nthusiasm gathered, and few men have
better deserved it.

When he was writing he needed quiet and worked with complete
concentration; and when he had earned some leisure he loved to spend it
in violent physical exercise. He would suddenly call on Forster to come
out for a long ride on horseback to occupy the middle of the day; and
his diligent friend, unable to resist the lure of such company, would
throw his own work to the winds and come. Till near the end of his life
Dickens clung to these habits, thinking nothing of a walk of from twenty
to thirty miles; and there seems reason to believe that by constant
over-exertion he sapped his strength and shortened his life. But
lameness in one foot, the result of an illness early in 1865,
handicapped him severely at times; and in the same year he sustained a
rude shock in a railway accident where his nerves were upset by what he
witnessed in helping the injured. He ought to have acquired the wisdom
of the middle-aged man, and to have taken things more easily, but with
him it was impossible to be doing nothing; physical and mental activity
succeeded one another and often went together with a high state of
nervous tension.

This love of excitement sometimes took forms which modern taste would
call excessive and unwholesome. His attendance at the public execution
of the Mannings in 1849, his going so often to the Morgue in Paris, his
visit to America to 'the exact site where Professor Webster did that
amazing murder', may seem legitimate for one who had to study crime
among the other departments of life; but at times he revels in gruesome
details in a way which jars on our feeling, and betrays too theatrical a
love of sensation. However, no one could say that Dickens is generally
morbid, in view of the sound and hearty appreciation which he had for
all that is wholesome and genial in life.

In many ways the latter part of his life shows a less even tenor, a less
steady development. Though he was so domestic in his tastes and devoted
to his children, his relations with his wife became more and more
difficult owing to incompatibility of temperament; and from 1858 they
found it desirable to live apart. This no doubt added to his
restlessness and the craving for excitement, which showed itself in the
ardour with which he took up the idea of public readings. These readings
are only less famous than his writings, so prodigious was their success.
His great dramatic gifts, enlisted i