ing criticism, the lapse of a quarter of a century, and
the profound significance of a great war, have modified or removed." The
point was more pithily, and as truly, put by Mr. Horace Greeley in the
_Tribune_. "The fame as a novelist which Mr. Dickens had already created
in America, and which, at the best, has never yielded him anything
particularly munificent or substantial, is become his capital stock in
the present enterprise."

The first Reading was appointed for the second of December, and in the
interval he saw some old friends and made some new ones.[275] Boston he
was fond of comparing to Edinburgh as Edinburgh was in the days when
several dear friends of his own still lived there. Twenty-five years had
changed much in the American city; some genial faces were gone, and on
ground which he had left a swamp he found now the most princely streets;
but there was no abatement of the old warmth of kindness, and, with
every attention and consideration shown to him, there was no intrusion.
He was not at first completely conscious of the change in this respect,
or of the prodigious increase in the size of Boston. But the latter grew
upon him from day to day, and then there was impressed along with it a
contrast to which it was difficult to reconcile himself. Nothing
enchanted him so much as what he again saw of the delightful domestic
life of Cambridge, simple, self-respectful, cordial, and affectionate;
and it seemed impossible to believe that within half an hour's distance
of it should be found what might at any time be witnessed in such hotels
as that which he was staying at: crowds of swaggerers, loafers,
bar-loungers, and dram-drinkers, that seemed to be making up, from day
to day, not the least important-part of the human life of the city. But
no great mercantile resort in the States, such as Boston had now become,
could be without that drawback; and fortunate should we account any
place to be, though even so plague-afflicted, that has yet so near it
the healthier influence of the other life which our older world has
wellnigh lost altogether.

"The city has increased prodigiously in twenty-five years," he wrote to
his daughter Mary. "It has grown more mercantile. It is like Leeds mixed
with Preston, and flavoured with New Brighton. Only, instead of smoke
and fog, there is an exquisitely bright light air." "Cambridge is
exactly as I left it," he wrote to me. "Boston more mercantile, and much
larger. The hotel I fo