years or more. To me a desperate dead-lift pull all that time; my whole strength devoted to it; alone, withdrawn from all the world (except some bores who would take no hint, almost nobody came to see me, nor did I wish almost anybody then left living for me), all the world withdrawing from me; I desperate of ever getting through (not to speak of "succeeding"); left solitary "with the nightmares" (as I sometimes expressed it), "hugging unclean creatures" (Prussian Blockheadism) "to my bosom, trying to caress and flatter their secret out of them!" Why do I speak of all this? It is now become coprolith to me, insignificant as the dung of a thousand centuries ago: I did get through, thank God; let it now wander into the belly of oblivion for ever. But what I do still, and shall more and more, remember with loving admiration is her behaviour in it. She was habitually in the feeblest health; often, for long whiles, grievously ill. Yet by an alchemy all her own, she had extracted grains as of gold out of every day, and seldom or never failed to have something bright and pleasant to tell me, when I reached home after my evening ride, the most fordone of men. In all, I rode, during that book, some 30,000 miles, much of it (all the winter part of it) under cloud of night, sun just setting when I mounted. All the rest of the day, I sat silent aloft; insisting upon work, and such work, invitissimâ Minerva for that matter. Home between five and six, with mud mackintoshes off, and, the nightmares locked up for a while, I tried for an hour's sleep before my (solitary, dietetic, altogether simple) bit of dinner; but first always came up for half an hour to the drawing-room and Her; where a bright kindly fire was sure to be burning (candles hardly lit, all in trustful chiaroscuro), and a spoonful of brandy in water, with a pipe of tobacco (which I had learned to take sitting on the rug, with my back to the jamb, and door never so little open, so that all the smoke, if I was careful, went up the chimney): this was the one bright portion of my black day. Oh, those evening half-hours, how beautiful and blessed they were, — not awaiting me now on my home-coming, for the last ten weeks! She was oftenest reclining on the sofa ; wearied enough, she too, with her day's doings and endurings. But her history, even of what was bad, had such grace and truth, and spontaneous tinkling melody of a naturally cheerful and loving

heart, that I never anywhere enjoyed the like. Her courage, patience, silent heroism, meanwhile, must often have been immense. Within the last two years or so she has told me about my talk to her of the Battle of Mollwitz on these occasions, while that was on the anvil. She was lying on the sofa; weak, but I knew little how weak, and patient, kind, quiet and good as ever. After tugging and wriggling through what inextricable labyrinth and Sloughs-of-despond, I still remember, it appears I had at last conquered Mollwitz, saw it all clear ahead and round me, and took to telling her about it, in my poor bit of joy, night after night. I recollect she answered little, though kindly always. Privately, she at that time felt convinced she was dying: - dark winter, and such the weight of misery and utter decay of strength; — and, night after night, my theme to her, Mollwitz! This she owned to me, within the last year or two;- which how could I listen to without shame and abasement? Never in my pretended-superior kind of life, have I done, for love of any creature, so supreme a kind of thing. It touches me at this moment with penitence and humiliation, yet with a kind of soft religious blessedness too. She read the first two volumes of Friedrich, much of it in printer's sheets (while on visit to the aged Misses Donaldson at Haddington); her applause (should not I collect her fine Notekins and reposit them here?) was beautiful and as sunlight to me, for I knew it was sincere withal, and unerringly straight upon the blot, however exaggerated by her great love of me. The other volumes (hardly even the third, I think) she never read, I knew too well why; and submitted without murmur, save once or twice perhaps a little quiz on the subject, which did not afflict her, either. Too weak, too weak by far, for a dismal enterprise of that kind, as I knew too well! But those Haddington visits were very beautiful to her (and to me through her letters and her); and by that time we were over the hill and "the worst of our days were past" (as poor Irving used to give for toast, long ago), worst of them past, though we did not yet quite know it.

CHARLES DICKENS

HARD EXPERIENCES IN BOYHOOD

[From The Life of Charles Dickens, by John Forster, Book I, Chaps. 1 and II. Chapman and Hall, London, 1872. For the Life of Dickens, see post, p. 569.

This Third Volume throws a new light and character to me over the Work at large. I incline to consider this Biography as taking rank, in essential respects, parallel to Boswell himself, though on widely different grounds. Boswell, by those genial abridgements and vivid face to face pictures of Johnson's thoughts, conversational ways, and modes of appearance among his fellow-creatures, has given, as you often hear me say, such a delineation of a man's existence as was never given by another man. By quite different resources, by those sparkling, clear, and sunny utterances of Dickens's own (bits of auto-biography unrivalled in clearness and credibility) which were at your disposal, and have been intercalated every now and then, you have given to every intelligent eye the power of looking down to the very bottom of Dickens's mode of existing in this world; and, I say, have performed a feat which, except in Boswell, the unique, I know not where to parallel. So long as Dickens is interesting to his fellow-men, here will be seen, face to face, what Dickens's manner of existing was. His bright and joyful sympathy with everything around him; his steady practicality, withal; the singularly solid business talent he continually had; and, deeper than all, if one has the eye to see deep enough, dark, fateful, silent elements, tragical to look upon, and hiding, amid dazzling radiances as of the sun, the elements of death itself. Those two American journeys especially transcend in tragic interest, to a thinking reader, most things one has seen in writing!" THOMAS CARLYLE, Letter to the Author, 16 February, 1874.]

