. . . . Of course I have been driving the
girls out of their wits here, by incessantly proclaiming that there
needed no medical evidence either way, and that the case was plain
without it. . . . Lastly of course (though a merciful man--because a
merciful man, I mean), I would hang any Home Secretary, Whig, Tory,
Radical, or otherwise, who should step in between so black a scoundrel
and the gallows. . . . I am reminded of Tennyson by thinking that King
Arthur would have made short work of the amiable man! How fine the
Idylls are! Lord! what a blessed thing it is to read a man who really
can write. I thought nothing could be finer than the first poem, till I
came to the third; but when I had read the last, it seemed to me to be
absolutely unapproachable." Other literary likings rose and fell with
him, but he never faltered in his allegiance to Tennyson.

[268] Mr. Grant White, whose edition of Shakespeare has been received
with much respect in England.

[269] A dear friend now gone, used laughingly to relate what outcry
there used to be, on the night of the week when a number was due, for
"that Pip nonsense!" and what roars of laughter followed, though at
first it was entirely put aside as not on any account to have time
wasted over it.

[270] There was no Chapter xx. as now; but the sentence which opens it
("For eleven years" in the original, altered to "eight years") followed
the paragraph about his business partnership with Herbert, and led to
Biddy's question whether he is sure he does not fret for Estella ("I am
sure and certain, Biddy" as originally written, altered to "O no--I
think not, Biddy"): from which point here was the close. "It was two
years more, before I saw herself. I had heard of her as leading a most
unhappy life, and as being separated from her husband who had used her
with great cruelty, and who had become quite renowned as a compound of
pride, brutality, and meanness. I had heard of the death of her husband
(from an accident consequent on ill-treating a horse), and of her being
married again to a Shropshire doctor, who, against his interest, had
once very manfully interposed, on an occasion when he was in
professional attendance on Mr. Drummle, and had witnessed some
outrageous treatment of her. I had heard that the Shropshire doctor was
not rich, and that they lived on her own personal fortune. I was in
England again--in London, and walking along Piccadilly with little
Pip--when a servant came