“‘So, sir,’ screamed out Cumberland, ‘you must have an uncommon good opinion of yourself! You consider yourself, I am told, three times as able as any one of us; for you undertake to do an amount of work, single-handed, which we have found enough for us all.’ ‘I am not afraid,’ said the young man, with imperturbable _sang froid_, ‘of doing all that is required of me.’ They all three then warned him of the tact, discretion, and knowledge of books and men required—of the difficulties of which he must expect to find an enterprise of such magnitude beset, &c., &c. They began then to sound his depth; but on politics, belles lettres, political economy, even the drama, they found him far from shallow. Cumberland, transported out of himself by his modest assurance, snatched up his hat, smashed it on his head, rammed snuff incontinently up his nose, and then rushed by Mellish, who was in the adjoining room, swearing, and saying as he left, ‘Confound the potato. He’s so tough, there’s no peeling him!’ The tough potato was John Wilson Croker.” That Charles Dickens made a great deal of money, all the world is well aware. That in the tale of “David Copperfield,” a little of his childish life was outlined, was known, or rather suspected; but till his life appeared, no one had the least idea how low down in the world he and his family were, and how much more creditable to him was his rise. If it is good for a man to bear the yoke in his youth, Dickens certainly had this advantage. We have seldom read a more touching picture than that which is given of the life of the neglected, untaught, half-starved boy at this time. It is tragic and affecting enough in itself, but it is still more impressive as suggesting the possible lot of hundreds and thousands in this great London of ours. The one boy, by means of marvellous genius, forces his way to the front; but who is to tell the story of the obscure multitude who perish in the struggle? What imagination has ever pictured scenes as tragic as the following experiences?— “It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me, that even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion enough on me—a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally—to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school. Our friends, I take it, were tired out. No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school, and going to Cambridge.