said pleasant adieu in the sketch of "Our Watering-place,"
written shortly before he left.

"It is more delightful here" (1st of June) "than I can express. Corn
growing, larks singing, garden full of flowers, fresh air on the sea--O
it is wonderful! Why can't you come down next Saturday (bringing work)
and go back with me on Wednesday for the _Copperfield_ banquet?
Concerning which, of course, I say yes to Talfourd's kind proposal.
Lemon by all means. And--don't you think? Browne? Whosoever, besides,
pleases Talfourd will please me." Great was the success of that banquet.
The scene was the Star-and-Garter at Richmond; Thackeray and Alfred
Tennyson joined in the celebration; and the generous giver was in his
best vein. I have rarely seen Dickens happier than he was amid the
sunshine of that day. Jerrold and Thackeray returned to town with us;
and a little argument between them about money and its uses, led to an
avowal of Dickens about himself to which I may add the confirmation of
all our years of intercourse. "No man," he said, "attaches less
importance to the possession of money, or less disparagement to the want
of it, than I do."

Vague mention of a "next book" escaped in a letter at the end of July,
on which I counselled longer abstinence. "Good advice," he replied, "but
difficult: I wish you'd come to us and preach another kind of
abstinence. Fancy the Preventive men finding a lot of brandy in barrels
on the rocks here, the day before yesterday! Nobody knows anything about
the barrels, of course. They were intended to have been landed with the
next tide, and to have been just covered at low water. But the water
being unusually low, the tops of the barrels became revealed to
Preventive telescopes, and descent was made upon the brandy. They are
always at it, hereabouts, I have no doubt. And of course B would not
have had any of it. O dear no! certainly not."

His reading was considerable and very various at these intervals of
labour, and in this particular summer took in all the minor tales as
well as the plays of Voltaire, several of the novels (old favourites
with him) of Paul de Kock, Ruskin's _Lamps of Architecture_, and a
surprising number of books of African and other travel for which he had
insatiable relish: but the notices of all this in his letters were few.
"By the bye, I observe, reading that wonderful book the _French
Revolution_ again, for the 500th time, that Carlyle, who knows
everything, don't kn