Dickens is bold in the advocacy of truth and in denouncing error; he is the champion of honest poverty; he is the foe of class pretension and oppression; he is the friend of friendless children; the reformer of those whom society has made vagrants.  Without many clear assertions of Christian doctrine, but with no negation of it, he believes in doing good for its own sake,—­in self-denial, in the rewards which virtue gives herself.  His faults are few and venial.  His merry life smacks too much of the practical joke and the punch-bowl; he denounces cant in the self-appointed ministers of the gospel, but he is not careful to draw contrasted pictures of good pastors.  His opinion seems to be based upon a human perfectibility.  But for rare pictures of real life he has never been surpassed; and he has instructed an age, concerning itself, wisely, originally, and usefully.  He has the simplicity of Goldsmith, and the truth to nature of Fielding and Smollett, without a spice of sentimentalism or of impurity; he has brought the art of prose fiction to its highest point, and he has left no worthy successor.  He lived for years separated from his wife on the ground of incompatibility, and, during his later years at Gadshill, twenty miles from London, to avoid the dissipations and draughts upon his time in that city.

SECOND VISIT TO AMERICA.—­In 1868 he again visited America, to read portions of his own works.  He was well received by the public; but society had learned its lesson on his former visit, and he was not overwhelmed with a hospitality he had so signally failed to appreciate.  And if we had learned better, he had vastly improved; the genius had become a gentleman.  His readings were a great pecuniary success, and at their close he made an amend which was graceful and proper; so that when he departed from our shores his former errors were fully condoned, and he left an admiring hemisphere behind him.

In the glow of health, and while writing, in serial numbers, a very promising novel entitled The Mystery of Edwin Drood, he was struck by apoplexy, in June, 1870, and in a few hours was dead.  England has hardly experienced a greater loss.  All classes of men mourned when he was buried in Westminster Abbey, in the poets’ corner, among illustrious writers,—­a prose-poet, none of whom has a larger fame than he; a historian of his time of greater value to society than any who distinctively bear the title.  His characters are drawn from life; his own experience is found in Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield; Micawber is a caricature of his own father. Traddles is said to represent his friend Talfourd. Skimpole is supposed to be an original likeness of Leigh Hunt, and William and Daniel Grant, of Manchester, were the originals of the Brothers Cheeryble.