noble countenance. Encountering him within
a very few weeks of his death, Mr. Arthur Locker has said, "I was
especially struck with the brilliancy and vivacity of his eyes:" adding,
"there seemed as much life and animation in them as in twenty ordinary
pairs of eyes." Another keen observer, Mr. Arthur Helps, has in the
same spirit exclaimed, "What portrait can do justice to the frankness,
kindness, and power of his eyes?" None certainly that ever was painted
by the pencil of the sunbeam, or by the brush of a Royal Academician.
Fully to realise the capacity for indicating emotion latent in them,
and informing his whole frame--his hands for example, in their every
movement, being wonderfully expressive--those who attended these
Readings soon came to know, that you had but to listen to his variable
and profoundly sympathetic voice, and to watch the play of his handsome
features.

The different original characters introduced in his stories, when he
read them, he did not simply describe, he impersonated: otherwise to
put it, for whomsoever he spoke, he spoke in character. Thus, when
everything was quiet in the crowded assembly, and when the ringing
applause that always welcomed his appearance, but which he never by any
chance acknowledged, had subsided--when he began: "A Christmas Carol, in
four staves. Stave one, Marley's Ghost. Marley was dead to begin with."
Having remarked, yet further, that "there was no doubt whatever about
that," the register of his burial being signed by this functionary, that
and the other--when he added, "_Scrooge_ signed it; and Scrooge's name
was good upon 'Change for anything he chose to put his hand to"--Scrooge
in the flesh was, through the very manner of the utterance of his name,
brought vividly and upon the instant before the observant listener. "Oh!
but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, was Scrooge!" _That_
we knew instinctively, without there being any need whatever for our
hearing one syllable of the description of him, admirably given in the
book, but suppressed in the Reading, judiciously suppressed enough,
because, for that matter, we saw and heard it without any necessity for
its being explained. As one might say--quoting here a single morsel from
the animated description of Scrooge, that was actually illustrated
by Scrooge's impersonator--it all "spoke out shrewdly in his grating
voice!" And it was thus, not merely with regard to the leading
personages of the little act