ence of all proper nursing. The joke was well kept
up by Quin and Edwin Landseer, Lord Strangford joining in with a tragic
sympathy for his friend the poet; and the banquet so dolefully
interrupted ended in uproarious mirth. For nothing really serious had
happened. Benedict went laughing away with his wife, and I helped Rogers
on with his overshoes for his usual night-walk home. "Do you know how
many waistcoats I wear?" asked the poet of me, as I was doing him this
service. I professed my inability to guess. "Five!" he said: "and here
they are!" Upon which he opened them, in the manner of the gravedigger
in _Hamlet_, and showed me every one.

That dinner was in the April of 1849, and among others present were Mrs.
Procter and Mrs. Macready, dear and familiar names always in his house.
No swifter or surer perception than Dickens's for what was solid and
beautiful in character; he rated it higher than intellectual effort; and
the same lofty place, first in his affection and respect, would have
been Macready's and Procter's, if the one had not been the greatest of
actors, and the other a poet as genuine as old Fletcher or Beaumont.
There were present at this dinner also the American minister and Mrs.
Bancroft (it was the year of that visit of Macready to America, which
ended in the disastrous Forrest riots); and it had among its guests Lady
Graham, the wife of Sir James Graham, than whom not even the wit and
beauty of her nieces, Mrs. Norton and Lady Dufferin, better represented
the brilliant family of the Sheridans; so many of whose members, and
these three above all, Dickens prized among his friends. The table that
day will be "full" if I add the celebrated singer Miss Catherine Hayes,
and her homely good-natured Irish mother, who startled us all very much
by complimenting Mrs. Dickens on her having had for her father so clever
a painter as Mr. Hogarth.

Others familiar to Devonshire-terrace in these years will be indicated
if I name an earlier dinner (3rd of January), for the "christening" of
the _Haunted Man_, when, besides Lemons, Evanses, Leeches, Bradburys,
and Stanfields, there were present Tenniel, Topham, Stone, Robert Bell,
and Thomas Beard. Next month (24th of March) I met at his table, Lord
and Lady Lovelace; Milner Gibson, Mowbray Morris, Horace Twiss, and
their wives; Lady Molesworth and her daughter (Mrs. Ford); John
Hardwick, Charles Babbage, and Dr. Locock. That distinguished physician
had attended the p