In Bayham-street, meanwhile, affairs were going on badly; the poor boy's visits to his uncle, while the latter was still kept a prisoner by his accident, were interrupted by another attack of fever; and on his recovery the mysterious 'deed' had again come uppermost. His father's resources were so low, and all his expedients so thoroughly exhausted, that trial was to be made whether his mother might not come to the rescue. The time was arrived for her to exert herself, she said; and she 'must do something.' The godfather down at Limehouse was reported to have an Indian connection. People in the East Indies always sent their children home to be educated. She would set up a school. They would all grow rich by it. And then, thought the sick boy, 'perhaps even I might go to school myself.'

A house was soon found at number four, Gower-street north;

a large brass plate on the door announced MRS. DICKENS'S ESTABLISHMENT; and the result I can give in the exact words of the then small actor in the comedy, whose hopes it had raised so high. 'I left, at a great many other doors, a great many circulars calling attention to the merits of the establishment. Yet nobody ever came to school, nor do I recollect that anybody ever proposed to come, or that the least preparation was made to receive anybody. But I know that we got on very badly with the butcher and baker; that very often we had not too much for dinner; and that at last my father was arrested.' The interval between the sponging-house and the prison was passed by the sorrowful lad in running errands and carrying messages for the prisoner, delivered with swollen eyes and through shining tears; and the last words said to him by his father before he was finally carried to the Marshalsea, were to the effect that the sun was set upon him for ever. 'I really believed at the time,' said Dickens to me, 'that they had broken my heart.' He took afterwards ample revenge for this false alarm by making all the world laugh at them in David Copperfield.

The readers of Mr. Micawber's history who remember David's first visit to the Marshalsea prison, and how upon seeing the turnkey he recalled the turnkey in the blanket in Roderick Random, will read with curious interest what follows, written as a personal experience of fact two or three years before the fiction had even entered into his thoughts.

'My father was waiting for me in the lodge, and we went up to his room (on the top story but one), and cried very much. And he told me, I remember, to take warning by the Marshalsea, and to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a-year, and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy; but that a shilling spent the other way would make him wretched. I see the fire we sat before, now; with two bricks inside the rusted grate, one on each side, to prevent its burning too many coals. Some other debtor shared the room with him, who came in by-and-by; and as the dinner was a joint-stock repast, I was sent up to "Captain Porter" in the room overhead, with Mr. Dickens's compliments, and I was his son, and could he, Captain P, lend me a knife and fork?

H

'Captain Porter lent the knife and fork, with his compliments in return. There was a very dirty lady in his little room; and two wan girls, his daughters, with shock heads of hair. I thought I should not have liked to borrow Captain Porter's comb. The Captain himself was in the last extremity of shabbiness; and if I could draw at all, I would draw an accurate portrait of the old, old, brown great-coat he wore, with no other coat below it. His whiskers were large. I saw his bed rolled up in a corner; and what plates, and dishes, and pots he had, on a shelf; and I knew (God knows how) that the two girls with the shock heads were Captain Porter's natural children, and that the dirty lady was not married to Captain P. My timid, wondering station on his threshold, was not occupied more than a couple of minutes, I dare say; but I came down again to the room below with all this as surely in my knowledge, as the knife and fork were in my hand.'

How there was something agreeable and gipsy-like in the dinner after all, and how he took back the Captain's knife and fork early in the afternoon, and how he went home to comfort his mother with an account of his visit, David Copperfield has also accurately told. Then, at home, came many miserable daily struggles that seemed to last an immense time, yet did not perhaps cover many weeks. Almost everything by degrees was sold or pawned, little Charles being the principal agent in those sorrowful transactions. Such of the books as had been brought from Chatham, Peregrine Pickle, Roderick Random, Tom Jones, Humphrey Clinker, and all the rest, went first. They were carried off from the little chiffonier, which his father called the library, to a bookseller in the Hampstead-road, the same that David Copperfield describes as in the City-road; and the account of the sales, as they actually occurred and were told to me long before David was born, was reproduced word for word in his imaginary narrative. "The keeper of this bookstall, who lived in a little house behind it, used to get tipsy every night, and to be violently scolded by his wife every morning. More than once, when I went there early, I had audience of him in a turn-up bedstead, with a cut in his forehead or a black eye, bearing witness to his excesses over night (I am afraid he was quarrelsome in his drink); and he, with a shaking hand,