The fortunate acquisition of a legacy of considerable amount released the elder Dickens from the Marshalsea. "In due time Mr. Micawber's petition was ripe for hearing, and that gentleman was ordered to be discharged under the Act. Mr. Micawber returned to the King's Bench when his case was over, as some fees were to be settled, and some formalities observed, before he could be actually released. The club received him with transport, and held a harmonic meeting that evening in his honor; while Mrs. Micawber and I had a lamb's fry in private, surrounded by the sleeping family." But you may read all there is to be read of the Micawbers and the King's Bench in the first volume of "David Copperfield," Chapters 11 and 12, and compare it, if you choose, with the early passages of "The Life of Charles Dickens," by John Forster, Volume I. Dickens's presentations of the Fleet and the Marshalsea had, it will be noted, the interest of description as well as of personal association with the characters of the stories for which they provided a part of the scenario. The King's Bench is an entirely personal episode. The figure of Mr. Micawber obscures all view of the prison. It poses on the merest suggestion of a background of barred windows and spiked walls. For this there are two reasons to be found. In the first place, all of the debtors' prisons of London were alike in their general features. They differed only in degrees and details of misery. In the Fleet and in the Marshalsea Dickens had exposed all that fell within his vocation to expose. Moreover, the necessity for invoking public obloquy upon the dens had passed away with the revision of the laws for debt. To have elaborated the material details of the life in the King's Bench would have been to repeat a twice-told tale. Apart from this, Dickens had made no special study of the King's Bench Prison. His memories of the Marshalsea were indelibly imprinted on his mind. It had been a part of his own life. He had explored the Fleet with the purpose of lending what aid he could toward its abolishment. His boyish wanderings had made him familiar enough with the external aspect of the King's Bench, and he had visited it on at least one occasion when an acquaintance was incarcerated there. But, after the Fleet and Marshalsea, its familiar features made no appeal to him. What could he say or write of it that had not been said or written by him already?