ted." It remained unweakened
till death came.

There were circumstances that drew us at once into frequent and close
communication. What the sudden popularity of his writings implied, was
known to others some time before it was known to himself; and he was
only now becoming gradually conscious of all the disadvantage this had
placed him at. He would have laughed if, at this outset of his wonderful
fortune in literature, his genius acknowledged by all without misgiving,
young, popular, and prosperous, any one had compared him to the luckless
men of letters of former days, whose common fate was to be sold into a
slavery which their later lives were passed in vain endeavors to escape
from. Not so was his fate to be, yet something of it he was doomed to
experience. He had unwittingly sold himself into a quasi-bondage, and
had to purchase his liberty at a heavy cost, after considerable
suffering.

It was not until the fourth or fifth number of _Pickwick_ (in the latter
Sam Weller made his first appearance) that its importance began to be
understood by "the trade," and on the eve of the issue of its sixth
number, the 22d August, 1836, he had signed an agreement with Mr.
Bentley to undertake the editorship of a monthly magazine to be started
the following January, to which he was to supply a serial story; and
soon afterwards he had agreed with the same publisher to write two other
tales, the first at a specified early date; the expressed remuneration
in each case being certainly quite inadequate to the claims of a writer
of any marked popularity. Under these Bentley agreements he was now
writing, month by month, the first half of _Oliver Twist_, and, under
his Chapman & Hall agreement, the last half of _Pickwick_, not even by a
week in advance of the printer with either; when a circumstance became
known to him of which he thus wrote to me:

"I heard half an hour ago, on authority which leaves me in no doubt
about the matter (from the binder of _Pickwick_, in fact), that Macrone
intends publishing a new issue of my _Sketches_ in monthly parts of
nearly the same size and in just the same form as the _Pickwick Papers_.
I need not tell you that this is calculated to injure me most seriously,
or that I have a very natural and most decided objection to being
supposed to presume upon the success of the _Pickwick_, and thus foist
this old work upon the public in its new dress for the mere purpose of
putting money in my own pocket.