"Saturday, July 1st--To the Palace. The Prince, to my extreme astonishment, offered me the professorship, and very earnestly and with many flattering expressions, pressed me to accept it. I was resolute, and gratefully and respectfully declined. I should have declined, indeed, if only in order to give no ground to anybody to accuse me of foul play, for I have had difficulty enough in steering my course so as to deal properly both by Stephen and Kemble, and if I had marched off with the prize, I could not have been astonished if both had entertained a very unjust suspicion of me. But, in truth, my temper is that of the wolf in the fable, I cannot bear the collar, and I have got rid of much finer and richer collars than this. It would be strange if, having sacrificed for liberty, a seat in the Cabinet and twenty-five hundred pounds a year, I should now sacrifice liberty for a chair at Cambridge and four hundred pounds a year. Besides, I never could do two things at once. If I lectured well, my _History_ must be given up, and to give up my _History_ would be to give up much more than the emoluments of the professorship--if emolument were my chief object, which it is not now, nor ever was. The prince, when he found me determined, asked me about the other candidates." XXIV DICKENS WRITES THE PICKWICK PAPERS We are always interested in the beginnings of a successful career, for humanity with all its selfishness takes a generous pleasure in the advancement of those who have made an honest fight for fame or wealth. The first success of Dickens came with the publication of the _Pickwick Papers_, by the publication of which the publishers, it is said, made $100,000,--much to their astonishment. We all know the early career of the famous novelist: How he passed a boyhood of poverty; how he became a stenographer, a good one, for said a Mr. Beard, "There never was such a shorthand writer," at the time Dickens entered the gallery as a Parliament reporter; how he later became a reporter for the _Morning Chronicle_. In the December number of the _Old Monthly Magazine_ his first published story saw the light. This was in 1833, when Dickens was twenty-one. The story first went under the name of _A Dinner at Poplar Walk_, but it afterwards was changed to _Mr. Mims and his Cousin_. Then came _Sketches by Boz_ in 1835, and in 1836 _Pickwick_ appeared in serial form, the book coming out a year later. An amusing and striking illustration of the widespread interest in the story of _Pickwick_, if we may call so rambling an account as _Pickwick_ a story, is related by Carlyle: "An archdeacon with his own venerable lips repeated to me the other night a strange profane story: of a solemn clergyman who had been administering ghostly consolation to a sick person; having finished, satisfactorily as he thought, and got out of the room, he heard the sick person ejaculate, 'Well, thank God, _Pickwick_ will be out in ten days any way!'--this is dreadful."