ld not afford to pay tax for. The
dog escaped and got killed, and "I must lie to him--the cobbler--for
life, and say that the dog is fat and happy" (ii., p. 58).

In the winter of 1862 he was reading at Cheltenham. Macready was in the
audience, and Dickens writes: "I found him quite unable to speak, and
able to do nothing but square his dear old jaw all on one side, and roll
his eyes (half closed), like Jackson's picture of him." Macready said:
"I swear to heaven that, as a piece of passion and
playfulness--er--indescribably mixed up together, it does--er--no,
really, Dickens! amaze me as profoundly as it moves me. . . . How is it
got at--er--how is it done--er--how one man can--well? It lays me on
my--er--back, and it is of no use talking about it!" (ii., p. 196).

Dickens seems to have been thought to have done a wrong to Jews in
general by his character Fagin in _Oliver Twist_. He wrote, 10th July
1863, to a Jewish lady that it "unfortunately was true of the time to
which the story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was
a Jew." The real reply to her letter was Riah in _Our Mutual Friend_.

Of that book he says: "It is a combination of drollery with romance,
which requires a great deal of pains and a perfect throwing away of
points that might be amplified, but I hope it is _very good_" (ii., p.
225).

In speaking of his public readings he refers to wearing a flower given
him. This doubtless explains why, when he read at Cambridge, he wore
first a red rose and then a white one in his buttonhole, which to my
undergraduate mind seemed "dandiacal." Of this occasion he wrote: "The
reception at Cambridge last night was something to be proud of in such a
place. The colleges mustered in full force from the biggest guns to the
smallest, and went far beyond even Manchester in the roars of welcome and
the rounds of cheers. . . . The place was crammed, and the success the
most brilliant I have ever seen" (ii., p. 284).

In 1867 we again come across a reference to the exhaustion caused by his
public readings. "On Friday night I quite astonished myself; but I was
taken so faint afterwards that they laid me on a sofa at the hall for
half an hour."

In spite of protestations he went to America, and in regard to his visit
he wrote in 1867: "I do not expect as much money as the calculators
estimate, but I cannot set the hope of a large sum of money aside."

And from Boston he wrote to his daughter: