Nor in that great place of the dead does Dickens 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 computed that he had made L12,000 by the two first series of readings.

[33] “Charles Dickens as I Knew Him.”  By George Dolby.  Miss Dickens considers this “the best and truest picture of her father yet written.”

[34] Mr. Dolby remonstrated on this, and it was in connection with a very slight show of temper on the occasion that he says:  “In all my experiences with the Chief that was the only time I ever heard him address angry words to any one.”