and its odd incidents and characters he had learned and studied during his brief apprenticeship to the Law. The interior economy of the Fleet Prison he had learned from his family's disastrous experiences; the turnkeys, and blighted inhabitants he had certainly taken from life. But he shifted the scene from the Marshalsea to the King's Bench Prison—the former place would have been too painful a reminiscence for his father. To his reporting expeditions we owe the Election scenes at Ipswich, and to another visit for the same object, his Bath experiences. Much of the vividness and reality of his touchings, particularly in the case of Rochester and its doings, is the magnifying, searching power resulting from a life of sorrow in childhood, family troubles working on a keen, sensitive nature; these made him appreciate and meditate on all that was going on about him, as a sort of relief and relaxation. All the London scenes—the meetings at taverns—were personal experiences. Among his friends were medical
