one stories in reserve for home.”  At Boston the enthusiasm had swelled to even greater proportions.  “How can I give you,” he writes, “the faintest notion of my reception here; of the crowds that pour in and out the whole day; of the people that line the streets when I go out; of the cheering when I went to the theatre; of the copies of verses, letters of congratulation, welcomes of all kinds, balls, dinners, assemblies without end?...  There is to be a dinner in New York, ... to which I have had an invitation with every known name in America appended to it....  I have had deputations from the Far West, who have come from more than two thousand miles’ distance; from the lakes, the rivers, the backwoods, the log-houses, the cities, factories, villages, and towns.  Authorities from nearly all the states have written to me.  I have heard from the universities, congress, senate, and bodies, public and private, of every sort and kind.”  All was indeed going happy as a marriage bell.  Did I not rightly say that the world was conspiring to spoil this young man of thirty, whose youth had certainly not been passed in the splendour of opulence or power?  What wonder if in the dawn of his American experiences, and of such a reception, everything assumed a roseate hue?  Is it matter for surprise if he found the women “very beautiful,” the “general breeding neither stiff nor forward,” “the good nature universal”; if he expatiated, not without a backward look at unprogressive Old England, on the comparative comfort among the working classes, and the absence of beggars in the streets?  But, alas, that rosy dawn ended, as rosy dawns sometimes will, in sleet and mist and very dirty weather.  Before many weeks, before many days had flown, Dickens was writing in a very different spirit.  On the 24th of February, in the midst of a perfect ovation of balls and dinners, he writes “with reluctance, disappointment, and sorrow,” that “there is no country on the face of the earth, where there is less freedom of opinion on any subject in reference to which there is a broad difference of opinion, than in” the United States.  On the 22nd of March he writes again, to Macready, who seems to have remonstrated with him on his growing discontent:  “It is of no use, I am disappointed.  This is not the republic I came to see; this is not the republic of my imagination.  I infinitely prefer a liberal monarchy—­even with its sickening accompaniment of Court circulars—­to such a government as this.  The more I think of its youth and strength, the poorer and more trifling in a thousand aspects it appears in my eyes.  In everything of which it has made a boast, excepting its education of the people, and its care for poor children, it sinks immeasurably below the level I had placed it upon, and England, even England, bad and faulty as the old land is, and miserable as millions of her people are, rises in the comparison....  Freedom of opinion; where is it?  I see a press more mean and paltry and silly and disgraceful than any country I ever knew....  In the respects of not being left alone, and of being horribly disgusted by tobacco chewing and tobacco spittle, I have suffered considerably.”