If I might offer any apology for so exaggerated a fiction as the Barnacles and the Circumlocution³ Office, I would seek it in the common experience of an Englishman, without presuming to mention the unimportant fact of my having done that violence to good manners, in the days of a Russian war, and of a Court of Inquiry⁴ at Chelsea. If I might make so bold as to defend that extravagant⁵ conception, Mr Merdle, I would hint that it originated after the Railroad-share epoch⁶, in the times of a certain Irish bank, and of one or two other equally laudable enterprises. If I were to plead anything in mitigation of the preposterous⁷ fancy that a bad design will sometimes claim to be a good and an expressly religious design, it would be the curious coincidence that it has been brought to its climax⁸ in these pages, in the days of the public examination of late Directors of a Royal British Bank. But, I submit myself to suffer judgment⁹ to go by default on all these counts, if need be, and to accept the assurance (on good authority) that nothing like them was ever known in this land.

Some of my readers may have an interest in being informed whether or no any portions of the Marshalsea Prison are yet

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