ens enjoy cold barren
honour alone. Nearly seventeen years have gone by since he was laid
there--yes, nearly seventeen years, though it seems only yesterday
that I was listening to the funeral sermon in which Dean Stanley spoke
of the simple and sufficient faith in which he had lived and died. But
though seventeen years have gone by, yet are outward signs not wanting
of the peculiar love that clings to him still. As I strolled through
the Abbey this last Christmas Eve I found his grave, and his grave
alone, made gay with the season's hollies. "Lord, keep my memory
green,"--in another sense than he used the words, that prayer is
answered.

And of the future what shall we say? His fame had a brilliant day
while he lived; it has a brilliant day now. Will it fade into
twilight, without even an after-glow; will it pass altogether into the
night of oblivion? I cannot think so. The vitality of Dickens' works
is singularly great. They are all a-throb, as it were, with hot human
blood. They are popular in the highest sense because their appeal is
universal, to the uneducated as well as the educated. The humour is
superb, and most of it, so far as one can judge, of no ephemeral kind.
The pathos is more questionable, but that too, at its simplest and
best; and especially when the humour is shot with it--is worthy of a
better epithet than excellent. It is supremely touching. Imagination,
fancy, wit, eloquence, the keenest observation, the most strenuous
endeavour to reach the highest artistic excellence, the largest
kindliness,--all these he brought to his life-work. And that work, as
I think, will live, I had almost dared to prophesy for ever. Of
course fashions change. Of course no writer of fiction, writing for
his own little day, can permanently meet the needs of all after times.
Some loss of immediate vital interest is inevitable. Nevertheless, in
Dickens' case, all will not die. Half a century, a century hence, he
will still be read; not perhaps as he was read when his words flashed
upon the world in their first glory and freshness, nor as he is read
now in the noon of his fame. But he will be read much more than we
read the novelists of the last century--be read as much, shall I say,
as we still read Scott. And so long as he _is_ read, there will be one
gentle and humanizing influence the more at work among men.

THE END.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] For his own graphic account of the accident, see his "Letters."

[32] He co