the last-named happiness, and take a good long stroll."

During the year, at the inauguration of the Manchester Athenæum, he made an admirable speechhis longest effort up to this time-on the importance and usefulness of Mechanics' Institutes. *

After the publication of "Oliver Twist" and "Martin Chuzzlewit," Dickens's friends were continually reporting to him cases of cruelty and hardship, and begging his attention thereto. In answer to one of these philanthropic appeals, Dickens wrote -he was at that time living in Devonshire terrace :— "That is a very horrible case you tell me of. I would to God I could get at the parental heart of in which event I would so scarify it, that he should writhe again. But if I were to put such a father as he into a book, all the fathers going (and especially the bad ones) would hold up their hands and protest against the unnatural caricature. I find that a great many people (particularly those who might have sat for the character) consider even Mr. Pecksniff a grotesque impossibility; and Mrs. Nickleby herself, sitting bodily before me in a solid chair, once asked me whether I really believed there was such a woman.

"So

reviewing his own case, would not believe in Jonas Chuzzlewit. I like "Oliver Twist," 'for I am fond of children. But the book

says

* Given in Charles Dickens's Speeches, recently published.

is unnatural. For who would think of being cruel to poor little Oliver Twist?'

"Nevertheless I will bear the dog in my mind. And if I can hit him between the eyes, so that he shall stagger more than you or I have done this Christmas under the combined effects of punch and turkey—I will.

"Thank you cordially for your note. Excuse this scrap of paper. I thought it was a whole sheet, until I turned over."*

The reader will remember Maclise's beautiful portrait of Dickens, familiar to us all as the engraved frontispiece to the large edition of "Nicholas Nickleby." It is the portrait of a literary exquisite thirty years ago; and it is hard to believe that those large effeminate eyes sparkling from beneath flowing locks, that ample black satin scarf, with a diamond union-pin, and that wide velvet collar, can have anything to do with the hearty, keen-eyed, sailor-like man whose last photographs now look at us from every shop-window! But it is so! they are the portraits of the same great man. Time alone has worked the change. Of his elegant appearance, when young, Mr. Arthur Locker gives us a reminiscence" The first time," he says, "I saw the idolized Boz in the flesh was at a Fancy Fair in the Painted Hall of Greenwich Hospital, held, I think,

*The letter was dated "Second January, 1844." It was published in the Autographic Mirror for February, 1864.

for the benefit of the Shipwrecked Mariners' Society. He was then a handsome young man, with piercing bright eyes and carefully arranged hair-much, in fact, as he is represented in Maclise's picture."

Towards the close of this year another characteristic portrait of our author was taken by Miss M. Gillies, and a fine engraving of it, by Armytage, appeared as a frontispiece to Horne's "New Spirit of the Age," issued early in the new year. It is different to the Maclise picture; the hair is longer and more careless, the face is more thoughtful, the mouth firmer-in fact, there is less of the exquisite and more of the man about it than in the Maclise portrait taken four years before.

IS next work was that delightful little book -a better-hearted one never issued from the press "A Christmas Carol, in prose; being a Ghost Story of Christmas." It appeared in December, 1843, with some admirable illustrations by John Leech. Since the publication of the "Pickwick Papers," no work of Dickens's caused half the sensation this touching and beautiful little story did. It is written with such a hearty appreciation of Christmas, and all the attendant festivities indulged in at that joyous period. The description of Scrooge is wonderfully drawn; his excitement in waking up after his interviews with the spirits, and finding it all a dream, his getting up and nearly cutting his nose off in shaving, buying the big turkey, and sending it off to Bob Cratchit, with a series of chuckles, and giving so handsome a donation to the collector, and finally going to the party at Fred's, where that fine fellow Topper and the plump sister played up such grand tricks, and then behaving so unexpectedly to poor Bob the next day,-follow so rapidly as almost to take one's breath away with amazement and delight!

If any individual story ever warmed a Christmas hearth, that was the one; if ever solitary Old-Self was converted by a book, and made to be merry and childlike at that season "when its blessed founder was himself a child," he surely was by that!

On a former page we spoke of Thackeray's hearty appreciation of Dickens - expressed, too, at a time when the "Vanity Fair" had made its writer's fame. It has been said that a degree of rivalry at one period existed between the two authors; but few readers, we think, will be inclined to characterize by any such term the most friendly competition after perusing this touching and beautiful tribute to Mr. Dickens's genius from the pen of the yet unknown Michael Angelo Titmarsh. A box of Christmas books is supposed to have been sent by the editor to Titmarsh in his retirement in Switzerland, whence the latter writes his notions of their contents. The last book of all is Mr. Dickens's "Christmas Carol"-we mean the story of old Scrooge-the immortal precursor of that long line of Christmas stories which are now so familiar to his readers.

"And now (says the critic), there is but one book left in the box, the smallest one, but oh! how much the best of all. It is the work of the master of all the English humourists now alive; the young man. who came and took his place calmly at the head of the whole tribe, and who has kept it. Think of all * It appeared in Fraser's Magazine, for July, 1844• .