d, while yet he
seemed to be seeing nothing; and the small esteem in which this rare
faculty was held by himself, a quaint oddity that gave to shrewdness
itself in him an air of Irish simplicity, his unquestionable turn for
literature, and a varied knowledge of it not always connected with such
intense love and such unwearied practice of one special and absorbing
art, combined to render him attractive far beyond the common. His fine
genius and his handsome person, of neither of which at any time he
seemed himself to be in the slightest degree conscious, completed the
charm. Edwin Landseer, all the world's favorite, and the excellent
Stanfield, came a few months later, in the Devonshire-Terrace days; but
another painter-friend was George Cattermole, who had then enough and to
spare of fun as well as fancy to supply ordinary artists and humorists
by the dozen, and wanted only a little more ballast and steadiness to
have had all that could give attraction to good-fellowship. A friend now
especially welcome, too, was the novelist Mr. Ainsworth, who shared with
us incessantly for the three following years in the companionship which
began at his house; with whom we visited, during two of those years,
friends of art and letters in his native Manchester, from among whom
Dickens brought away his Brothers Cheeryble, and to whose sympathy in
tastes and pursuits, accomplishments in literature, open-hearted
generous ways, and cordial hospitality, many of the pleasures of later
years were due. Frederick Dickens, to whom soon after this a treasury
clerkship was handsomely given, on Dickens's application, by Mr. Stanley
of Alderley, known in and before those Manchester days, was for the
present again living with his father, but passed much time in his
brother's home; and another familiar face was that of Mr. Thomas Mitton,
who had known him when himself a law-clerk in Lincoln's Inn, through
whom there was introduction of the relatives of a friend and partner,
Mr. Smithson, the gentleman connected with Yorkshire mentioned in his
preface to _Nickleby_, who became very intimate in his house. These, his
father and mother and their two younger sons, with members of his wife's
family, and his married sisters and their husbands, Mr. and Mrs. Burnett
and Mr. and Mrs. Austin, are figures that all associate themselves
prominently with the days of Doughty Street and the cottages of
Twickenham and Petersham as remembered by me in the summers of 1838