Court, with his hat in one hand, and the other pushing his hair back, laughing in his heartiest manner at a ridiculous remembrance we had in common, which I had presented in some exaggerated light to divert him." Then again—of the same day—"The dinner party was a large one, and I did not sit near him at table. But he and I arranged, before we went in to dinner, that he was only to eat some simple dish that we agreed upon, and was only to drink sherry-and-water." Then, "We exchanged, 'God bless you!' and shook hands."

And they never met again.

But how full of wise consideration is all this day spent with the invalid friend, in the midst of merriment, even to the ridiculous remembrance "presented in some exaggerated light, to divert him." Mr. Charles Kent has told me how he met Dickens a few weeks before his death, and was observed, at a glance, by that most masterly and piercing observer, to be in low spirits and feeble.* Whereupon, Dickens, who had ample and momentous business of his own on hand, put it aside, sketched a pleasant day together: a tête-à-tête dinner and a walk. In short, to watch the many sides of his unselfishness, and the fund of resources for the good of other people he had at his command, was to be astonished at his extraordinary vitality. How good he was to all who had the slightest claim on him, who shall tell? But that which Hepworth Dixon said over my father's dust may be assuredly repeated by the narrow bed near Macaulay, Sheridan, and Handel. If every one who has received a favour at the hands of Dickens should cast a flower upon his grave, a mountain of roses would lie upon the great man's breast. And, in truth, his grave was filled with flowers! To plaster a few of the ills which obtrude themselves unpleasantly upon the attention with cheques handed to resounding cheers, is a kind of charity that is strongly spiced with selfishness. The sham of charitydinner speakers and donors Dickens abhorred, as I have shown. And in like manner, and with like vehemence, he detested slip-shod assistance or careless, unreflecting giving. The last time I sate with him on a business occasion was at a Council meeting of the Guild of Literature and Art. There had been an application from the wife of a literary brother. The wrecked man of letters was suffering from that which would never relax its hold upon him. But it could not be said that his misconduct had not brought on the blow. The firmness and delicacy

* Mr. Arthur Helps recently said that, during a walk with Charles Dickens, the great novelist observed nine objects for every one that he, Mr. Helps, observed. The same might be said by most men who have ever walked frequently in company with Mr. Dickens. Besides this, I can vouch for another yet more important and striking fact, viz., that Mr Dickens scarcely ever looked direct at anything. He walked along without turning his head or staring in front (as some of those horrid coloured glaring photographs represent him), as one should say-"Here I am, looking right through you!" He saw everything at a glance-or with "half an eye." It was only on very particular occasions that he looked hard at anything. He had no need. His was one of those gifted visions upon which objects photographed themselves on the retina in rapid succession. The Poet Laureate possesses a vision of a similar kind, though no doubt more intense, if not so universal. He has no need to fix his eyes upon anything; and, indeed, has been found sometimes to have seen the whole of an exquisite landscape when apparently looking inwardly, as in a waking dream, and lost to all around him. We certainly must not hence infer that the power of observation depends upon the brilliancy of the eyes; nevertheless, in the three instances last mentioned, such power is very perceptible in exquisitely truthful descriptious of local scenery and of character that abound in their works. Laman Blanchard had eyes of a very similar kind, while the eyes of Douglas Jerrold had a gleaming, lion-like, straightforward look, highly characteristic of his undaunted character and writings.-The Poor Artist, by R. H. HORNE.

with which Dickens sketched the case to the Council, passing wholly over the cause, to get at once to the imploring fact upon which our hearts could not be closed, left in my mind a delightful sense of his abounding goodness. He spoke of the wife, and her heroic self-abandonment to her husband, through years which would have tried beyond endurance very many wives. He begged that the utmost might be done; and at the same time he remained firmly just. What were the objects of the Fund as laid down in the rules? Did the case come strictly within the limits of our mission? Friendship, sympathy apart, was it a proper and deserving case? The points were argued with the greatest care; and all the time an acute anxiety was upon the countenance of the chairman. When at length we saw our way to afford the help desired, Dickens' face brightened as he became busy with his minutes and his books, and his secretary, who was at hand; and he remarked cheerily how glad he was we had seen our way to do something.

Another occasion thrusts itself through a crowd of recollections. A very dear friend of mine, and of many others to whom literature is a staff, had died. To say that his family had claims on Charles Dickens is to say that they were promptly acknowledged, and satisfied with the grace and heartiness which double the gift, sweeten the bread, and warm the wine. I asked a connection of our dead friend whether he had seen the poor wife and children.

"Seen them!" he answered. "I was there to-day. They are removed into a charming cottage. They have everything about them; and, just think of this, when I burst into one of the parlours, in my eager survey of the new home, I saw a man in his shirt-sleeves, up some steps, hammering away lustily. He turned: it was Charles Dickens; and he was hanging the pictures for the widow."

