with the Queen--Dickens's Grateful Impression
from it--"In Memoriam" by Arthur Helps--Rural
Enjoyments--A Winner in the Games--Dickens's
Habits of Life everywhere--Centre and Soul of
his Home--Daily Habits--London Haunts--First
Attack of Lameness--How it affected his Large
Dogs--His Hatred of Indifference--At Social
Meetings--Agreeable Pleasantries--Ghost
Stories--Marvels of Coincidence--Predominant
Impression of his Life--Effects on his Career.

OBJECTION has been taken to this biography as likely to disappoint its
readers in not making them "talk to Dickens as Boswell makes them talk
to Johnson." But where will the blame lie if a man takes up _Pickwick_
and is disappointed to find that he is not reading _Rasselas_? A book
must be judged for what it aims to be, and not for what it cannot by
possibility be. I suppose so remarkable an author as Dickens hardly ever
lived who carried so little of authorship into ordinary social
intercourse. Potent as the sway of his writings was over him, it
expressed itself in other ways. Traces or triumphs of literary labour,
displays of conversational or other personal predominance, were no part
of the influence he exerted over friends. To them he was only the
pleasantest of companions, with whom they forgot that he had ever
written anything, and felt only the charm which a nature of such
capacity for supreme enjoyment causes every one around it to enjoy. His
talk was unaffected and natural, never bookish in the smallest degree.
He was quite up to the average of well read men, but as there was no
ostentation of it in his writing, so neither was there in his
conversation. This was so attractive because so keenly observant, and
lighted up with so many touches of humorous fancy; but, with every
possible thing to give relish to it, there were not many things to bring
away.

Of course a book must stand or fall by its contents. Macaulay said very
truly that the place of books in the public estimation is fixed, not by
what is written about them, but by what is written in them. I offer no
complaint of any remark made upon these volumes, but there have been
some misapprehensions. Though Dickens bore outwardly so little of the
impress of his writings, they formed the whole of that inner life which
essentially constituted the man; and as in this respect he was actually,
I have thought that his biography should en