argument, for his is not a logical mind ; nor is Ms excellence exactly one of statement, for he is of a discursive habit, and "loose in his gaiters, looser in his gait," he loves to linger by the way, to dive down cunning lanes, to whistle jigs to accidental milestones, to pull bilberries in the hedge, to do anything, in short that will serve him as an excuse for loitering, that will obviate for an instant the necessity of training on in such straightforward, square-shouldered wise as was the wont—let us .say—of Charles Dickens. His fluency is amazing, his facility incomparable, his memory inexhaustible. He has a camera in his eye, and a private stenographer is attached to either lobe of his brain. He is a sort of latter-day Mnemosyne ; not the m>ise as she was carven of the Greeks, white and round and radiant, but the muse as the ueeds of the 19th century-this babbling, curious, esurient 19th century—have modilied her. In him is incarnate that observation with attentive view which the late Dr. Samuel Johnson engyved in a celebrated couplet; and not only does he survey mankind, from China to Peru, a sort of journalistic Ahasuerus, hurried hither and thither as the needs of able editors advise, but he has profited by it, and can tell you as much about any section of it as you would care to know. With the nameless mysteries of this great and evil city he is as, familiar as was his master and idol, the man who wrote out those wonderful hits of London for "Oliver Twist" and "Our Mutual Friend." He has lived in llussia, and has told us all about it in most pleasant terms ; he has sojourned in Constantinople, and knows a great deal more of the unspeakable Turk than Mr Gladstone himself. He can talk of Paris in such a familiar strain as to make us long sometimes to have the command of millions that we might retain him specially to read with us "Ferragus," " La Cousine Bette," "Le Cousin Pens," "Le Pure Goriot," and to pilot us through the labryinthine intricacies of the city that Balzai loved so dearly and honored so splendidly. He is at home in New York and in Dublin, in New Orleans and on the Eighi, in Mexico, and in Milan, in Santiago de Cuba, and in Capri, in Vallombrosa, and in Versailles, in Salem and in Syracuse, in Berlin and in Barcelona. Great cities are magnetic to him, and like a splinter of steel he Hies to them.—" London."