and that the passage to it is speedy. God's will be done!"

Our Saviour's life and teaching afford so many interesting illustrations to Charles Dickens that our great difficulty, in the limited space to which we are now confined, is to make a good selection. Here is a sketch entitled "A Christmas Tree," from one of his reprinted pieces, which contains this simple and beautiful summary of our Lord's life on earth :-" The waits are playing, and they break my childish sleep! What images do I associate with the Christmas music as I see them set forth on the Christmas Tree? Known before all the others, keeping far apart from all the others, they gather round my little bed. An angel speaking to a group of shepherds in a field; some travellers, with eyes uplifted, following a star; a Baby in a manger; a Child in a spacious temple talking with grave men; a solemn figure, with a mild and beautiful face, raising a dead girl by the hand; again, near a city gate, calling back the son of a widow, on his bier, to life; a crowd of people looking through the opened roof of a chamber where He sits, and letting down a sick person on a bed with ropes ; the same, in a tempest, walking on the water to a ship; again, on a sea-shore, teaching a great multitude; again, with a child upon His knee, and other children round; again, restoring sight to the blind, speech to the dumb, hearing to the deaf, health to the sick, strength to the lame, knowledge to the ignorant ; again, dying upon a cross, watched by armed soldiers,

a thick darkness coming on, the earth beginning to shake, and only one voice heard, 'Forgive them, for they know not what they do.'"

These passages, which are only a few out of a very much longer list that might be made, will be sufficient, we trust, to show how much our greatest living novelist is in the habit of going to the sacred narrative for illustrations to many of his most touching incidents, and how reverent and respectful always is the spirit in which every such illustration is employed. To think of Charles Dickens's writings as containing no religious teaching, is to do them a great injustice.

The first of Mr. Dickens's famous public Readings was given at Birmingham, during the Christmas week of 1853. At a meeting held on Monday, January 10, 1853, in the theatre of the Philosophical Institution, for the purpose of considering the desirableness of establishing in Birmingham a Scientific and Literary Society upon a comprehensive plan, having for its object the diffusion," &c., Mr. Arthur Ryland read a letter from Mr. Charles Dickens, received by him the day after the Literary and Artistic Banquet, containing an offer to visit Birmingham next Christmas, and read his Christmas Carol, in the Town Hall, for the benefit of the proposed Institution, with the proviso, however, that as many as possible of the working class should be admitted free. "It would," said Mr. Dickens, "take about two hours, with a pause of ten minutes half-way through. There would be some

novelty in the thing, as I have never done it in public, though I have in private, and (if I may say so) with a great effect on the hearers. I was so inexpressibly gratified last night by the warmth and enthusiasm of my Birmingham friends, that I feel half ashamed this morning of so poor an offer. But as I had decided on making it to you before I came down yesterday, I propose it nevertheless."

The readings-three in number-came off with great éclat during the last week of the year, and brought in a net sum of £400 to the Institute. Mr. Dickens continued from this time to give similar readings, for charitable purposes, both in the provinces and in London; but it was not till five years later (1858) that he began to read on his own account.

As we are writing, that long series of readingscontinued through sixteen years, in both hemispheres -is drawing to a close, and the voice and figure of Charles Dickens, that have grown so familiar to us all, will dwell henceforth in the memory alone, but in one of its most honoured niches.

We ought not to omit to mention what any reader may well surmise, that Charles Dickens is inimitable in enlivening correspondence or table-talk with humorous anecdote, appropriate to the occasion. We subjoin a few specimens. The first is from one of his letters to Douglas Jerrold, and is dated Paris, 14th February, 1847:-"I am somehow reminded of a good story I heard the other night from a man who was a witness of it, and an actor in it. At a certain

German town last autumn there was a tremendous furore about Jenny Lind, who, after driving the whole place mad, left it, on her travels, early one morning. The moment her carriage was outside the gates, a party of rampant students, who had escorted it, rushed back to the inn, demanded to be shown to her bedroom, swept like a whirlwind upstairs into the room indicated to them, tore up the sheets, and wore them in strips as decorations. An hour or two afterwards a bald old gentleman, of amiable appearance, an Englishman, who was staying in the hotel, came to breakfast at the table d'hôte, and was observed to be much disturbed in his mind, and to show great terror whenever a student came near him. At last he said, in a low voice, to some people who were near him at the table, 'You are English gentlemen, I observe. Most extraordinary people, these Germans! Students, as a body, raving mad, gentlemen!' 'Oh, no!' said somebody else; 'excitable, but very good fellows, and very sensible.' 'By God, sir!' returned the old gentleman, still more disturbed, 'then there's something political in it, and I am a marked man. I went out for a little walk this morning after shaving, and while I was gone '-he fell into a terrible perspiration as he told it-they burst into my bedroom, tore up my sheets, and are now patrolling the town in all directions with bits of 'em in their button-holes!' I needn't wind up by adding that they had gone to the wrong chamber."

Dickens now and then administers a little gentle

rebuke to affectation, in a pleasant but unmistakable manner. Here is an instance of how he silenced a bilious young writer, who was inveighing against the world in a very "forcible feeble manner." During a pause in this philippic against the human race, Dickens said across the table, in the most self-congratulatory of tones :-"I say—what a lucky thing it is you and I don't belong to it? It reminds me," continued the author of Pickwick, "of the two men, who on a raised scaffold were awaiting the final delicate attention of the hangman; the notice of one was aroused by observing that a bull had got into the crowd of spectators, and was busily employed in tossing one here, and another there; whereupon one of the criminals said to the other—'I say, Bill, how lucky it is for us that we are up here."

Here is a humorous and graphic account which he sent to the leading newspaper of his sensations during the shock of earthquake that was felt all over England in October, 1863. It is doubly interesting, as giving a description of his country-house at Gad's-hill, near Rochester :

"I was awakened by a violent swaying of my bed. stead from side to side, accompanied by a singular heaving motion. It was exactly as if some great beast had been crouching asleep under the bedstead, and were now shaking itself and trying to rise. The time by my watch was twenty minutes past three,