of a certain distinguished man (still living), that opinion
should prove to be in agreement with mine. Unhappily it fell in with his
own, and the publication went on. It was followed by another statement,
a letter subscribed with his name, which got into print without his
sanction; nothing publicly being known of it (I was not among those who
had read it privately) until it appeared in the _New York Tribune_. It
had been addressed and given to Mr. Arthur Smith as an authority for
correction of false rumours and scandals, and Mr. Smith had given a copy
of it, with like intention, to the _Tribune_ correspondent in London.
Its writer referred to it always afterwards as his "violated letter."

The course taken by the author of this book at the time of these
occurrences, will not be departed from here. Such illustration of grave
defects in Dickens's character as the passage in his life affords, I
have not shrunk from placing side by side with such excuses in regard to
it as he had unquestionable right to claim should be put forward also.
How far what remained of his story took tone or colour from it, and
especially from the altered career on which at the same time he entered,
will thus be sufficiently explained; and with anything else the public
have nothing to do.

FOOTNOTES:

[213] Anything more completely opposed to the Micawber type could hardly
be conceived, and yet there were moments (really and truly only moments)
when the fancy would arise that if the conditions of his life had been
reversed, something of a vagabond existence (using the word in
Goldsmith's meaning) might have supervened. It would have been an
unspeakable misery to him, but it might have come nevertheless. The
question of hereditary transmission had a curious attraction for him,
and considerations connected with it were frequently present to his
mind. Of a youth who had fallen into a father's weaknesses without the
possibility of having himself observed them for imitation, he thus wrote
on one occasion: "It suggests the strangest consideration as to which of
our own failings we are really responsible, and as to which of them we
cannot quite reasonably hold ourselves to be so. What A. evidently
derived from his father cannot in his case be derived from association
and observation, but must be in the very principles of his individuality
as a living creature."

[214] "You may as well know" (20th of March 1858) "that I went on" (I
designate the ladie