ical preparation for what he was, at this time, led finally to
choose as an employment from which a fair income was certain with such
talents as he possessed; his father already having taken to it, in these
latter years, in aid of the family resources. In his father's house,
which was at Hampstead through the first portion of the Mornington
Street school time, then in the house out of Seymour Street mentioned by
Dr. Danson, and afterwards, upon the elder Dickens going into the
gallery, in Bentinck Street, Manchester Square, Charles had continued to
live; and, influenced doubtless by the example before him, he took
sudden determination to qualify himself thoroughly for what his father
was lately become, a newspaper parliamentary reporter. He set
resolutely, therefore, to the study of short-hand; and, for the
additional help of such general information about books as a
fairly-educated youth might be expected to have, as well as to satisfy
some higher personal cravings, he became an assiduous attendant in the
British Museum reading-room. He would frequently refer to these days as
decidedly the usefulest to himself he had ever passed; and, judging from
the results, they must have been so. No man who knew him in later years,
and talked to him familiarly of books and things, would have suspected
his education in boyhood, almost entirely self-acquired as it was, to
have been so rambling or hap-hazard as I have here described it. The
secret consisted in this, that, whatever for the time he had to do, he
lifted himself, there and then, to the level of, and at no time
disregarded the rules that guided the hero of his novel. "Whatever I
have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well.
What I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely.
Never to put one hand to anything on which I could throw my whole self,
and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was, I find now
to have been my golden rules."

Of the difficulties that beset his short-hand studies, as well as of
what first turned his mind to them, he has told also something in
_Copperfield_. He had heard that many men distinguished in various
pursuits had begun life by reporting the debates in parliament, and he
was not deterred by a friend's warning that the mere mechanical
accomplishment for excellence in it might take a few years to master
thoroughly; "a perfect and entire command of the mystery of short-hand
writing and readin