al as its public schools, and that there was
nowhere in the country so complete an absence of servility to mere rank,
position, or riches. "A boy, there, is always what his abilities or his
personal qualities make him. We may differ about the curriculum and
other matters, but of the frank, free, manly, independent spirit
preserved in our public schools, I apprehend there can be no kind of
question." In December[236] he was entertained at a public dinner in
Coventry on the occasion of receiving, by way of thanks for help
rendered to their Institute, a gold repeater of special construction by
the watchmakers of the town; as to which he kept faithfully his pledge
to the givers, that it should be thenceforward the inseparable companion
of his workings and wanderings, and reckon off the future labours of his
days until he should have done with the measurement of time. Within a
day from this celebration, he presided at the Institutional Association
of Lancashire and Cheshire in Manchester Free Trade Hall; gave prizes to
candidates from a hundred and fourteen local mechanics' institutes
affiliated to the Association; described in his most attractive language
the gallant toiling fellows by whom the prizes had been won; and ended
with the monition he never failed to couple with his eulogies of
Knowledge, that it should follow the teaching of the Saviour, and not
satisfy the understanding merely. "Knowledge has a very limited power
when it informs the head only; but when it informs the heart as well,
it has a power over life and death, the body and the soul, and dominates
the universe."

This too was the year when Mr. Frith completed Dickens's portrait, and
it appeared upon the walls of the Academy in the following spring. "I
wish," said Edwin Landseer as he stood before it, "he looked less eager
and busy, and not so much out of himself, or beyond himself. I should
like to catch him asleep and quiet now and then." There is something in
the objection, and he also would be envious at times of what he too
surely knew could never be his lot. On the other hand who would
willingly have lost the fruits of an activity on the whole so healthy
and beneficent?

FOOTNOTES:

[227] This was the _Carol_ and _Pickwick_. "We are reduced sometimes,"
he adds, "to a ludicrous state of distress by the quantity of silver we
have to carry about. Arthur Smith is always accompanied by an immense
black leather-bag full." Mr. Smith had an illness a coup