CHARLES DICKENS. 



115 



his melancholy couch, and set 

 his task at an hour when gaiety 

 had little more than sought his. 

 Firmly did he keep to his desk 

 during long hours, till he could 

 satisfy himself that he had done his 

 utmost. The temptations of so- 

 ciety, the more insinuating claims 

 of an overworked system for rest, 

 were alike resolutely rejected. The 

 world must ever hear with wonder, 

 that between the third day after 

 his bankruptcy and the fifteenth 

 day thereafter, he had written a 

 volume of Woodstock, although se- 

 veral of these days had been spent 

 in comparative vacancy, to allow 

 the imagination time for brooding. 

 He believed, that, for a bet, he could 

 have written this volume in ten 

 18. Just a fortnight after his 

 iinal breach with fortune, he says 

 in his journal, " I have now no pe- 

 cuniary provisions to embarrass me, 

 in id I think, now the shock of the 

 discovery is past and over, I am 

 much better off on the whole. . . . 

 I shall be free of a hundred petty 

 public duties imposed on me as a 

 man of consideration, of the ex- 

 pense of a great hospitality, and, 

 what is better, of the waste of time 

 connected with it. I have known 

 in my day all kinds of society, and 

 can pretty well estimate how much 

 or how little one loses by retiring 

 from all but that which is very 

 intimate. , . . If I could see 

 those about me as indifferent to the 

 loss of rank as I am, I should be 

 completely happy. As it is, time 

 must salve that sore, and to tune I 

 trust it." 



SIR WALTER SCOTT AND THE AMERI- 

 CAN AUTHORESS. 



"One morning," said Scott, "I 

 opened a huge lump of a despatch, 

 without looking to know how it 

 was addressed, never doubting that 

 it had travelled under some omni- 

 potent frank, like the first lord of 

 admiralty's, when, lo and behold, 



to I the contents proved to be a manu- 

 script play, by a young lady of New 

 York, who kindly requested me to 

 read and correct it, equip it with 

 prologue and epilogue, procure for 

 it a favourable reception from the 

 manager of Drury Lane, and make 

 Murray or Constable bleed hand- 

 somely for the copyright ; and, in- 

 specting the cover, I found that I 

 had been charged five pounds odd 

 for the postage. This was bad 

 enough ; but there was no help, so 

 I groaned and submitted. A fort- 

 night or so after, another packet, 

 of not less formidable bulk, arrived, 

 and I was absent enough to break 

 its seal too, without examination. 

 Conceive my horror, when out 

 jumped the same identical tragedy 

 of the " Cherokee Lovers," with a 

 second epistle from the authoress, 

 stating that, as the winds had been 

 boisterous, she feared the vessel in- 

 trusted with her former communi- 

 cation might have foundered, and 

 therefore judged it prudent to for- 

 ward a duplicate." 



CHARLES DICKENS. 



Itaving stated, in the original 

 preface to Nicholas NicMeby, that 

 the, Brothers CheeryUe were por- 

 traits from the life, and that they 

 yet exercised their unbounded be- 

 nevolence in the town of which 

 they are the pride and honour, 

 Dickens thus laments over the 

 applications to which his state- 

 ment has given rise : 



" If I were to attempt to sum up 

 the hundreds upon hundreds of let- 

 ters from all sorts of people, in all 

 sorts of latitudes and ciimatea, to 

 which this unlucky paragraph has 

 since given rise, I should get into 

 an arithmetical difficulty from 

 which I could not easily extri- 

 cate myself. Suffice it to say, that 

 I believe the applications for loans, 

 gifts, and offices of profit, that I 

 have been requested to forward to 

 the originals of the Brothers Cheery- 



