posed some interesting traits in his household economy. A question,
therefore, naturally arose in several people's curiosity--Where was this
house situated? and the more so because I had pointed a renewed
attention to it by saying, that on that very evening, (viz. the evening
on which that particular page of the Confessions was written,) I had
visited the street, looked up at the windows, and, instead of the gloomy
desolation reigning there when myself and a little girl were the sole
nightly tenants, sleeping in fact (poor freezing creatures that we both
were) on the floor of the attorney's law-chamber, and making a pillow
out of his infernal parchments, I had seen with pleasure the evidences
of comfort, respectability, and domestic animation, in the lights and
stir prevailing through different stories of the house. Upon this the
upright critic told his readers that I had described the house as
standing in Oxford Street, and then appealed to their own knowledge of
that street whether such a house could be _so_ situated. Why not--he
neglected to tell us. The houses at the east end of Oxford Street are
certainly of too small an order to meet my account of the attorney's
house; but why should it be at the east end? Oxford Street is a mile and
a quarter long, and being built continuously on both sides, finds room
for houses of _many_ classes. Meantime it happens that, although the
true house was most obscurely indicated, _any_ house whatever in Oxford
Street was most luminously excluded. In all the immensity of London
there was but one single street that could be challenged by an attentive
reader of the Confessions as peremptorily _not_ the street of the
attorney's house--and _that_ one was Oxford Street; for, in speaking of
my own renewed acquaintance with the outside of this house, I used some
expression implying that, in order to make such a visit of
reconnoissance, I had turned _aside_ from Oxford Street. The matter is a
perfect trifle in itself, but it is no trifle in a question affecting a
writer's accuracy. If in a thing so absolutely impossible to be
forgotten as the true situation of a house painfully memorable to a
man's feelings, from being the scene of boyish distresses the most
exquisite--nights passed in the misery of cold, and hunger preying upon
him both night and day, in a degree which very many would not have
survived,--he, when retracing his schoolboy annals, could have shown
indecision even, far more dread