lly for his
bewilderingly subtracted or added or divided pockethandkerchiefs and
playing-cards; a paralysis of wit as to which I once more, and with the
same wan despair, feel my companions' shy telegraphy of relief, their
snickerings and mouthings and raised numerical fingers, reach me from
the benches.

The second definite matter in the Dickens connection is the Smike of
Miss Weston--whose praenomen I frivolously forget (though I fear it was
Lizzie,) but who was afterwards Mrs. E. L. Davenport and then, sequently
to some public strife or chatter, Mrs. Charles Matthews--in a version of
Nicholas Nickleby that gracelessly managed to be all tearful melodrama,
long-lost foundlings, wicked Ralph Nicklebys and scowling Arthur Grides,
with other baffled villains, and scarcely at all Crummleses and
Kenwigses, much less Squeerses; though there must have been something of
Dotheboys Hall for the proper tragedy of Smike and for the broad
Yorkshire effect, a precious theatrical value, of John Brodie. The
ineffaceability was the anguish, to my tender sense, of Nicholas's
starved and tattered and fawning and whining protege; in face of my
sharp retention of which through all the years who shall deny the
immense authority of the theatre, or that the stage is the mightiest of
modern engines? Such at least was to be the force of the Dickens
imprint, however applied, in the soft clay of our generation; it was to
resist so serenely the wash of the waves of time. To be brought up thus
against the author of it, or to speak at all of the dawn of one's early
consciousness of it and of his presence and power, is to begin to tread
ground at once sacred and boundless, the associations of which, looming
large, warn us off even while they hold. He did too much for us surely
ever to leave us free--free of judgment, free of reaction, even should
we care to be, which heaven forbid: he laid his hand on us in a way to
undermine as in no other case the power of detached appraisement. We
react against other productions of the general kind without "liking"
them the less, but we somehow liked Dickens the more for having
forfeited half the claim to appreciation. That process belongs to the
fact that criticism, roundabout him, is somehow futile and tasteless.
His own taste is easily impugned, but he entered so early into the blood
and bone of our intelligence that it always remained better than the
taste of overhauling him. When I take him up to-day and find