r mention by Dickens himself, was presumably of a
less wholesome and instructive character. 'I used,' he says, 'when I was
at school, to take in the _Terrific Register_, making myself unspeakably
miserable, and frightening my very wits out of my head, for the small
charge of a penny weekly; which, considering that there was an
illustration to every number in which there was always a pool of blood,
and at least one body, was cheap.' An obliging correspondent writes to
me upon my reference to the Fox-under-the-hill, at p. 62: 'Will you
permit me to say, that the house, shut up and almost ruinous, is still
to be found at the bottom of a curious and most precipitous court, the
entrance of which is just past Salisbury-street. . . . It was once, I
think, the approach to the halfpenny boats. The house is now shut out
from the water-side by the Embankment.'" I proceed to state in detail
what the changes thus referred to were.

The passage about James Lamert, beginning at the thirteenth line of p.
31, now stands: "His chief ally and encourager in these displays was a
youth of some ability, much older than himself, named James Lamert,
stepson to his mother's sister and therefore a sort of cousin, who was
his great patron and friend in his childish days. Mary, the eldest
daughter of Charles Barrow, himself a lieutenant in the navy, had for
her first husband a commander in the navy called Allen; on whose death
by drowning at Rio Janeiro she had joined her sister, the navy-pay
clerk's wife, at Chatham; in which place she subsequently took for her
second husband Doctor Lamert, an army surgeon, whose son James, even
after he had been sent to Sandhurst for his education, continued still
to visit Chatham from time to time. He had a turn for private
theatricals; and as his father's quarters were in the ordnance-hospital
there, a great rambling place otherwise at that time almost uninhabited,
he had plenty of room in which to get up his entertainments." Two other
corrections were consequent on this change. At the 21st line of page 38,
for "the elder cousin" read "the cousin by marriage;" and at the 31st
line of p. 49, "cousin by his mother's side" should be "cousin by his
aunt's marriage."

At the 15th line of the 41st page, "his bachelor-uncle, fellow-clerk,"
&c. should be "the uncle who was at this time fellow-clerk," &c. At the
11th line of page 54, "Charles-court" should be "Clare-court." The
allusion to one of his favourite localiti