more. As some wit has phrased it, "Dickens is always raising an altar to Pathos, and sacrificing a kid upon it!"

In 1842 came Mr. Dickens's famous visit to the United States. The whole American people "went wild" over him, and many made themselves troublesome and ridiculous. A greater man than Dickens might have excused the annoyance for the sake of the cordial love for his writings which underlay it. But Mr. Dickens saw only the surface of the strange, informal, inelegant, democratic society; a society imperfect, but growing better by its own strength, then as now. Of the "American Notes," published after his return, he learned to be ashamed; of the anger they excited among Americans we learned to be ashamed; therefore they may well be forgotten, bright though the "notes" were and many the unpalatable truths they told. When he came again, twenty-five years later, he was again received with cordial welcome, and his readings from his own works were extremely profitable, the amount cleared by thirty-four of them being near £11,000. One can not but rejoice at this as being in some sort, though imperfectly, an offset to the fact that the millions of his books sold in America had yielded him no income, because of the absence of international copyright. This righteous measure, fruitlessly urged by Mr. Dickens upon the American people and government, has at last, forty years after his visit, been enacted, and is the law of the land.

Unfortunately, Mr. Dickens's health was unequal to the strain of such a campaign as that of his lecturing winter. As to his manner of living, it may be judged from a letter to a friend in which he speaks of having been "reduced," by ill-health, to such a regimen as the following:

At seven in the morning, in bed, a tumbler of new cream and two tablespoonsful of rum. At twelve, a sherry cobbler and a biscuit. At three (dinner-time) a pint of champagne.

an egg beaten up with a glass of sherry.

At five minutes to eight

Between the parts [of

his reading] the strongest beef-tea that can be made, drank hot. At a quarter past ten, soup and any little thing to drink that I can fancy. Indeed the matter of drink is continually cropping up, in all his letters.

After the first American tour came "Martin Chuzzlewit," a poor and weak recalling of the trip; next "Dombey and Son," with its rather grim pathos, and then "David Copperfield," the most artistic work he ever did; the most natural, heartfelt and satisfactory; the favorite among all his novels. "Bleak House," and "Little Dorrit" were written before the memorable year when he removed to the fine Gadshill property; a change which reminds one painfully of Scott's taking up the fatal burden of Abbotsford. The occasion was simultaneous with his separation from his wife; they afterward living apart, the children being free to come and go as they pleased.

It was in this year (1858) that he finally took up the long - considered plan of giving public readings for his own profit; the cost of Gadshill drawing heavily upon him. The place itself was far from costly, but his living expenses were large and his benevolent outlays most generous. He seems to have supported his parents almost entirely, and other members of his family largely; and every charitable and philanthropic work that appealed to his sympathy was the recipient of boundless help. The receipts at his readings for charity were enormous.

"The Tale of Two Cities," which appeared about this time, showed much of Dickens's old power, but was lacking in the humorous—a sad deficiency. This novel, "The Uncommercial Traveller," and "Our Mutual Friend," all appeared serially in "All the Year Round" (a periodical with which he was then connected), before being issued in book form. He wrote nothing more except the unfinished "Edwin Drood." Paralysis was near. He had to give up dinner - parties. At the last meeting between

him and Mr. Forster they recalled their old jolly companions, now all gone, and as he said "none beyond his sixtieth year, very few beyond fifty."

He died at Gadshill on June 9, 1870, aged fifty-eight, evidently a victim to the pace at which he lived. He may be said to have burned his candle not only at both ends but also in the middle. He walked hard, wrote much and lived fast.

Few men have ever written who moved the minds and hearts of their fellow - men as greatly as did Charles Dickens. And his voice was in favor of charity, justice, benevolence, manliness, brotherhood, morality. If one could add temperance, the circle of beneficent influence would be complete. But to those who find in drink the fruitful source of all evil, the feeling intrudes itself (even while wondering at and admiring the boundless power and kindly impulses of the man) that his constant reference to the delights of convivial excitement, making it the inseparable companion if not the absolute foundation of joy and gladness, has been and must remain a fatal defect in the fabric of his teachings.

BULWER.

CHAPTER LV.

READE.

COLLINS. THE TROLLOPES.

HE earlier writings of Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton (1806-73), Baron Lytton, appeared under the writer's family name of Bulwer, and by that name he is better known than under his title of Lord Lytton.*

He was one of the most versatile of men; novelist,

* He was over sixty when, in reward for political services, he was raised to the peerage.

dramatist, poet, essayist and politician. Poetry was his earliest ambition; he published a volume of poems at fifteen, and at twenty won a prize for a poem on sculpture. His first noteworthy novel was "Pelham," which was very successful, and is a remarkable production for a young man of twenty-two. From this time until the rise of Charles Dickens, ten years later, he may be said to have been the leading English novelist, writing in that time "The Disowned," "Devereux," "Paul Clifford," "Eugene Aram," and "Godolphin." The most noted is "Eugene Aram," written to illustrate how a man of fine nature may be led, step by step, into the deepest villainy.

His greatest and best work is "The Last Days of Pompeii," a historical novel, its time being the first century of the Christian era, and its place the Roman city buried during the terrible eruption of Vesuvius in the year 79 A.D. It is by far the most popular and most valuable English novel dealing with times so remote, and has become and will remain an English prose classic.

As a playwright, Bulwer is greater than as a novelist. He achieved the rare success of writing three plays "The Lady of Lyons," "Richelieu," and "Money," which hold the stage to this day. This is more than any other modern playwright has done who was not himself an actor; and it is said that the great actor, Macready, helped him to make the plays what they are.

After Bulwer's earlier novels, several of which are open to the charge of great immorality, a change came over the manner of his writing, and his later works, "The Caxtons," "My Novel," "What Will He Do With It?" and others, are entirely free from this blemish. In his first novels, also, he seemed to write for the purpose of inculcating a theory rather than telling a story; later, he tried to meet the popular demand for real-life pictures; and if we had not had such humorists as Dickens, such satirists as Thackeray, such

realists as Anthony Trollope, and such character-painters as Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, he would have stood at the head of the English novelists of his generation. His greatest deficiency was the lack of a sense of humor. Otherwise, he had many of the requisites of a successful novelist. His training was perfect, his aim exact, and his industry untiring. In his fifty productive years he published at least fifty separate books, and beside all the work mentioned, he was a politician, a parliamentary orator and a member of the British cabinet.

He

Charles Reade (1814-84) has been characterized by Trollope as "almost a genius." If it were true, as is alleged, that "genius is only infinite capacity for work," he would take rank as not almost but quite a genius, for he was one of the most painstaking and indefatigable of writers. called "no day without a line," the eleventh commandment. Like many another man destined to make a name with his pen, he took to it only after trying in vain to succeed in other lines. The law (for which his fine education especially fitted him) and playwriting having both failed him, he took his rejected drama, "Masks and Faces," and after succeeding in producing it by the help of the dramatist, Tom Taylor, he worked up the same plot and characters into the romance of "Peg Woffington," which established him as a novelist. He followed this up by "Christie Johnstone." At this early stage in his career, he maps out its course in a diary, thus:

June 20. The plan I propose to myself in writing will, I see, cost me undeniable labor. I propose never to guess where I can know, For instance, Tom Robinson is in gaol. I have therefore been to Oxford gaol and visited every inch, and shall do the same at Reading. Having also collected material in Durham gaol, whatever I write about Tom Robinson's gaol will therefore carry (I hope) a physical exterior of truth.

George Fielding is going in a ship to Australia. I know next to nothing about a ship, but my brother Bill is a sailor. I have com