Wills were there, and Dickens's old fast friend Mr. Thomas Beard;
the two nearest country neighbours with whom the family had become very
intimate, Mr. Hulkes and Mr. Malleson, with their wives, joined the
party; among the others were Henry Chorley, Chauncy Townshend, and
Wilkie Collins; and, for friend special to the occasion, the bridegroom
had brought his old fellow-student in art, Mr. Holman Hunt. Mr. Charles
Collins had himself been bred as a painter, for success in which line he
had some rare gifts; but inclination and capacity led him also to
literature, and, after much indecision between the two callings, he took
finally to letters. His contributions to _All the Year Round_ were among
the most charming of its detached papers, and two stories published
independently showed strength of wing for higher flights. But his health
broke down, and his taste was too fastidious for his failing power. It
is possible however that he may live by two small books of description,
the _New Sentimental Journey_ and the _Cruize on Wheels_, which have in
them unusual delicacy and refinement of humour; and if those volumes
should make any readers in another generation curious about the writer,
they will learn, if correct reply is given to their inquiries, that no
man disappointed so many reasonable hopes with so little fault or
failure of his own, that his difficulty always was to please himself,
and that an inferior mind would have been more successful in both the
arts he followed. He died in 1873 in his forty-fifth year; and until
then it was not known, even by those nearest to him, how great must have
been the suffering which he had borne, through many trying years, with
uncomplaining patience.

His daughter's marriage was the chief event that had crossed the even
tenor of Dickens's life since his first paid readings closed; and it was
followed by the sale of Tavistock House, with the resolve to make his
future home at Gadshill. In the brief interval (29th of July) he wrote
to me of his brother Alfred's death. "I was telegraphed for to
Manchester on Friday night. Arrived there at a quarter past ten, but he
had been dead three hours, poor fellow! He is to be buried at Highgate
on Wednesday. I brought the poor young widow back with me yesterday."
All that this death involved,[242] the troubles of his change of home,
and some difficulties in working out his story, gave him more than
sufficient occupation till the following spring; and