d Mr. Dick, looking
earnestly at me, and taking up his pen to note it down,
'when the bull got into the china warehouse and did
so much mischief?'

In the proof Dickens struck out all the words after 'when,'
and inserted in their place the following:

'King Charles the First had his head cut off?'

I said I believed it happened in the year sixteen
hundred and forty-nine.

'Well,' returned Mr. Dick, scratching his ear with his
pen and looking dubiously at me, 'so the books say,
but I don't see how that can be. Because if it was so
long ago, how could the people about him have made that
mistake of putting some of the trouble out of his head,
after it was taken off, into mine?'

The whole of the substituted passage is inserted in the margin
at the bottom of the page. Again, when Mr. Dick shows David
Copperfield his kite covered with manuscript, David was made to
say in the proof: 'I thought I saw some allusion to the bull
again in one or two places.' Here Dickens has struck through
the words, 'the bull,' and replaced them with 'King Charles
the First's head.'

The original reference was to a very popular song of the period
called 'The Bull in the China Shop,' words by C. Dibdin, Junior,
and music by W. Reeve. Produced about 1808, it was popularized
by the celebrated clown Grimaldi. The first verse is:

You've heard of a frog in an opera hat,
'Tis a very old tale of a mouse and a rat,
I could sing you another as pleasant, mayhap,
Of a kitten that wore a high caul cap;
But my muse on a far nobler subject shall drop,
Of a bull who got into a china shop,
With his right leg, left leg, upper leg, under leg,
St. Patrick's day in the morning.

[17] Mr. Alfred Payne writes thus: 'Some time ago an old
friend told me that he had heard from a Hertfordshire
organist that Dr. W.H. Monk (editor of _Hymns
Ancient and Modern_) adapted "Belmont" from the highly
classical melody of which a few bars are given above.
Monk showed this gentleman the notes, being the actual
arrangement he had made from this once popular song,
back in the fifties. This certainly coincides with
its appearance in Severn's _Islington Collection_,
1854.'--See _Hymn-Tunes and their Story_, p. 354.

[18] The Marshalsea was a debtors' prison formerly situated
in Southwark. It was closed about the middle of the