managed it. In it appeared, besides more Christmas stories, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Hunted Down (1860), The Uncommercial Traveller (1860), and Great Expectations (1860-61).

Nor were these the only fruits of Dickens's inexhaustible power. The Pictures from Italy were followed, in 1846, 1847, and 1848 by Dombey and Son, in twenty monthly numbers. An old charwoman's remark, told by Forster, reveals the great popularity of Dickens's stories. She lodged at a snuff-shop, where on the first Monday of every month the landlord read Dombey aloud. "Lawk, Ma'am!" she said one day to Mrs. Hogarth, "I thought that three or four men must have put together Dombey!" The intimacy of the woman with the book is of course the point for remark, but it is not uninteresting that the author's several-handed fertility should have struck her in exactly the same way as Pickwick struck Mr. Chesterton; it is indeed hard to believe that Dickens was one man. For fast on the heels of Dombey came David Copperfield, begun in May, 1849, and finished in serial form in November, 1850. Other great novels followed in rapid succession. Besides what he published in Household Words and All the Year Round, Dickens wrote Bleak House (1852-53), Little Dorrit (1855-57), Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), cut short by the author's death.

Yet through all this success and in spite of his natural cheerfulness, Dickens was not wholly happy at home. He had been for some time unwontedly irritable and depressed, and finally, in 1858, showed by his letters to Forster that the chief trouble, besides failing health, lay in Mrs. Dickens, whom he had married in

such a burst of enthusiasm for all the Hogarth daughters. "Why is it," he wrote " that, as with poor David, a sense comes always crushing on me now, when I fall into low spirits, as of one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion I have never made?" Again: "We are strangely ill-assorted for the bond there is between us." In May, 1858, he and his wife agreed to separate, Dickens allowing her £600 a year and nothing in his will.

The weakest thing Dickens did in connection with the whole unfortunate affair was to publish a defense of himself, in answer to some scandal, thus making the matter public; and to write a letter to his secretary, his "violated letter," as he called it, which got into the papers. Dickens was strangely sensitive about some matters, notably this and certain questions of publication, though, oddly enough, he was lacking in the finer sensitiveness which would have made him shrink from petty public wrangling.

Just before his separation from his wife, Dickens bought Gad's Hill Place, on the London road near Rochester. As a boy he had resolved some day to buy the house which stood near the scene of Falstaff's encounter with the men in buckram; and though on his travels he always longed for London, he managed to break the spell of the metropolis for the dream of his boyhood and in 1860 to move permanently to Gad's Hill,

His was nevertheless still the active spirit of earlier years. He walked incessantly, often twenty miles a day, and filled spare moments with planting trees and shrubbery, making the "tunnel" under the London road, and building summer-houses in the "wilderness," a

thicket reached by the tunnel. In 1853, moreover, he had begun public readings of his works. They were no doubt remarkable, for Dickens was a dramatic man with a fine voice; indeed even the old Carlyle would leave Chelsea to hear them; but they were no doubt not indicative of a very modest taste. Certainly the exertion necessary hastened his death. For, once he had begun them, and once people expected him, in spite of very poor health, to fulfill his engagements, he was the indefatigable, active-spirited Dickens of newspaper days. He read all over England; he even visited America again, where he found the people ready, with the quick recovery of youth, to forget the quarrel of twenty-five years before. His audiences were everywhere very large, and his pay was proportionate. But the trip to America was a great strain on his health; soon the doctors had to forbid his public readings. He retired to Gad's Hill to rest, was in pain and without sleep much of the time, but outwardly very cheerful and still determined to work at Edwin Drood. Suddenly one day, as he rose from dinner, he fell by the fireplace, never regained consciousness, and died the next day, June 9, 1870. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Dickens was only fifty-eight, in full career of middle life, when he died. Indeed, when his scant education, the struggle he had to make for mere existence, and what he did actually achieve are considered, his life is a phenomenal record - not so much because of the bulk as because of the quality of the work. Many half-forgotten men are buried in the Poets' Corner; but Dickens has joined those who will be remembered when Westminster is forgotten, who have created a few great characters more real than living men,- Falstaff, Don

Quixote, Sir Roger, Tristram Shandy. We may be "such stuff as dreams are made on;" but no one dare bring such an allegation against the imperishable person of Mr. Pickwick. More than this, wherever kindly optimism, not blatant, cocksure optimism, cheers the faint of heart, wherever Scrooges are transformed and Tiny Tims are loved, the name of Dickens will be an enduring and a blessed name.

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

"POOR Thackeray, adieu, adieu!" wrote Carlyle when he heard of the novelist's death; "he had many fine qualities, no guile or malice against any mortal, a big mass of a soul, but not strong in proportion; a beautiful vein of genius lay struggling about him." Mr. Leslie Stephen adds that Thackeray's weakness was "the excess of sensibility of a strongly artistic temperament." When this excess of sensibility was thrown back upon itself by the rebuffs of the world, it found expression not, as with Carlyle, in rage and denunciations, but in a humor which moved between the extremes of laughter and tears, and in that form of fiction which exposes the follies and hypocrisy of mankind rather than its great vices and great virtues.

William Makepeace Thackeray was born July 18, 1811, at Calcutta. His great-grandfather was archdeacon of Surrey, while his grandfather, his father, and several of his uncles had been distinguished in the civil service of the East India Company. The father died when Thackeray was five years old, and the latter was sent back to England in 1817, living there with an aunt. His mother was married soon after in India to a Major Smyth, coming, however, to England with her husband in 1821. At the age of eleven Thackeray was sent to the Charterhouse School, and remained there till he was seventeen. His experiences are described with fair accuracy in the story of Pendennis, where the school is called Greyfriars, and the place itself is fondly