nd coming here in a
hackney-coach, with a big portmanteau, to-morrow. It surely is better to
be unwell with a Quick and Cheerful (and Co) in the neighbourhood, than
in the dreary vastness of Lincoln's-inn-fields. Here is the snuggest
tent-bedstead in the world, and there you are with the drawing-room for
your workshop, the Q and C for your pal, and 'every-think in a
concatenation accordingly.' I begin to have hopes of the regeneration of
mankind after the reception of Gregory last night, though I have none of
the _Chronicle_ for not denouncing the villain. Have you seen the note
touching my _Notes_ in the blue and yellow?"

The first of these closing allusions was to the editor of the infamous
_Satirist_ having been hissed from the Drury-lane stage, on which he had
presented himself in the character of Hamlet; and I remember with what
infinite pleasure I afterwards heard Chief Justice Tindal in court,
charging the jury in an action brought by this malefactor against a
publican of St. Giles's for having paid men to take part in the hissing
of him, avow the pride he felt in "living in the same parish with a man
of that humble station of life of the defendant's," who was capable of
paying money out of his own pocket to punish what he believed to be an
outrage to decency. The second allusion was to a statement of the
reviewer of the _American Notes_ in the _Edinburgh_ to the effect, that,
if he had been rightly informed, Dickens had gone to America as a kind
of missionary in the cause of international copyright; to which a prompt
contradiction had been given in the _Times_. "I deny it," wrote Dickens,
"wholly. He is wrongly informed; and reports, without enquiry, a piece
of information which I could only characterize by using one of the
shortest and strongest words in the language."

The disputes that had arisen out of the American book, I may add,
stretched over great part of the year. It will quite suffice, however,
to say here that the ground taken by him in his letters written on the
spot, and printed in my former volume, which in all the more material
statements his book invited public judgment upon and which he was moved
to reopen in _Chuzzlewit_, was so kept by him against all comers, that
none of the counter-statements or arguments dislodged him from a square
inch of it. But the controversy is dead now; and he took occasion, on
his later visit to America, to write its epitaph.

Though I did not, to revert to his F