from him no
addition to its best types; that the burlesque humourist is always
stronger in him than the reflective moralist; that the light thrown by
his genius into out of the way corners of life never steadily shines in
its higher beaten ways; and that beside his pictures of what man is or
does, there is no attempt to show, by delineation of an exalted purpose
or a great career, what man is able to be or to do. In the charge
abstractedly there is truth; but the fair remark upon it is that
whatever can be regarded as essential in the want implied by it will be
found in other forms in his writings, that the perfect innocence of
their laughter and tears has been itself a prodigious blessing, and that
it is otherwise incident to so great a humourist to work after the
fashion most natural to the genius of humour. What kind of work it has
been in his case, the attempt is made in preceding pages to show; and on
the whole it can be said with some certainty that the best ideals in
this sense are obtained, not by presenting with added comeliness or
grace the figures which life is ever eager to present as of its best,
but by connecting the singularities and eccentricities, which ordinary
life is apt to reject or overlook, with the appreciation that is deepest
and the laws of insight that are most universal. It is thus that all
things human are happily brought within human sympathy. It was at the
heart of everything Dickens wrote. It was the secret of the hope he had
that his books might help to make people better; and it so guarded them
from evil, that there is scarcely a page of the thousands he has written
which might not be put into the hands of a little child.[274] It made
him the intimate of every English household, and a familiar friend
wherever the language is spoken whose stores of harmless pleasure he has
so largely increased.

"The loss of no single man during the present generation, if we except
Abraham Lincoln alone," said Mr. Horace Greeley, describing the profound
and universal grief of America at his death, "has carried mourning into
so many families, and been so unaffectedly lamented through all the
ranks of society." "The terrible news from England," wrote Longfellow to
me (Cambridge, Mass. 12th of June 1870), "fills us all with
inexpressible sadness. Dickens was so full of life that it did not seem
possible he could die, and yet he has gone before us, and we are
sorrowing for him. . . . I never knew an author's