“In July,” says Mr. Forster, writing of the year 1858-9, “he took earnest part in the opening efforts on behalf of the Royal Dramatic College, which he supplemented later by a speech for the establishment of schools for actors’ children, in which he took occasion to declare his belief that there were no institutions in England so socially liberal as its public schools, and that there was nowhere in the country so complete an absence of servility to mere rank, position, and riches.  ‘A boy there’” (Mr. Forster here quotes Dickens’s own words) “’is always what his abilities and personal qualities make him.  We may differ about the curriculum and other matters, but of the frank, free, manly, independent spirit preserved in our public schools I apprehend there can be no kind of question.’”

I have in my possession a great number of letters from Dickens, some of which might probably have been published in the valuable collection of his letters published by his sister-in-law and eldest daughter had they been get-at-able at the time when they might have been available for that publication.[1] But I was at Rome, and the letters were safely stowed away in England in such sort that it would have needed a journey to London to get at them.

[Footnote 1:  Some of the letters in question—­such as I had with me—­were sent to London for that purpose.  I do not remember now which were and which were not.  But if it should be the case that any of those printed here have been printed before, I do not think any reader will object to having them again brought under his eye.]

I was for several years a frequent contributor to Household Words, my contributions for the most part consisting of what I considered tit-bits from the byways of Italian history, which the persevering plough of my reading turned up from time to time.

In one case I remember the article was sent “to order,” I was dining with him after I had just had all the remaining hairs on my head made to stand on end by the perusal of the officially published Manual for Confessors, as approved by superior authority for the dioceses of Tuscany.  I was full of the subject, and made, I fancy, the hairs of some who sat at table with me stand on end also.  Dickens said, with nailing forefinger levelled at me, “Give us that for Household Words.  Give it us just as you have now been telling it to us”—­which I accordingly did.  Whether the publication of that article was in anywise connected with the fact that when I wished to purchase a second copy of that most extraordinary work I was told that it was out of print, and not to be had, I do not know.  Of course it was kept as continually in print as the Latin Grammar, for the constant use of the class for whom it was provided, and who most assuredly could not have found their way safely through the wonderful intricacies of the Confessional without it.  And equally, of course, the publishers of so largely-circulated a work did not succeed in preventing me from obtaining a second copy of it.