sympathy with Lockhart's handling of
some passages in his admirable _Life of Scott_ that had drawn down upon
him the wrath of the Ballantynes. This he did in the _Examiner_; where
also I find him noticing a book by Thomas Hood: "rather poor, but I have
not said so, because Hood is too, and ill besides." In the course of the
year he was taken into Devonshire to select a home for his father, on
the removal of the latter (who had long given up his reporting duties)
from his London residence; and this he found in a cottage at Alphington,
near Exeter, where he placed the elder Dickens with his wife and their
youngest son. The same year closed Macready's Covent Garden management,
and at the dinner to the retiring manager, when the Duke of Cambridge
took the chair, Dickens spoke with that wonderful instinct of knowing
what to abstain from saying, as well as what to say, which made his
after-dinner speeches quite unique. Nor should mention be omitted of the
Shakspeare Society, now diligently attended, of which Procter, Talfourd,
Macready, Thackeray, Henry Davison, Blanchard, Charles Knight, John
Bell, Douglas Jerrold, Maclise, Stanfield, George Cattermole, the good
Tom Landseer, Frank Stone, and other old friends were members, and
where, out of much enjoyment and many disputings,[27] there arose, from
Dickens and all of us, plenty of after-dinner oratory. The closing
months of this year of 1839 had special interest for him. At the end of
October another daughter was born to him, who bears the name of that
dear friend of his and mine, Macready, whom he asked to be her
godfather; and before the close of the year he had moved out of Doughty
Street into Devonshire Terrace, a handsome house with a garden of
considerable size, shut out from the New Road by a high brick wall
facing the York Gate into Regent's Park. These various matters, and his
attempts at the _Barnaby_ novel on the conclusion of _Nickleby_, are the
subject of his letters between October and December.

"Thank God, all goes famously. I have worked at _Barnaby_ all day, and
moreover seen a beautiful (and reasonable) house in Kent Terrace, where
Macready once lived, but larger than his." Again (this having gone off):
"_Barnaby_ has suffered so much from the house-hunting, that I mustn't
chop to-day." Then (for the matter of the Middle Temple), "I return the
form. It's the right temple, I take for granted. _Barnaby_ moves, not at
race-horse speed, but yet as fast (I thin