Mayhew's Envelope.
From a Photo. by Elliott & Fry. Mr. Sala discards his customary chair at the writing-table, on which stands a statuette of Thackeray; but, lighting a cigar—and is not G. A. S. generally accredited as being the best judge of a Havannah in London?—he meditatively walks the room, and tells, point by point and chapter by chapter, the story of his life. He wears a short smoking-jacket. He is of medium height, and is the happy possessor of a wonderfully level temper. He speaks kindly and good-naturedly of all his brother scribes, and writes the most microscopic hand amongst them all. He is three-and-sixty years of age, but prepared to pack his bag and start as "Special Correspondent" to Siberia at a couple of hours' notice. Though certainly the most versatile leader-writer of to-day, and justly regarded as being at the top of the journalistic tree, he is still a working man. His work is his recreation, the recreation of a moving mind. He has written more "leaders" than any man living. For the first five years of his thirty-four years' connection with The Daily Telegraph he wrote two a day; now, three hundred leaders a year is his estimate. He has no politics, and for upwards of twenty years not a line from his pen has appeared in The Daily Telegraph on home politics. He argues that, whatever the Government in power, it must needs be the best Government. He has seen the work of every government in every country, from the matter-of-fact and easy-going Parliament of the dwellers in Central Africa to that of Australia, where the supreme ruler is his royal highness—Working Man.
Learning to write.
George Augustus Sala was born in New-street, Manchester-square, on November 24, 1828, His father was an Italian, his mother being a professor of Italian singing. He was born at a time when children were sent out to be nursed. His nurse must have been a most diabolical young woman, for when it was decided by his mother to have little George Augustus home again, she attempted to kill her charge. This resulted in a long and serious illness, and the small life was despaired of.
"I was blind and deaf," he said, "from seven to half-past eight, that is, from 7
