re he rests?

"He whom we mourn was the friend of mankind, a philanthropist in the
true sense; the friend of youth, the friend of the poor, the enemy of
every form of meanness and oppression. I am not going to attempt to draw
a portrait of him. Men of genius are different from what we suppose them
to be. They have greater pleasures and greater pains, greater affections
and greater temptations, than the generality of mankind, and they can
never be altogether understood by their fellow men. . . . But we feel that
a light has gone out, that the world is darker to us, when they depart.
There are so very few of them that we cannot afford to lose them one by
one, and we look vainly round for others who may supply their places. He
whose loss we now mourn occupied a greater space than any other writer
in the minds of Englishmen during the last thirty-three years. We read
him, talked about him, acted him; we laughed with him; we were roused by
him to a consciousness of the misery of others, and to a pathetic
interest in human life. Works of fiction, indirectly, are great
instructors of this world; and we can hardly exaggerate the debt of
gratitude which is due to a writer who has led us to sympathize with
these good, true, sincere, honest English characters of ordinary life,
and to laugh at the egotism, the hypocrisy, the false respectability of
religious professors and others. To another great humourist who lies in
this Church the words have been applied that his death eclipsed the
gaiety of nations. But of him who has been recently taken I would rather
say, in humbler language, that no one was ever so much beloved or so
much mourned."

FOOTNOTES:

[289] Mr. Grant Wilson has sent me an extract from a letter by
Fitz-Greene Halleck (author of one of the most delightful poems ever
written about Burns) which exactly expresses Dickens as he was, not only
in 1842, but, as far as the sense of authorship went, all his life. It
was addressed to Mrs. Rush of Philadelphia, and is dated the 8th of
March 1842. "You ask me about Mr. Boz. I am quite delighted with him. He
is a thorough good fellow, with nothing of the author about him but the
reputation, and goes through his task as Lion with exemplary grace,
patience, and good nature. He has the brilliant face of a man of
genius. . . . His writings you know. I wish you had listened to his
eloquence at the dinner here. It was the only real specimen of eloquence
I have ever witnessed. Its c