hose
therefore will first be taken that in some form or other appeared
afterwards in his writings, with such reference to the latter as may
enable the reader to make comparison for himself.

"Our House. Whatever it is, it is in a first-rate situation, and a
fashionable neighbourhood. (Auctioneer called it 'a gentlemanly
residence.') A series of little closets squeezed up into the corner of a
dark street--but a Duke's Mansion round the corner. The whole house
just large enough to hold a vile smell. The air breathed in it, at the
best of times, a kind of Distillation of Mews." He made it the home of
the Barnacles in _Little Dorrit_.

What originally he meant to express by Mrs. Clennam in the same story
has narrower limits, and a character less repellent, in the Memoranda
than it assumed in the book. "Bed-ridden (or room-ridden)
twenty--five-and-twenty--years; any length of time. As to most things,
kept at a standstill all the while. Thinking of altered streets as the
old streets--changed things as the unchanged things--the youth or girl I
quarrelled with all those years ago, as the same youth or girl now.
Brought out of doors by an unexpected exercise of my latent strength of
character, and then how strange!"

One of the people of the same story who becomes a prominent actor in it,
Henry Gowan, a creation on which he prided himself as forcible and new,
seems to have risen to his mind in this way. "I affect to believe that I
would do anything myself for a ten-pound note, and that anybody else
would. I affect to be always book-keeping in every man's case, and
posting up a little account of good and evil with every one. Thus the
greatest rascal becomes 'the dearest old fellow,' and there is much less
difference than you would be inclined to suppose between an honest man
and a scoundrel. While I affect to be finding good in most men, I am in
reality decrying it where it really is, and setting it up where it is
not. Might not a presentation of this far from uncommon class of
character, if I could put it strongly enough, be likely to lead some
men to reflect, and change a little? I think it has never been done."

In _Little Dorrit_ also will be found a picture which seems to live with
a more touching effect in his first pleasing fancy of it. "The ferryman
on a peaceful river, who has been there from youth, who lives, who grows
old, who does well, who does ill, who changes, who dies--the river runs
six hours up and six hours