Dickens was the soul of truth and manliness, as well as kindness; so that such a service as this came as naturally to him as help from his purse. His friend, Paul Fèval, has said over his grave: "nothing in him was false, not even his modesty."

There was that boy-element in Charles Dickens which has been so often remarked in men of genius as to appear almost inseparable from the highest gifts of nature. "Why, we played a game of knock 'em down only a week or two ago,” a friend remarked to me last June, with brimming eyes. "And he showed all the old, astonishing energy and delight in taking aim at Aunt Sally."

My own earliest recollections of Charles Dickens are of his gayest moods: when the boy in him was exuberant, and leap-frog or rounders were not sports too young for the player who had written Pickwick twenty years before. To watch him through an afternoon, by turns light and grave; gracious and loving and familiar to the young, apt and vigorous in council with the old; ready for a frolic upon the lawn-leap-frog, rounders; as ready for a committee meeting in the library; and then to catch his cheery good-night, and feel the hand that spoke so truly from the heart, was to see Charles Dickens the man, the friend, the companion

and the counsellor all at once, and to get at something like a just estimate of that which was beautiful in the brilliant and noble Englishman we have lost. The sweet and holy lessons which he presented to humanity out of the humble places in the world could not have been evolved out of a nature less true and sympathetic than his was. It wanted such a man as Dickens was in his life to be such a writer as he was for the world. He drew beauties out of material that to the common eye was vulgar, unpromising stuff. Shallow readers have said of him that he could not draw a gentleman or a lady; and this charge has provoked some remarks from the Times, which are bold and to the point :

"We have heard it objected also by gentlemen that Charles Dickens could never describe 'a lady,' and by ladies that he could never sketch the character of 'a gentleman;' but we have always observed, that when put to the proof these male and female critics failed lamentably to establish their case. We are not sure that Charles Dickens' gentlemen were all as well dressed as those who resort to Poole's Temple of Fashion, or that his ladies were always attired after the very last fancy of Worth. Dress is no doubt what may be called, in the catechism of gentility, the 'outward and visible sign' of a gentleman, just as the outward fashion of a lady is shown by her dress; but even these are nothing if that 'inward and spiritual grace' which is characteristic of the true gentleman and real lady be wanting, and in that grace, however negligent they may be in their attire, the ladies and gentlemen in Charles Dickens' works are never deficient. We are not denying that the true type of gentle life is to be found in the upper classes. Far from it. We only insist, when we are told that Charles Dickens could not describe either a lady or a gentleman, that there are ladies and gentlemen in all ranks and classes of life, and that the inward delicacy and gentle feeling which we acknowledge as the only true criterion of the class, may be found under the smock-frock of the ploughboy as well as beneath the mantle of an earl."

The “fierce light" which beats not only about a throne, but about all stations in life in these days, has discovered the absolute truth of the creed which animated Dickens, when, working upon his own observation, he drew a gentlemen in the rough form of Joe Gargery, and planted a little chivalry in the breast of the convict who was grateful to Pip. In the long gallery of Dickens' portraits of the men and women of his time-to which I beseech the attention of the young reader-there are gentlemen and ladies of all degrees. He made no fuss about "Nature's noblemen"; but he painted what he saw, and delighted to find strong elements of that goodness which he loved so passionately, and worshipped so devoutly, in all his rambles and prospectings in the unlikeliest places. That he drew with an impartial hand is witnessed not only by the hold his creations at once got upon the public mind, but by the whole tenour of his life and work, away from his desk. The conventional gentleman and lady had no picturesque side to attract him; and they could seldom be got into the frame of his subject. He was an artist, and he consequently preferred a green lane and a gipsy camp any and every day to the Ladies' Mile and a lounge in his club.

If you want to make your most conventional gentleman look noble in marble to all posterity, you strip the figure Poole has dressed in his inspired moment, and shake out a toga, and think about sandals. The poor and lowly come to the artist's hand ready-made pictures. Besides, the observer's sense of justice is gratified when he finds himself enabled, out of the fund of his own discoveries among the neglected of his fellow-creatures, to rehabilitate the Humble and Despised. While the tendency of modern party warfare has been grievously to quicken and heat class animosities, the writings of Charles Dickens, which have been spread over every level of society, have been powerful counter-agents, teaching all classes the truth that is the best bond and the safest-viz., that, in the words of the Times, the gentleman is to be found "under the smock-frock of the ploughboy as well as beneath the mantle of an earl."

