e, the Balls at "The Bull," the Reviews on
the Lines. The officers--like Dr. Slammer, all the figures--fat boy
included--were drawn from this stage of his life. The Golden Cross,
which figures also in _Copperfield_, he had constantly stopped at. He
knew, too, the inns in the Boro'. The large legal element and its odd
incidents and characters he had learned and studied during his brief
apprenticeship to the Law. The interior economy of the Fleet Prison he
had learned from his family's disastrous experiences; the turnkeys, and
blighted inhabitants he had certainly taken from life. But he shifted
the scene from the Marshalsea to the King's Bench Prison--the former
place would have been too painful a reminiscence for his father. To his
reporting expeditions we owe the Election scenes at Ipswich, and to
another visit for the same object, his Bath experiences. Much of the
vividness and reality of his touchings, particularly in the case of
Rochester and its doings, is the magnifying, searching power resulting
from a life of sorrow in childhood, family troubles working on a keen,
sensitive nature; these made him appreciate and meditate on all that was
going on about him, as a sort of relief and relaxation. All the London
scenes the meetings at taverns--were personal experiences. Among his
friends were medical students and many odd beings. We can trace his
extraordinary appreciation of Christmas--and its genial, softening
festivities--which clung to him till it altogether faded out, to the same
sense of relief; it furnished an opportunity of forgetting for a time (at
least), the dismal, gloomy home.

Boz, if he drew his characters from life, did not draw wholesale; he
would take only a portion of a character that pleased him and work it up
in combination with another distinct character. It was thus he dealt
with Leigh Hunt, borrowing his amusing, airy frivolity, and combining it
with the meanness and heartlessness of Skimpole. I have always fancied
that Dowler in "Pickwick" was founded--after this composite principle--on
his true-hearted but imperious friend, Forster. Forster was indeed also
a perfect reproduction of Dr. Johnson and had the despotic intolerance--in
conversation certainly--of that great man. Like him "if his pistol
missed fire, he knocked you down with the butt end of it." He could be
as amiable and tender-hearted as "old Sam" himself. Listening to Dowler
at the coach office in Piccadilly we--who