cause the work of his uncle Barrow's publication required to be done
there; and if, in later years, the great author was in the same room as
the guest of the prime minister, it must have been but a month or two
before he died, when for the first time he visited and breakfasted with
Mr. Gladstone.

The mention of his career in the gallery may close with the incident. I
will only add that his observation while there had not led him to form
any high opinion of the House of Commons or its heroes, and that of the
Pickwickian sense which so often takes the place of common sense in our
legislature he omitted no opportunity of declaring his contempt at
every part of his life.

The other occupation had meanwhile not been lost sight of, and for this
we are to go back a little. Since the first sketch appeared in the
_Monthly Magazine_, nine others have enlivened the pages of later
numbers of the same magazine, the last in February, 1835, and that which
appeared in the preceding August having first had the signature of Boz.
This was the nickname of a pet child, his youngest brother Augustus,
whom in honor of the _Vicar of Wakefield_ he had dubbed Moses, which
being facetiously pronounced through the nose became Boses, and being
shortened became Boz. "Boz was a very familiar household word to me,
long before I was an author, and so I came to adopt it." Thus had he
fully invented his Sketches by Boz before they were even so called, or
any one was ready to give much attention to them; and the next invention
needful to himself was some kind of payment in return for them. The
magazine was owned as well as conducted at this time by a Mr. Holland,
who had come back from Bolivar's South American campaigns with the rank
of captain, and had hoped to make it a popular mouthpiece for his ardent
liberalism. But this hope, as well as his own health, quite failed; and
he had sorrowfully to decline receiving any more of the sketches when
they had to cease as voluntary offerings. I do not think that either he
or the magazine lived many weeks after an evening I passed with him in
Doughty Street in 1837, when he spoke in a very touching way of the
failure of this and other enterprises of his life, and of the help that
Dickens had been to him.

Nothing thus being forthcoming from the _Monthly_, it was of course but
natural the sketches too should cease to be forthcoming; and, even
before the above-named February number appeared, a new opening had be