in the smallest compass.  None but a fine imagination would have conceived the supernatural agency that works old Scrooge’s moral regeneration—­the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and to come, that each in turn speaks to the wizened heart of the old miser, so that, almost unwittingly, he is softened by the tender memories of childhood, warmed by sympathy for those who struggle and suffer, and appalled by the prospect of his own ultimate desolation and black solitude.  Then the episodes:  the scenes to which these ghostly visitants convey Scrooge; the story of his earlier years as shown in vision; the household of the Cratchits, and poor little crippled Tiny Tim; the party given by Scrooge’s nephew; nay, before all these, the terrible interview with Marley’s Ghost.  All are admirably executed.  Sacrilege would it be to suggest the alteration of a word.  First of the Christmas books in the order of time, it is also the best of its own kind; it is in its own order perfect.

Nor did the public of Christmas, 1843, fail to appreciate that something of very excellent quality had been brought forth for their benefit.  “The first edition of six thousand copies,” says Forster, “was sold” on the day of publication, and about as many more would seem to have been disposed of before the end of February, 1844.  But, alas, Dickens had set his heart on a profit of L1,000, whereas in February he did not see his way to much more than L460,[18] and his unpaid bills for the previous year he described as “terrific.”  So something, as I have said, had to be done.  A change of front became imperative.  Messrs. Bradbury and Evans advanced him L2,800 “for a fourth share in whatever he might write during the ensuing eight years,”—­he purchased at the Pantechnicon “a good old shabby devil of a coach,” also described as “an English travelling carriage of considerable proportions”; engaged a courier who turned out to be the courier of couriers, a very conjurer among couriers; let his house in Devonshire Terrace; and so started off for Italy, as I calculate the dates, on the 1st of July, 1844.

FOOTNOTES: 

[18] The profit at the end of 1844 was L726.

CHAPTER VIII.

Ah, those eventful, picturesque, uncomfortable old travelling days, when railways were unborn, or in their infancy; those interminable old dusty drives, in diligence or private carriage, along miles and miles of roads running straight to the low horizon, through a line of tall poplars, across the plains of France!  What an old-world memory it seems, and yet, as the years go, not so very long since after all.  The party that rumbled from Boulogne to Marseilles in the old “devil of a coach” aforesaid, “and another conveyance for luggage,” and I know not what other conveyances besides, consisted of Dickens himself; Mrs. Dickens; her sister, Miss Georgina Hogarth, who had come to live with them on their return from