w-makers welcoming the inimitable. I wish you could have seen the
inimitable shown to a great elbow-chair by the Speaker's throne, and
sitting alone in the middle of the floor of the House of Commons, the
observed of all observers, listening with exemplary gravity to the
queerest speaking possible, and breaking, in spite of himself, into a
smile as he thought of this commencement to the thousand and one
stories in reserve for home." At Boston the enthusiasm had swelled to
even greater proportions. "How can I give you," he writes, "the
faintest notion of my reception here; of the crowds that pour in and
out the whole day; of the people that line the streets when I go out;
of the cheering when I went to the theatre; of the copies of verses,
letters of congratulation, welcomes of all kinds, balls, dinners,
assemblies without end?... There is to be a dinner in New York, ... to
which I have had an invitation with every known name in America
appended to it.... I have had deputations from the Far West, who have
come from more than two thousand miles' distance; from the lakes, the
rivers, the backwoods, the log-houses, the cities, factories,
villages, and towns. Authorities from nearly all the states have
written to me. I have heard from the universities, congress, senate,
and bodies, public and private, of every sort and kind." All was
indeed going happy as a marriage bell. Did I not rightly say that the
world was conspiring to spoil this young man of thirty, whose youth
had certainly not been passed in the splendour of opulence or power?
What wonder if in the dawn of his American experiences, and of such a
reception, everything assumed a roseate hue? Is it matter for surprise
if he found the women "very beautiful," the "general breeding neither
stiff nor forward," "the good nature universal"; if he expatiated, not
without a backward look at unprogressive Old England, on the
comparative comfort among the working classes, and the absence of
beggars in the streets? But, alas, that rosy dawn ended, as rosy dawns
sometimes will, in sleet and mist and very dirty weather. Before many
weeks, before many days had flown, Dickens was writing in a very
different spirit. On the 24th of February, in the midst of a perfect
ovation of balls and dinners, he writes "with reluctance,
disappointment, and sorrow," that "there is no country on the face of
the earth, where there is less freedom of opinion on any subject in
reference to which there i