ly at the Manchester dinner, and his earnestness
and determination about the Guild was most impressive. It carried
everything before it. They are now getting up annual subscriptions, and
will give us a revenue to begin with. I swear I believe that people to
be the greatest in the world. At Liverpool I had a Round Robin on the
stage after the play was over, a place being left for your signature,
and as I am going to have it framed, I'll tell Green to send it to
Lincoln's-inn-fields. You have no idea how good Tenniel, Topham, and
Collins have been in what they had to do."

These names, distinguished in art and letters, represent additions to
the company who had joined the enterprise; and the last of them, Mr.
Wilkie Collins, became, for all the rest of the life of Dickens, one of
his dearest and most valued friends.

FOOTNOTES:

[142] He entered the Royal Navy, and survived his father only a year and
eleven months. He was a Lieutenant, at the time of his death from a
sharp attack of bronchitis; being then on board the P. and O. steamer
"Malta," invalided from his ship the Topaze, and on his way home. He was
buried at sea on the 2nd of May, 1872. Poor fellow! He was the smallest
in size of all the children, in his manhood reaching only to a little
over five feet; and throughout his childhood was never called by any
other name than the "Ocean Spectre," from a strange little weird yet
most attractive look in his large wondering eyes, very happily caught in
a sketch in oils by the good Frank Stone, done at Bonchurch in September
1849 and remaining in his aunt's possession. "Stone has painted,"
Dickens then wrote to me, "the Ocean Spectre, and made a very pretty
little picture of him." It was a strange chance that led his father to
invent this playful name for one whom the ocean did indeed take to
itself at last.

[143] I think it right to place on record here Leigh Hunt's own allusion
to the incident (_Autobiography_, p. 432), though it will be thought to
have too favourable a tone, and I could have wished that other names had
also found mention in it. But I have already (p. 211) stated quite
unaffectedly my own opinion of the very modest pretensions of the whole
affair, and these kind words of Hunt may stand _valeant quantum_.
"Simultaneous with the latest movement about the pension was one on the
part of my admirable friend Dickens and other distinguished men,
Forsters and Jerrolds, who, combining kindly purpose with an