pplying a motive to exertion for the time, and otherwise opening out
to the idolater, both in fact and fiction, a highly unsubstantial,
happy, foolish time. I used to laugh and tell him I had no belief in any
but the book Dora, until the incident of a sudden reappearance of the
real one in his life, nearly six years after _Copperfield_ was written,
convinced me there had been a more actual foundation for those chapters
of his book than I was ready to suppose. Still, I would hardly admit it,
and, that the matter could possibly affect him then, persisted in a
stout refusal to believe. His reply (1855) throws a little light on this
juvenile part of his career, and I therefore venture to preserve it:

"I don't quite apprehend what you mean by my overrating the strength of
the feeling of five-and-twenty years ago. If you mean of my own feeling,
and will only think what the desperate intensity of my nature is, and
that this began when I was Charley's age; that it excluded every other
idea from my mind for four years, at a time of life when four years are
equal to four times four; and that I went at it with a determination to
overcome all the difficulties, which fairly lifted me up into that
newspaper life, and floated me away over a hundred men's heads; then you
are wrong, because nothing can exaggerate that. I have positively stood
amazed at myself ever since!--And so I suffered, and so worked, and so
beat and hammered away at the maddest romances that ever got into any
boy's head and stayed there, that to see the mere cause of it all, now,
loosens my hold upon myself. Without for a moment sincerely believing
that it would have been better if we had never got separated, I cannot
see the occasion of so much emotion as I should see any one else. No
one can imagine in the most distant degree what pain the recollection
gave me in _Copperfield_. And, just as I can never open that book as I
open any other book, I cannot see the face (even at four-and-forty), or
hear the voice, without going wandering away over the ashes of all that
youth and hope in the wildest manner." More and more plainly seen,
however, in the light of four-and-forty, the romance glided visibly
away, its work being fairly done; and at the close of the month
following that in which this letter was written, during which he had
very quietly made a formal call with his wife at his youthful Dora's
house, and contemplated with a calm equanimity, in the hall, her stuffe