But Dickens's eye--I wasn't much more than a boy, and he didn't know me from Adam--went at once straight for mine. "Here's somebody who likes me, anyhow," it said. For the next few minutes he read at me, if ever man did. The sympathetic unit is everything to us. And on my word the result was that he so warmed to his work that he got the whole audience in his hand, and dispensed with me. Only once again--oh, how like him it was!--he fixed me with his eye just towards the end of the reading, and made a short but perceptible pause. I wondered what was coming--and soon knew. The choleric old party in the street had to appear for one passing instant more, and fire off one more passing sentence. Which he did--with the same results. Good heavens! what an actor Dickens was.
When that reading ended--with the success which it deserved--never did that most expressive of all human features, the eye, thank a boy more expressively. Over all things cultivate sympathy. If antipathy goes with it, so much the better. If the magnet must attract, it likewise must repel. Dickens was a magnet of the magnets; but in his case I must confess, that when a modern specimen tells me he can't laugh at him, he makes me feel rather as Heine felt when somebody told him that he--the somebody--was an atheist; frightened.
... Dickens is perhaps best described as to my immense amusement, and by the most delicious misprint I ever saw, I found myself once described in the "Visitors' List" in an English paper abroad--"Human Marvel, and family." It looked like some new kind of acrobat. Of Charles Dickens's great kindnesses to me in after days, and of some personal experiences of his stage passion, at the end of his life, I ventured to gossip with readers of the _Bar_, some months ago, in a paper called "With the Majority." In one sense, yes; but in another--in what a minority, Thackeray and he!
When Charles Dickens died the English papers and magazines were filled with criticisms and appreciations of the great writer. It may be interesting to glance at a few extracts from these:
From _Fraser's Magazine_.--On the eighth of June, 1870, the busiest brain and the busiest hand that ever guided pen over paper finished their appointed work, and that pen was laid aside forever. Words of its inditing were sure of immediately reaching and being welcomed by a larger number of men and women than those of any other living writer--perhaps of any writer who has ever lived.