Only Charles Dickens wrought this out many years ago, by patient travels in the midst of the smock-frocks, and by obtaining proof positive that there was occasionally a gentle heart under the corduroy of a costermonger. Dickens' triumph lay in this, that he convinced mankind of the truth and completeness of his diagnosis. None of the genteel classes are on intimate terms of daily intercourse with ostlers, and yet who has not accepted Sam Weller as a part of the breathing population of the Empire? Dickens' men and women ought to be included in the census. *

By this admirable standpoint for his observation of humanity which he had adopted, Dickens had come to regard all men and women so thoroughly and exclusively on account of their moral, intellectual, and spiritual worth, that he was at home with all kinds of society, in the highest and the humblest walks. So that it is easy to picture him standing in a drawing-room at Windsor Castle, one arm just resting upon the sofa, and talking in his quiet, earnest manner to the First Lady in the land. There would not be the least shadow of nervousness in him; so great was the command which his trained brain and heart had given him, in the presence of humanity of every degree, under every conceivable circumstance, by the Throne † or facing thousands of his countrymen who loved him, one and all, so well.

It

* The British Medical Journal declares:-"How true to nature, even in the most trivial details, almost every character and every incident in the works of the great novelist whose dust has just been laid to rest really were, is best known to those whose tastes or whose duties led them to frequent the paths of life from which Dickens delighted to draw. But none, except medical men, can judge of the rare fidelity with which he followed the great Mother through the devious paths of disease and death. In reading Oliver Twist and Dombey and Son, or the Chimes, or even No Thoroughfare, the physician often felt tempted to say, 'What a gain it would have been to physic if one so keen to observe and so facile to describe had devoted his powers to the medical art.' must not be forgotten that his description of hectic (in Oliver Twist) has found its way into more than one standard work both in medicine and surgery." The Law Journal bears testimony to his truth and force as a painter of lawyers :-"He has left us a whole gallery of legal caricatures. We have the wonderful trial of 'Bardell v. Pickwick,' introducing the fussy Buzfuz, and that rare phenomenon, a modest junior. In the same book we have the smart Dodson and Fogg, the excellent Mr. Perker, and the solicitor to the Wellers. In Bleak House we have the great chancery suit of 'Jarndyce v. Jarndyce,' with graphic descriptions of the court, of the lawyers engaged in the suit, of the shrewd solicitor of the Dedlock family, and of the poor law-writer. In the Old Curiosity Shop we have Sampson Brass, the masculine Sally Brass, and the mirth-provoking Dick Swiveller. In Great Expectations we have that wonderful character, Wemmick, and his wellconceived employer, the Old Bailey attorney. We need not add to the list."

+ Her Majesty gave Dickens, with a charming modesty "to so great an author," a copy of her Highland book, inscribed in her beautiful handwriting, "Charles Dickens, Esq, from Victoria R." Dickens had hardly offered the Queen his favourite library edition of his works, to which Her Majesty at once gave a place of honour, when he died.

The "soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit," how often has Dickens painted!--the Christian gentleman, if not Poole's: the modest, high-souled gentlewoman—a lady, if not Worth's? He inclined to the Biblia Pauperum, and was delighted to catch heavy thumbs turning over the holy pictures. But he turned no sour face upon the well-to-do. Of the foibles and pretences of these he was an unsparing critic; but he was as unsparing when he had the vices of the ignorant and poor to deal with. He was pre-Raphaelite in his allegiance and constancy to Nature: but his eye loved the beautiful, and his spirit leaned to all that was valiant, noble, and holy in the human heart. If he took his heroes amid the lower or middle ranks of life, it was because here the picturesque in these won the artist's eye; and if he drew the good that was in the scenes he analysed, rather than the bad, it was because he delighted in finding it under the most unpromising circumstances, and in showing, to quote a line from my father, "there is goodness, like wild honey, hived in strange nooks and corners of the world."

But I am not presuming to elaborate a literary estimate of Charles Dickens. The time is not now, if indeed it can ever be, necessary, for the popularity of his prodigious and glorious work has been, is, and will be universal. People tell you that Mrs. Gamp will not do, in French, as Madame Gamp, and that his fiction will not bear transplanting; but the transplanting steadily goes on nevertheless, and every day shows us how far the range of human sympathy stretches, when the name of Dickens wakes it. Papers in any tongue that has a printing press have echoed the lamentations of our own over him whom Mr. Chorley has called the greatest and most beneficent men of genius England has produced since the days of Shakespere."

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After writing the page on which Dickens as a painter of gentlefolk was handled, I saw the tearful, eloquent record which Mr. Chorley, who knew his subject so well, printed in the Athenæum. I was delighted to find my view supported by so sound an authority and so intimate a friend. Mr. Chorley says: "It has been said that he could not draw gentlemen and ladies (as footmen understand the designation). This is false. The characters of Sir Leicester Dedlock in Bleak House, that of Mrs. Steerforth in David Copperfield, and fifty indications more may be cited in disproof. That he found greater pleasure in selecting and marking out figures where the traits were less smoothed or effaced by the varnish of polite society than in picturing those of a world where the expression of individual characters become less marked, is true. To each man his own field. An essay could be recalled, written to prove that Scott was a miserable creature, because his imagination delighted in the legends and traditions of feudal times, with their lords and their retainers. And yet Scott gave us the