picked out by the porter.

It seems a queer education for a man of letters; but, like Sir
Walter Scott when revelling in Liddesdale, he "was making himself
all the time." He was collecting myriads of odd experiences and
treasures of anecdotes; he was learning to know men of all sorts;
and later, as a country doctor, he had experiences of mess tables,
of hunting, and of all the ways of his remarkable countrymen. When
cholera visited his district he stuck to his work like a man of
heart and courage. But the usual tasks of a country doctor wearied
him; he neglected them, he became unpopular with the authorities, he
married his first love and returned to Brussels, where he practised
as a physician. He had already begun his first notable book, "Harry
Lorrequer," in the University Magazine. It is merely a string of
Irish and other stories, good, bad, and indifferent--a picture
gallery full of portraits of priests, soldiers, peasants and odd
characters. The plot is of no importance; we are not interested in
Harry's love affairs, but in his scrapes, adventures, duels at home
and abroad. He fights people by mistake whom he does not know by
sight, he appears on parade with his face blackened, he wins large
piles at trente et quarante, he disposes of coopers of claret and
bowls of punch, and the sheep on a thousand hills provide him with
devilled kidneys. The critics and the authors thought little of the
merry medley, but the public enjoyed it, and defied the reviewers.
One paper preferred the book to a wilderness of "Pickwicks"; and as
this opinion was advertised everywhere by M'Glashan, the publisher,
Mr. Dickens was very much annoyed indeed. Authors are easily
annoyed. But Lever writes ut placeat pueris, and there was a
tremendous fight at Rugby between two boys, the "Slogger Williams"
and "Tom Brown" of the period, for the possession of "Harry