awyers and the mansions of the proudest nobles.
Indeed, he seemed to be almost a universal friend.

One remembers, for instance, how he was called in to arbitrate between
Thackeray and George Augustus Sala, who had quarreled. One remembers
how Lord Byron's daughter, Lady Lovelace, when upon her sick-bed, used
to send for Dickens because there was something in his genial,
sympathetic manner that soothed her. Crushing pieces of ice between her
teeth in agony, she would speak to him and he would answer her in his
rich, manly tones until she was comforted and felt able to endure more
hours of pain without complaint.

Dickens was a jovial soul. His books fairly steam with Christmas cheer
and hot punch and the savor of plum puddings, very much as do his
letters to his intimate friends. Everybody knew Dickens. He could not
dine in public without attracting attention. When he left the
dining-room, his admirers would descend upon his table and carry off
egg-shells, orange-peels, and other things that remained behind, so
that they might have memorials of this much-loved writer. Those who
knew him only by sight would often stop him in the streets and ask the
privilege of shaking hands with him; so different was he from--let us
say--Tennyson, who was as great an Englishman in his way as Dickens,
but who kept himself aloof and saw few strangers.

It is hard to associate anything like mystery with Dickens, though he
was fond of mystery as an intellectual diversion, and his last
unfinished novel was The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Moreover, no one
admired more than he those complex plots which Wilkie Collins used to
weave under the influence of laudanum. But as for his own life, it
seemed so normal, so free from anything approaching mystery, that we
can scarcely believe it to have been tinged with darker colors than
those which appeared upon the surface.

A part of this mystery is plain enough. The other part is still
obscure--or of such a character that one does not care to bring it
wholly to the light. It had to do with his various relations with women.

The world at large thinks that it knows this chapter in the life of
Dickens, and that it refers wholly to his unfortunate disagreement with
his wife. To be sure, this is a chapter that is writ large in all of
his biographies, and yet it is nowhere correctly told. His chosen
biographer was John Forster, whose Life of Charles Dickens, in three
volumes, must remain a standard work; bu