ank a boy more
expressively. Over all things cultivate sympathy. If antipathy goes
with it, so much the better. If the magnet must attract, it likewise
must repel. Dickens was a magnet of the magnets; but in his case I
must confess, that when a modern specimen tells me he can't laugh at
him, he makes me feel rather as Heine felt when somebody told him that
he--the somebody--was an atheist; frightened.

... Dickens is perhaps best described as to my immense amusement, and
by the most delicious misprint I ever saw, I found myself once
described in the "Visitors' List" in an English paper abroad--"Human
Marvel, and family." It looked like some new kind of acrobat. Of
Charles Dickens's great kindnesses to me in after days, and of some
personal experiences of his stage passion, at the end of his life, I
ventured to gossip with readers of the _Bar_, some months ago, in a
paper called "With the Majority." In one sense, yes; but in
another--in what a minority, Thackeray and he!

XXVI

ON THE DEATH OF DICKENS

When Charles Dickens died the English papers and magazines were filled
with criticisms and appreciations of the great writer. It may be
interesting to glance at a few extracts from these:

From _Fraser's Magazine_.--On the eighth of June, 1870, the busiest
brain and the busiest hand that ever guided pen over paper finished
their appointed work, and that pen was laid aside forever. Words of
its inditing were sure of immediately reaching and being welcomed by a
larger number of men and women than those of any other living
writer--perhaps of any writer who has ever lived.

About six o'clock on that summer evening, having done his day's work
with habitual assiduity, Charles Dickens sat down to dinner with some
members of his family. He had complained of headache, but neither he
nor any one felt the least apprehension. The pain increased, the head
drooped forward, and he never spoke again. Breathing went on for
four-and-twenty hours, and then there was nothing left but ... dismay
and sorrow. When the sad news was made public it fell with the shock
of a personal loss on the hearts of countless millions, to whom the
name of the famous author was like that of an intimate and dear
friend....

Anthony Trollope in _St. Paul's_.--It seems to have been but the other
day that, sitting where I now sit, in the same chair, at the same
table, with the same familiar things around me, I wrote for the
_Cornhill Magazine_ a fe