after this engaged to be married to Miss Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of one of his fellow-workers on the Chronicle.  There had been, so Forster tells us, a previous very shadowy love affair in his career,—­an affair so visionary indeed, and boyish, as scarcely to be worthy of mention in this history, save for three facts:  first, that his devotion, dreamlike as it was, seems to have had love’s highest practical effect in inducing him to throw his whole strength into the study of shorthand; secondly, that the lady of his love appears to have had some resemblance to Dora, the child-wife of David Copperfield; and thirdly, that he met her again long years afterwards, when time had worked its changes, and the glamour of love had left his eyes, and that to that meeting we owe the passages in “Little Dorrit” relating to poor Flora.  This, however, is a parenthesis.  The engagement to Miss Hogarth was neither shadowy nor unreal—­an engagement only in dreamland.  Better for both, perhaps—­who knows?—­if it had been.  Ah me, if one could peer into the future, how many weddings there are at which tears would be more appropriate than smiles and laughter!  Would Charles Dickens and Catherine Hogarth have foreborne to plight their troth, one wonders, if they could have foreseen how slowly and surely the coming years were to sunder their hearts and lives?—­They were married on the 2nd of April, 1836.

This date again leads me to a time subsequent to the publication of the first number of “Pickwick,” which had appeared a day or two before;—­and again I refrain from dealing with that great book.  For before I do so, I wish to pause a brief space to consider what manner of man Charles Dickens was when he suddenly broke on the world in his full popularity; and also what were the influences, for good and evil, which his early career had exercised upon his character and intellect.

What manner of man he was?  In outward aspect all accounts agree that he was singularly, noticeably prepossessing—­bright, animated, eager, with energy and talent written in every line of his face.  Such he was when Forster saw him, on the occasion of their first meeting, when Dickens was acting as spokesman for the insurgent reporters engaged on the Mirror.  So Carlyle, who met him at dinner shortly after this, and was no flatterer, sketches him for us with a pen of unwonted kindliness.  “He is a fine little fellow—­Boz, I think.  Clear, blue, intelligent eyes, eyebrows that he arches amazingly, large protrusive rather loose mouth, a face of most extreme mobility, which he shuttles about—­eyebrows, eyes, mouth and all—­in a very singular manner while speaking.  Surmount this with a loose coil of common-coloured hair, and set it on a small compact figure, very small, and dressed a la D’Orsay rather than well—­this is Pickwick.  For the rest, a quiet, shrewd-looking little fellow, who seems to guess pretty well what he is and what others are."[7] Is not this a graphic little picture, and characteristic even to the touch about D’Orsay, the dandy French Count?  For Dickens, like the young men of the time—­Disraeli, Bulwer, and the rest—­was a great fop.  We, of these degenerate days, shall never see again that antique magnificence in coloured velvet waistcoats.