computed, to L3,000, and as Forster computes to about L2,500.  This Dickens, who, to use his own words, “never undervalued his own work,” considered a very inadequate percentage on their gains—­forgetting a little, perhaps, that the risks had been wholly theirs, and that he had been more than content with the original bargain.  Similarly he was soon utterly dissatisfied with his arrangements with Bentley about the editorship of the Miscellany and “Oliver Twist,”—­arrangements which had been entered into in August, 1836, while “Pickwick” was in progress; and he utterly refused to let that publisher have “Gabriel Varden, The Locksmith of London” ("Barnaby Rudge”) on the terms originally agreed upon.  With Macrone also, who had made some L4,000 by the “Sketches,” and given him about L400, he was no better pleased, especially when that enterprising gentleman threatened a re-issue in monthly parts, and so compelled him to re-purchase the copyright for L2,000.  But however much he might consider himself ill-treated by the publishing fraternity, he was, of course, rapidly getting far richer than he had been, and so able to enlarge his mode of life.  He had begun, modestly enough, by taking his wife to live with him in his bachelor’s quarters in Furnival’s Inn,—­much as Tommy Traddles, in “David Copperfield,” took his wife to live in chambers at Gray’s Inn; and there, in Furnival’s Inn, his first child, a boy, was born on the 6th of January, 1837.  But in the March of that year he moved to a more commodious dwelling, at 48, Doughty Street, where he remained till the end of 1839, when still increasing means enabled him to move to a still better house at 1, Devonshire Terrace, Regent’s Park.  But the house in Doughty Street must have been endeared to him by many memories.  It was there, on the 7th of May, 1837, that he lost, at the early age of seventeen, and quite suddenly, a sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, to whom he was greatly attached.  The blow fell so heavily at the time as to incapacitate him from all work, and delayed the publication of one of the numbers of “Pickwick.”  Nor was the sorrow only sharp and transient.  He speaks of her in the preface to the first edition of that book.  Her spirit seemed to be hovering near as he stood looking at Niagara.  He felt her hallowing influence when in danger of growing too much elated by his first reception in America.  She came back to him in dreams in Italy.  Her image remained in his heart, unchanged by time, as he declared, to the very end.  She represented to his mind all that was pure and lovely in opening womanhood, and lives, in the world created by his art, as the Little Nell of “The Old Curiosity Shop.”  It was in Doughty Street, too, that he began to gather round him the circle of friends whose names seem almost like a muster-roll of the famous men and women in the first thirty years of Queen Victoria’s reign.  I shall not enumerate them.  The list of writers, artists, actors, would be too long.  But this at least it would be unjust