horses, and drunken postboys, and have got back in time for
publication, to be received with never-forgotten compliments by the
late Mr. Black, coming in the broadest of Scotch from the broadest of
hearts I ever knew."

What shall I add to this? That the papers on which he was engaged as a
reporter, were _The True Sun_, _The Mirror of Parliament_, and _The
Morning Chronicle_; that long afterwards, little more than two years
before his death, when addressing the journalists of New York, he gave
public expression to his "grateful remembrance of a calling that was
once his own," and declared, "to the wholesome training of severe
newspaper work, when I was a very young man, I constantly refer my
first success;" that his income as a reporter appears latterly to have
been some five guineas a week, of course in addition to expenses and
general breakages and damages; that there is independent testimony to
his exceptional quickness in reporting and transcribing, and to his
intelligence in condensing; that to an observer so keen and apt, the
experiences of his business journeys in those more picturesque and
eventful ante-railway days must have been invaluable; and, finally,
that his connection with journalism lasted far into 1836, and so did
not cease till some months after "Pickwick" had begun to add to the
world's store of merriment and laughter.

But I have not really reached "Pickwick" yet, nor anything like it.
That master-work was not also a first work. With all Dickens' genius,
he had to go through some apprenticeship in the writer's art before
coming upon the public as the most popular novelist of his time. Let
us go back for a little to the twilight before the full sunrise, nay,
to the earliest streak upon the greyness of night, to his first
original published composition. Dickens himself, and in his preface to