ely. The
lady in the refreshment-room was very hard upon me, harder even than
those fair enslavers usually are. She gave me a cup of tea, as if I were
a hyena and she my cruel keeper with a strong dislike to me. I mingled
my tears with it, and had a petrified bun of enormous antiquity in
miserable meekness."

The Court of Chancery finds a place in more than one of his books. His
strong feeling in regard to it is shown in the following extract from a
letter to Wills: "It has become (through the vile dealing with those
courts and the vermin they have called into existence) a positive precept
of experience, that a man had better endure a great wrong than go, or
suffer himself to be taken, into Chancery, with the dream of setting it
right" (7th August 1856).

He wrote to Mrs Winter: "A necessity is upon me . . . of wandering about
in my old wild way, to think. I could no more resist this on Sunday or
yesterday than a man can dispense with food. . . . Whoever is devoted to
an art must be content to deliver himself wholly up to it, and find his
recompense in it. I am grieved if you suspect me of not wanting to see
you, but I can't help it; I must go my way whether or no" (3rd April
1855).

In September 1855 he was at Folkestone, whence he wrote to Mrs Watson
about _Little Dorrit_, to which he at the time intended to give the name
_Nobody's Fault_: "The new story is everywhere--heaving in the sea,
flying with the clouds, blowing in the wind. . . . I settle to nothing,
and wonder (in the old way) at my own incomprehensibility" (16th
September 1855).

In 1857 he came into possession of Gad's Hill, and thus fulfilled the
dream of his childhood.

There are many instances of his kindness to would-be authors. In a
letter to a lady he says that he cannot tell her with what reluctance he
gives an opinion against her story, in spite of much that is good in it.
And about an article by another lady he writes to F. Stone (who
approached Dickens on her behalf). He says: "These Notes are destroyed
by too much smartness. For the love of God don't condescend! Don't
assume the attitude of saying, 'See how clever I am, and what fun
everybody else is.'"

In a letter to Miss Hogarth from Dublin he wrote: "The success at Belfast
has been equal to the success here. Enormous! . . . and the personal
affection there was something overwhelming. . . . I have never seen men
go in to cry undisguisedly as they did at that reading yest