w lines in remembrance of Thackeray, who had
then been taken from us, and when those lines appeared they were
preceded by others, very full of feeling, from his much older friend,
Charles Dickens. Now I take up my pen again because Charles Dickens
has also gone, and because it is not fit that this publication should
go forth without a word spoken to his honor.

It is singular that two men in age so nearly equal, in career so
nearly allied, friends so old, and rivals so close, should each have
left us so suddenly, without any of that notice, first doubting and
then assured, which illness gives; so that in the case of the one as
of the other, the tidings of death's dealings have struck us a hard
and startling blow, inflicting not only sorrow, but for a while that
positive, physical pain which comes from evil tidings which are
totally unexpected. It was but a week or two since that I was
discussing at the club that vexed question of American copyright with
Mr. Dickens, and while differing from him somewhat, was wondering at
the youthful vitality of the man who seemed to have done his forty
years of work without having a trace of it left upon him to lessen his
energy, or rob his feelings of their freshness. It was but the other
day that he spoke at the Academy dinner, and those who heard him then
heard him at his best; and those who did not hear him, but only read
his words, felt how fortunate it was that there should be such a man
to speak for literature on such an occasion. When he took farewell of
the public as a public reader, a few months since, the public wondered
that a man in the very prime of his capacity should retire from such a
career. But though there was to be an end to his readings, there was
not, therefore, to be an end of his labors. He was to resume, and did
resume, his old work, and when the first number of _Edwin Drood's
Mystery_ was bought up with unprecedented avidity by the lovers of
Dickens's stories, it was feared, probably, by none but one that he
might not live to finish his chronicle. He was a man, as we all
thought, to live to be a hundred. He looked to be full of health, he
walked vigorously, he stood, and spoke, and, above all, he laughed
like a man in the full vigor of his life....

He would attempt nothing--show no interest in anything--which he could
not do, and which he did not understand. But he was not on that
account forced to confine himself to literature. Every one knows how
he read