tend his observation;
but even as to this the result showed him right in believing that he
should obtain decided intellectual advantage from the mere effects of
such farther travel. Here indeed he spoke from experience, for already
he had returned from America with wider views than when he started, and
with a larger maturity of mind. The money difficulties on which he dwelt
were also, it is now to be admitted, unquestionable. Beyond his own
domestic expenses necessarily increasing, there were many,
never-satisfied, constantly-recurring claims from family quarters, not
the more easily avoidable because unreasonable and unjust; and it was
after describing to me one such with great bitterness, a few days
following the letter last quoted, that he thus replied on the following
day (19th of November) to the comment I had made upon it. "I was most
horribly put out for a little while; for I had got up early to go at it,
and was full of interest in what I had to do. But having eased my mind
by that note to you, and taken a turn or two up and down the room, I
went at it again, and soon got so interested that I blazed away till 9
last night; only stopping ten minutes for dinner! I suppose I wrote
eight printed pages of _Chuzzlewit_ yesterday. The consequence is that I
_could_ finish to-day, but am taking it easy, and making myself laugh
very much." The very next day, unhappily, there came to himself a
repetition of precisely similar trouble in exaggerated form, and to me a
fresh reminder of what was gradually settling into a fixed resolve. "I
am quite serious and sober when I say, that I have very grave thoughts
of keeping my whole menagerie in Italy, three years."

* * * * *

Of the book which awoke such varied feelings and was the occasion of
such vicissitudes of fortune, some notice is now due; and this,
following still as yet my former rule, will be not so much critical as
biographical. He had left for Italy before the completed tale was
published, and its reception for a time was exactly what his just-quoted
letter prefigures. It had forced itself up in public opinion without
forcing itself up in sale. It was felt generally to be an advance upon
his previous stories, and his own opinion is not to be questioned that
it was in a hundred points immeasurably the best of them thus far; less
upon the surface, and going deeper into springs of character. Nor would
it be difficult to say, in a single wo