cessful author; he kept the fact from his wife till long after marriage, and, we are told, could never bear to speak to his children of that and the like endurances. This I have seen mentioned as a proof of sensitiveness verging on snobbery; but surely it is nothing of the kind. Dickens would not, like his pet aversion, Josiah Bounderby in Hard Times, proclaim from the house-tops that he had been a poor boy toiling for a few shillings a week, and most certainly he would have preferred to look back upon a childhood like to that of his friends and neighbours; but the true reason for his shrinking from this recollection lay in the fact that it involved a grave censure upon his parents. "It is wonderful to me," he writes, in the fragment of autobiography preserved by Forster (Life, Book I. 2), "how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me that, even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion enough on me—a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally—to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school. Our friends, I take it, were tired out. No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could
