ill
death do us part. Your notices make me grateful, but very proud: so have
a care of them."

There was nothing written by him after this date which I did not see
before the world did, either in manuscript or proofs; and in connection
with the latter I shortly began to give him the help which he publicly
mentioned twenty years later in dedicating his collected writings to me.
One of his letters reminds me when these corrections began, and they
were continued very nearly to the last. They lightened for him a labor
of which he had more than enough imposed upon him at this time by
others, and they were never anything but an enjoyment to me. "I have,"
he wrote, "so many sheets of the _Miscellany_ to correct before I can
begin _Oliver_, that I fear I shall not be able to leave home this
morning. I therefore send your revise of the _Pickwick_ by Fred, who is
on his way with it to the printers. You will see that my alterations are
very slight, but I think for the better." This was the fourteenth number
of the _Pickwick Papers_. Fred was his next younger brother, who lived
with him at the time.

The number following this was the famous one in which the hero finds
himself in the Fleet; and another of his letters will show what
enjoyment the writing of it had given to himself. I had sent to ask him
where we were to meet for a proposed ride that day. "HERE," was his
reply. "I am slippered and jacketed, and, like that same starling who is
so very seldom quoted, can't get out. I am getting on, thank Heaven,
like 'a house o' fire,' and think the next _Pickwick_ will bang all the
others. I shall expect you at one, and we will walk to the stable
together. If you know anybody at Saint Paul's, I wish you'd send round
and ask them not to ring the bell so. I can hardly hear my own ideas as
they come into my head, and say what they mean."

The exulting tone of confidence in what he had thus been writing was
indeed well justified. He had as yet done nothing so remarkable, in
blending humor with tragedy, as his picture of what the poor side of a
debtors' prison was in the days of which we have seen that he had
himself had bitter experience; and we have but to recall, as it rises
sharply to the memory, what is contained in this portion of a work that
was not only among his earliest but his least considered as to plan, to
understand what it was that not alone had given him his fame so early,
but that in itself held the germ of the future th