be
traced to all the pulpits and confessionals in Christendom since
Christmas 1842." "Who can listen," exclaimed Thackeray, "to objections
regarding such a book as this? It seems to me a national benefit, and to
every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness." Such praise
expressed what men of genius felt and said; but the small volume had
other tributes, less usual and not less genuine. There poured upon its
author daily, all through that Christmas time, letters from complete
strangers to him which I remember reading with a wonder of pleasure; not
literary at all, but of the simplest domestic kind; of which the general
burden was to tell him, amid many confidences about their homes, how the
_Carol_ had come to be read aloud there, and was to be kept upon a
little shelf by itself, and was to do them all no end of good. Anything
more to be said of it will not add much to this.

There was indeed nobody that had not some interest in the message of the
_Christmas Carol_. It told the selfish man to rid himself of
selfishness; the just man to make himself generous; and the good-natured
man to enlarge the sphere of his good nature. Its cheery voice of faith
and hope, ringing from one end of the island to the other, carried
pleasant warning alike to all, that if the duties of Christmas were
wanting no good could come of its outward observances; that it must
shine upon the cold hearth and warm it, and into the sorrowful heart and
comfort it; that it must be kindness, benevolence, charity, mercy, and
forbearance, or its plum pudding would turn to bile, and its roast beef
be indigestible.[73] Nor could any man have said it with the same
appropriateness as Dickens. What was marked in him to the last was
manifest now. He had identified himself with Christmas fancies. Its life
and spirits, its humour in riotous abundance, of right belonged to him.
Its imaginations as well as kindly thoughts were his; and its privilege
to light up with some sort of comfort the squalidest places, he had made
his own. Christmas Day was not more social or welcome: New Year's Day
not more new: Twelfth Night not more full of characters. The duty of
diffusing enjoyment had never been taught by a more abundant, mirthful,
thoughtful, ever-seasonable writer.

Something also is to be said of the spirit of the book, and of the
others that followed it, which will not anticipate special allusions to
be made hereafter. No one was more intensely fond than Dick