fray; and ended with the toast CHARLES DICKENS, THE GUEST OF THE NATION.
_There!_ said he, as he resumed his seat amid applause as great as had
greeted his rising, _There! I told you I should break down, and I've
done it!_" He was in London a few months later, on his way to Spain; and
I heard Thomas Moore describe[47] at Rogers's table the difficulty there
had been to overcome his reluctance, because of this break-down, to go
to the dinner of the Literary Fund on the occasion of Prince Albert's
presiding. "However," said Moore, "I told him only to attempt a few
words, and I suggested what they should be, and he said he'd never
thought of anything so easy, and he went, and did famously." I knew very
well, as I listened, that this had _not_ been the result; but as the
distinguished American had found himself, on this second occasion, not
among orators as in New York, but among men as unable as himself to
speak in public, and equally able to do better things,[48] he was
doubtless more reconciled to his own failure. I have been led to this
digression by Dickens's silence on his friend's break-down. He had so
great a love for Irving that it was painful to speak of him as at any
disadvantage, and of the New York dinner he wrote only in its connection
with his own copyright speeches.

* * * * *

"The effect of all this copyright agitation at least has been to awaken
a great sensation on both sides of the subject; the respectable
newspapers and reviews taking up the cudgels as strongly in my favor, as
the others have done against me. Some of the vagabonds take great credit
to themselves (grant us patience!) for having made me popular by
publishing my books in newspapers: as if there were no England, no
Scotland, no Germany, no place but America in the whole world. A
splendid satire upon this kind of trash has just occurred. A man came
here yesterday, and demanded, not besought but demanded, pecuniary
assistance; and fairly bullied Mr. Q. for money. When I came home, I
dictated a letter to this effect,--that such applications reached me in
vast numbers every day; that if I were a man of fortune, I could not
render assistance to all who sought it; and that, depending on my own
exertion for all the help I could give, I regretted to say I could
afford him none. Upon this, my gentleman sits down and writes me that he
is an itinerant bookseller; that he is the first man who sold my books
in New York; t