l not find it hard to take an interest in the author
of such a book." That was Mr. Edmund Yates, in whose literary successes
he took the greatest interest himself, and with whom he continued to the
last an intimate personal intercourse which had dated from kindness
shown at a very trying time. "I think" he wrote of another of his
contributors, Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, for whom he had also much personal
liking, and of whose powers he thought highly, "you will find _Fatal
Zero_ a very curious bit of mental development, deepening as the story
goes on into a picture not more startling than true." My mention of
these pleasures of editorship shall close with what I think to him was
the greatest. He gave to the world, while yet the name of the writer was
unknown to him, the pure and pathetic verse of Adelaide Procter. "In the
spring of the year 1853 I observed a short poem among the proffered
contributions, very different, as I thought, from the shoal of verses
perpetually setting through the office of such a periodical."[296] The
contributions had been large and frequent under an assumed name, when at
Christmas 1854 he discovered that Miss Mary Berwick was the daughter of
his old and dear friend Barry Cornwall.

But periodical writing is not without its drawbacks, and its effect on
Dickens, who engaged in it largely from time to time, was observable in
the increased impatience of allusion to national institutions and
conventional distinctions to be found in his later books. Party
divisions he cared for less and less as life moved on; but the decisive,
peremptory, dogmatic style, into which a habit of rapid remark on topics
of the day will betray the most candid and considerate commentator,
displayed its influence, perhaps not always consciously to himself, in
the underlying tone of bitterness that runs through the books which
followed _Copperfield_. The resentment against remediable wrongs is as
praiseworthy in them as in the earlier tales; but the exposure of
Chancery abuses, administrative incompetence, politico-economic
shortcomings, and social flunkeyism, in _Bleak House_, _Little Dorrit_,
_Hard Times_, and _Our Mutual Friend_, would not have been made less
odious by the cheerier tone that had struck with much sharper effect at
prison abuses, parish wrongs, Yorkshire schools, and hypocritical
humbug, in _Pickwick_, _Oliver Twist_, _Nickleby_, and _Chuzzlewit_. It
will be remembered of him always that he desired to set right w