creature found the loophole for escape. The
officers had taken him illegally without any warrant; and really they
messed it all through, quite facetiously."

He will himself also best relate the small domestic difficulty into
which he fell in his temporary dwelling, upon his unexpectedly
discovering it to be unequal to the strain of a dinner party for which
invitations had gone out just before the sudden "let" of
Devonshire-terrace. The letter is characteristic in other ways, or I
should hardly have gone so far into domesticities here; and it enables
me to add that with the last on its list of guests, Mr. Chapman the
chairman of Lloyd's, he held much friendly intercourse, and that few
things more absurd or unfounded have been invented, even of Dickens,
than that he found any part of the original of Mr. Dombey in the nature,
the appearance, or the manners of this estimable gentleman. "Advise,
advise," he wrote (9 Osnaburgh-terrace, 28th of May 1844), "advise with
a distracted man. Investigation below stairs renders it, as my father
would say, 'manifest to any person of ordinary intelligence, if the term
may be considered allowable,' that the Saturday's dinner cannot come off
here with safety. It would be a toss-up, and might come down heads, but
it would put us into an agony with that kind of people. . . . Now, I feel a
difficulty in dropping it altogether, and really fear that this might
have an indefinably suspicious and odd appearance. Then said I at
breakfast this morning, I'll send down to the Clarendon. Then says Kate,
have it at Richmond. Then I say, that might be inconvenient to the
people. Then she says, how could it be if we dine late enough? Then I am
very much offended without exactly knowing why; and come up here, in a
state of hopeless mystification. . . . What do you think? Ellis would be
quite as dear as anybody else; and unless the weather changes, the place
is objectionable. I must make up my mind to do one thing or other, for
we shall meet Lord Denman at dinner to-day. Could it be dropped
decently? That, I think very doubtful. Could it be done for a couple of
guineas apiece at the Clarendon? . . . In a matter of more importance I
could make up my mind. But in a matter of this kind I bother and
bewilder myself, and come to no conclusion whatever. Advise! Advise! . . .
List of the Invited. There's Lord Normanby. And there's Lord Denman.
There's Easthope, wife, and sister. There's Sydney Smith. There's you