Here they lived until 1823, these six years filled with increasing prosperity, with comparative comfort, with happy friendships, with his best work, with sudden fame. His income had slowly increased with each added year of service in the East India House, and the earnings of his literary work swelled it slightly. That work had never yet received its recognition. It was collected and published in two handsome volumes in 1818, and the reading world of that day suddenly awakened to see in the obscure clerk, plodding daily to his desk in Leadenhall Street, its most delicate humourist, its most acute critic, its most perfect essayist. A little later, inspired by this success, he set to work in these rooms in Russell Street on his “Elia” papers, begun in the new _London Magazine_ for August, 1820. So he outgrew his gloom and grew gayer, although he was never for one hour out of the shadow of Mary’s constant imminent danger of a relapse. He drew around him many new acquaintances, especially the theatrical folk of this quarter, and more and more of the “friendly harpies” he was fond of, on whom he spent his time and squandered his strength. He needed all he could save of time and strength for his evening work on his Essays, after his day’s work at his desk. Yet he not only was not allowed to attend to literary labour, but he complained that he could not even write letters at home, because he was never alone; and had to seize odd moments for all such writing at his office and from his work in East India House. Stationery, too, he seized there; and some of his unapproachable letters were written on printed official forms concerning “statements of the weights and amounts of the following lots”! His task-masters there would have gone out of their mercantile minds could they have made accurate estimates of the hard money value to be put by posterity on those “following lots” which he thus unofficially filled in! Even there he was not unmolested, but was constantly “called off to do the deposits on cotton wool,” he complained when writing to Wordsworth. “But why do I relate this to you, who want faculties to comprehend the great mystery of deposits, of interest, of warehouse rent, and of contingent fund?”