r-mat, in an eternal entry long and
narrow, is a puffy pug-dog, with a personal animosity towards us, who
triumphs over Time. The bark of that baleful Pug, a certain radiating
way he had of snapping at our undefended legs, the ghastly grinning of
his moist black muzzle and white teeth, and the insolence of his crisp
tail curled like a pastoral crook, all live and flourish. From an
otherwise unaccountable association of him with a fiddle, we conclude
that he was of French extraction, and his name _Fidele_. He belonged to
some female, chiefly inhabiting a back parlor, whose life appears to us
to have been consumed in sniffing, and in wearing a brown beaver
bonnet."--_Reprinted Pieces_, 287. (In such quotations as are made from
his writings, the _Charles Dickens Edition_ will be used.)

[3] "A few weeks' residence at home convinced me, who had till then been
an only child in the house of my grandfather, that a quarrel between
brothers was a very natural event."--Lockhart's _Life_, i. 30.

[4] The reader will forgive my quoting from a letter of the date of the
22d April, 1848. "I desire no better for my fame, when my personal
dustiness shall be past the control of my love of order, than such a
biographer and such a critic." "You know me better," he wrote, resuming
the same subject on the 6th of July, 1862, "than any other man does, or
ever will." In an entry of my diary during the interval between these
years, I find a few words that not only mark the time when I first saw
in its connected shape the autobiographical fragment which will form the
substance of the second chapter of this biography, but also express his
own feeling respecting it when written: "20 January, 1849. The
description may make none of the impression on others that the reality
made on him. . . . Highly probable that it may never see the light. No
wish. Left to J. F. or others." The first number of _David Copperfield_
appeared five months after this date; but though I knew, even before he
adapted his fragment of autobiography to the eleventh number, that he
had now abandoned the notion of completing it under his own name, the
"_no wish_," or the discretion left me, was never in any way
subsequently modified. What follows, from the same entry, refers to the
manuscript of the fragment: "No blotting, as when writing fiction; but
straight on, as when writing ordinary letter."

CHAPTER II.

HARD EXPERIENCES IN BOYHOOD.

1822-1824.

Mr. Dil