For ever echoing in the heart and present in the memory: who has not heard these tones, who does not hear them as he turns over your books that, for so many years, have been his companions and comforters?  We have been young and old, we have been sad and merry with you, we have listened to the mid-night chimes with Pen and Warrington, have stood with you beside the death-bed, have mourned at that yet more awful funeral of lost love, and with you have prayed in the inmost chapel sacred to our old and immortal affections, a’ le’al souvenir! And whenever you speak for yourself, and speak in earnest, how magical, how rare, how lonely in our literature is the beauty of your sentences!  ‘I can’t express the charm of them’ (so you write of George Sand; so we may write of you):  ’they seem to me like the sound of country bells, provoking I don’t know what vein of music and meditation, and falling sweetly and sadly on the ear.’  Surely that style, so fresh, so rich, so full of surprises —­that style which stamps as classical your fragments of slang, and perpetually astonishes and delights—­would alone give immortality to an author, even had he little to say.  But you, with your whole wide world of fops and fools, of good women and brave men, of honest absurdities and cheery adventurers:  you who created the Steynes and Newcomes, the Beckys and Blanches, Captain Costigan and F. B., and the Chevalier Strong—­all that host of friends imperishable—­you must survive with Shakespeare and Cervantes in the memory and affection of men.

II.

To Charles Dickens.

Sir,—­It has been said that every man is born a Platonist or an Aristotelian, though the enormous majority of us, to be sure, live and die without being conscious of any invidious philosophic partiality whatever.  With more truth (though that does not imply very much) every Englishman who reads may be said to be a partisan of yourself or of Mr. Thackeray.  Why should there be any partisanship in the matter; and why, having two such good things as your novels and those of your contemporary, should we not be silently happy in the possession?  Well, men are made so, and must needs fight and argue over their tastes in enjoyment.  For myself, I may say that in this matter I am what the Americans do not call a ‘Mugwump,’ what English politicians dub a ’superior person’—­that is, I take no side, and attempt to enjoy the best of both.

It must be owned that this attitude is sometimes made a little difficult by the vigour of your special devotees.  They have ceased, indeed, thank Heaven! to imitate you; and even in ‘descriptive articles’ the touch of Mr. Gigadibs, of him whom ‘we almost took for the true Dickens,’ has disappeared.  The young lions of the Press no longer mimic your less admirable mannerisms—­do not strain so much after fantastic comparisons, do not (in your manner and Mr. Carlyle’s) give people nick-names