etter indicates the position he held at Mr.
Blackmore's; and we have but to turn to the passage in _Pickwick_ which
describes the several grades of attorney's clerk, to understand it more
clearly. He was very far below the articled clerk, who has paid a
premium and is attorney in perspective. He was not so high as the
salaried clerk, with nearly the whole of his weekly thirty shillings
spent on his personal pleasures. He was not even on the level with his
middle-aged copying-clerk, always needy and uniformly shabby. He was
simply among, however his own nature may have lifted him above, the
"office-lads in their first surtouts, who feel a befitting contempt for
boys at day-schools, club as they go home at night for saveloys and
porter, and think there's nothing like life." Thus far, not more or
less, had he now reached. He was one of the office-lads, and probably in
his first surtout.

But, even thus, the process of education went on, defying what seemed to
interrupt it; and in the amount of his present equipment for his needs
of life, what he brought from the Wellington House Academy can have
borne but the smallest proportion to his acquirement at Mr. Blackmore's.
Yet to seek to identify, without help from himself, any passages in his
books with those boyish law-experiences, would be idle and hopeless
enough. In the earliest of his writings, and down to the very latest, he
worked exhaustively the field which is opened by an attorney's office to
a student of life and manners; but we have not now to deal with his
numerous varieties of the _genus_ clerk drawn thus for the amusement of
others, but with the acquisitions which at present he was storing up for
himself from the opportunities such offices opened to him. Nor would it
be possible to have better illustrative comment on all these years than
is furnished by his father's reply to a friend it was now hoped to
interest on his behalf, which more than once I have heard him
whimsically, but good-humoredly, imitate. "Pray, Mr. Dickens, where was
your son educated?" "Why, indeed, sir--ha! ha!--he may be said to have
educated himself!" Of the two kinds of education which Gibbon says that
all men who rise above the common level receive,--the first, that of his
teachers, and the second, more personal and more important, _his
own_,--he had the advantage only of the last. It nevertheless sufficed
for him.

Very nearly another eighteen months were now to be spent mainly in
pract