s highest mood, his energy
unwearied in good work, and his capacity for enjoyment without limit; he
was able to signalize its closing months by an achievement supremely
fortunate, which but for disappointments the year had also brought might
never have been thought of. He had not begun until a week after his
return from Manchester, where the fancy first occurred to him, and
before the end of November he had finished, his memorable _Christmas
Carol_. It was the work of such odd moments of leisure as were left him
out of the time taken up by two numbers of his _Chuzzlewit_; and though
begun with but the special design of adding something to the
_Chuzzlewit_ balance, I can testify to the accuracy of his own account
of what befell him in its composition, with what a strange mastery it
seized him for itself, how he wept over it, and laughed, and wept again,
and excited himself to an extraordinary degree, and how he walked
thinking of it fifteen and twenty miles about the black streets of
London, many and many a night after all sober folks had gone to bed. And
when it was done, as he told our friend Mr. Felton in America, he let
himself loose like a madman. "Forster is out again," he added, by way of
illustrating our practical comments on his celebration of the jovial
old season, "and if he don't go in again after the manner in which we
have been keeping Christmas, he must be very strong indeed. Such
dinings, such dancings, such conjurings, such blind-man's-buffings, such
theatre-goings, such kissings-out of old years and kissings-in of new
ones, never took place in these parts before."

Yet had it been to him, this closing year, a time also of much anxiety
and strange disappointments of which I am now to speak; and before, with
that view, we go back for a while to its earlier months, one step into
the new year may be taken for what marked it with interest and
importance to him. Eighteen hundred and forty-four was but fifteen days
old when a third son (his fifth child, which received the name of its
godfather Francis Jeffrey) was born; and here is an answer sent by him,
two days later, to an invitation from Maclise, Stanfield, and myself to
dine with us at Richmond. "DEVONSHIRE LODGE, _Seventeenth of January_,
1844. FELLOW COUNTRYMEN! The appeal with which you have honoured me,
awakens within my breast emotions that are more easily to be imagined
than described. Heaven bless you. I shall indeed be proud, my friends,
to respon