and Mac. There's Babbage. There's a Lady Osborne and her daughter.
There's Southwood Smith. And there's Quin. And there are Thomas Chapman
and his wife. So many of these people have never dined with us, that the
fix is particularly tight. Advise! Advise!" My advice was for throwing
over the party altogether, but additional help was obtained and the
dinner went off very pleasantly. It was the last time we saw Sydney
Smith.

Of one other characteristic occurrence he wrote before he left; and the
very legible epigraph round the seal of his letter, "It is particularly
requested that if Sir James Graham should open this, he will not
trouble himself to seal it again," expresses both its date and its
writer's opinion of a notorious transaction of the time. "I wish" (28th
of June) "you would read this, and give it me again when we meet at
Stanfield's to-day. Newby has written to me to say that he hopes to be
able to give Overs more money than was agreed on." The enclosure was the
proof-sheet of a preface written by him to a small collection of stories
by a poor carpenter dying of consumption, who hoped by their
publication, under protection of such a name, to leave behind him some
small provision for his ailing wife and little children.[77] The book
was dedicated to the kind physician, Doctor Elliotson, whose name was
for nearly thirty years a synonym with us all for unwearied,
self-sacrificing, beneficent service to every one in need.

The last incident before Dickens's departure was a farewell dinner to
him at Greenwich, which took also the form of a celebration for the
completion of _Chuzzlewit_, or, as the Ballantynes used to call it in
Scott's case, a christening dinner; when Lord Normanby took the chair,
and I remember sitting next the great painter Turner, who had come with
Stanfield, and had enveloped his throat, that sultry summer day, in a
huge red belcher-handkerchief which nothing would induce him to remove.
He was not otherwise demonstrative, but enjoyed himself in a quiet
silent way, less perhaps at the speeches than at the changing lights on
the river. Carlyle did not come; telling me in his reply to the
invitation that he truly loved Dickens, having discerned in the inner
man of him a real music of the genuine kind, but that he'd rather
testify to this in some other form than that of dining out in the
dogdays.

FOOTNOTES:

[74] In a letter on the subject of copyright published by Thomas Hood
after Dickens