his education.[172] At this date it seemed to me that the overstrain of
attempting too much, brought upon him by the necessities of his weekly
periodical, became first apparent in Dickens. Not unfrequently a
complaint strange upon his lips fell from him. "Hypochondriacal
whisperings tell me that I am rather overworked. The spring does not
seem to fly back again directly, as it always did when I put my own work
aside, and had nothing else to do. Yet I have everything to keep me
going with a brave heart, Heaven knows!" Courage and hopefulness he
might well derive from the increasing sale of _Bleak House_, which had
risen to nearly forty thousand; but he could no longer bear easily what
he carried so lightly of old, and enjoyments with work were too much for
him. "What with _Bleak House_, and _Household Words_, and _Child's
History_" (he dictated from week to week the papers which formed that
little book, and cannot be said to have quite hit the mark with it),
"and Miss Coutts's Home, and the invitations to feasts and festivals, I
really feel as if my head would split like a fired shell if I remained
here." He tried Brighton first, but did not find it answer, and
returned.[173] A few days of unalloyed enjoyment were afterwards given
to the visit of his excellent American friend Felton; and on the 13th of
June he was again in Boulogne, thanking heaven for escape from a
breakdown. "If I had substituted anybody's knowledge of myself for my
own, and lingered in London, I never could have got through."

What befell him in Boulogne will be given, with the incidents of his
second and third summer visits to the place, on a later page. He
completed, by the third week of August, his novel of _Bleak House_; and
it was resolved to celebrate the event by a two months' trip to Italy,
in company with Mr. Wilkie Collins and Mr. Augustus Egg. The start was
to be made from Boulogne in the middle of October, when he would send
his family home; and he described the intervening weeks as a fearful
"reaction and prostration of laziness" only broken by the _Child's
History_. At the end of September he wrote: "I finished the little
_History_ yesterday, and am trying to think of something for the
Christmas number. After which I shall knock off; having had quite enough
to do, small as it would have seemed to me at any other time, since I
finished _Bleak House_." He added, a week before his departure: "I get
letters from Genoa and Lausanne as if I wer