dvantages offered to them, though little Charles went
from door to door in the neighbourhood, carrying hither and thither
the most alluring circulars. Even thus was the place besieged by
assiduous and angry duns. And when, in the ordinary course of such sad
stories, Mr. Dickens is arrested for debt, and carried off to the
Marshalsea prison,[2] he moralizes over the event in precisely the
same strain as Mr. Micawber, using, indeed, the very same words, and
calls on his son, with many tears, "to take warning by the Marshalsea,
and to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a year, and spent
nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy;
but that a shilling spent the other way would make him wretched."

The son was taking note of other things besides these moral apothegms,
and reproduced, in after days, with a quite marvellous detail and
fidelity, all the incidents of his father's incarceration. Probably,
too, he was beginning, as children will, almost unconsciously, to form
some estimate of his father's character. And a very queer study in
human nature _that_ must have been, giving Dickens, when once he had
mastered it, a most exceptional insight into the ways of
impecuniosity. Charles Lamb, as we all remember, divided mankind into
two races, the mighty race of the borrowers, and the mean race of the
lenders; and expatiated, with a whimsical and charming eloquence, upon
the greatness of one Bigod, who had been as a king among those who by
process of loan obtain possession of other people's money. Shift the
line of division a little, so that instead of separating borrowers and
lenders, it separates those who pay their debts from those who do not
pay them, and then Dickens the elder may succeed to something of
Bigod's kingship. He was of the great race of debtors, possessing
especially that _ideal_ quality of mind on which Lamb laid such
stress. Imagination played the very mischief with him. He had
evidently little grasp of fact, and moved in a kind of haze, through
which all clear outlines would show blurred and unreal.
Sometimes--most often, perhaps--that haze would be irradiated with
sanguine visionary hopes and expectations. Sometimes it would be
fitfully darkened with all the horrors of despair. But whether in
gloom or gleam, the realities of his position would be lost. He never,
certainly, contracted a debt which he did not mean honourably to pay.
But either he had never possessed the faculty of f