e drawing-room that followed, and
Lady Houghton writes to me "I never saw Mr. Dickens more agreeable than
at a dinner at our house about a fortnight before his death, when he met
the King of the Belgians and the Prince of Wales at the special desire
of the latter." Up to nearly the hour of dinner, it was doubtful if he
could go. He was suffering from the distress in his foot; and on arrival
at the house, being unable to ascend the stairs, had to be assisted at
once into the dining-room.

The friend who had accompanied Dickens to Buckingham Palace, writing of
him[301] after his death, briefly but with admirable knowledge and
taste, said that he ardently desired, and confidently looked forward to,
a time when there would be a more intimate union than exists at present
between the different classes in the state, a union that should embrace
alike the highest and the lowest. This perhaps expresses, as well as a
few words could, what certainly was always at his heart; and he might
have come to think it, when his life was closing, more possible of
realisation some day than he ever thought it before. The hope of it was
on his friend Talfourd's lips when he died, and his own most jarring
opinions might at last have joined in the effort to bring about such
reconcilement. More on this head it needs not to say. Whatever may be
the objection to special views held by him, he would, wanting even the
most objectionable, have been less himself. It was by something of the
despot seldom separable from genius, joined to a truthfulness of nature
belonging to the highest characters, that men themselves of a rare
faculty were attracted to find in Dickens what Sir Arthur Helps has
described, "a man to confide in, and look up to as a leader, in the
midst of any great peril."

Mr. Layard also held that opinion of him. He was at Gadshill during the
Christmas before Dickens went for the last time to America, and
witnessed one of those scenes, not infrequent there, in which the master
of the house was pre-eminently at home. They took generally the form of
cricket matches; but this was, to use the phrase of his friend Bobadil,
more popular and diffused; and of course he rose with the occasion. "The
more you want of the master, the more you'll find in him," said the
gasman employed about his readings. "Foot-races for the villagers," he
wrote on Christmas Day, "come off in my field to-morrow. We have been
all hard at work all day, building a course,