s height when
he shut the volume of _Pickwick_ and spoke in his own person. He said
that for fifteen years he had been reading his own books to audiences
whose sensitive and kindly recognition of them had given him instruction
and enjoyment in his art such as few men could have had; but that he
nevertheless thought it well now to retire upon older associations, and
in future to devote himself exclusively to the calling which had first
made him known. "In but two short weeks from this time I hope that you
may enter, in your own homes, on a new series of readings at which my
assistance will be indispensable; but from these garish lights I vanish
now for evermore, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful, affectionate
farewell." The brief hush of silence as he moved from the platform; and
the prolonged tumult of sound that followed suddenly, stayed him, and
again for another moment brought him back; will not be forgotten by any
present.

Little remains to be told that has not in it almost unmixed pain and
sorrow. Hardly a day passed, while the readings went on or after they
closed, unvisited by some effect or other of the disastrous excitement
shown by the notes of Mr. Beard. On the 23rd of January, when for the
last time he met Carlyle, he came to us with his left hand in a sling;
on the 7th of February, when he passed with us his last birthday, and on
the 25th, when he read the third number of his novel, the hand was still
swollen and painful; and on the 21st of March, when he read admirably
his fourth number, he told us that as he came along, walking up the
length of Oxford-street, the same incident had recurred as on the day of
a former dinner with us, and he had not been able to read, all the way,
more than the right-hand half of the names over the shops. Yet he had
the old fixed persuasion that this was rather the effect of a medicine
he had been taking than of any grave cause, and he still strongly
believed his other troubles to be exclusively local. Eight days later he
wrote: "My uneasiness and hemorrhage, after having quite left me, as I
supposed, has come back with an aggravated irritability that it has not
yet displayed. You have no idea what a state I am in to-day from a
sudden violent rush of it; and yet it has not the slightest effect on my
general health that I know of." This was a disorder which troubled him
in his earlier life; and during the last five years, in his intervals of
suffering from other causes,