d by him as _Pic Nic Papers_, enabled him to help the
widow of his old publisher in her straitened means by a gift of L300. He
had finished his work of charity before he next wrote of _Barnaby
Rudge_, but he was fetching up his lee-way lazily. "I am getting on"
(29th of April) "very slowly. I want to stick to the story; and the fear
of committing myself, because of the impossibility of trying back or
altering a syllable, makes it much harder than it looks. It was too bad
of me to give you the trouble of cutting the number, but I knew so well
you would do it in the right places. For what Harley would call the
'onward work' I really think I have some famous thoughts." There is an
interval of a month before the next allusion: "Solomon's expression" (3d
of June) "I meant to be one of those strong ones to which strong
circumstances give birth in the commonest minds. Deal with it as you
like. . . . Say what you please of Gordon" (I had objected to some points
in his view of this madman, stated much too favorably as I thought), "he
must have been at heart a kind man, and a lover of the despised and
rejected, after his own fashion. He lived upon a small income, and
always within it; was known to relieve the necessities of many people;
exposed in his place the corrupt attempt of a minister to buy him out
of Parliament; and did great charities in Newgate. He always spoke on
the people's side, and tried against his muddled brains to expose the
profligacy of both parties. He never got anything by his madness, and
never sought it. The wildest and most raging attacks of the time allow
him these merits: and not to let him have 'em in their full extent,
remembering in what a (politically) wicked time he lived, would lie upon
my conscience heavily. The libel he was imprisoned for when he died, was
on the Queen of France; and the French government interested themselves
warmly to procure his release,--which I think they might have done, but
for Lord Grenville." I was more successful in the counsel I gave against
a fancy he had at this part of the story, that he would introduce as
actors in the Gordon riots three splendid fellows who should order,
lead, control, and be obeyed as natural guides of the crowd in that
delirious time, and who should turn out, when all was over, to have
broken out from Bedlam; but, though he saw the unsoundness of this, he
could not so readily see, in Gordon's case, the danger of taxing
ingenuity to ascribe a reas