Not my ugebond?" Upon which the doctor,
looking round one of the bottom posts of the bed, and taking Mrs.
Harris's pulse in a reassuring manner, says, with much admirable
presence of mind: "Howls, my dear madam?--no, no, no! What are we
thinking of? Howls, my dear Mrs. Harris? Ha, ha, ha! Organs, ma'am,
organs. Organs in the streets, Mrs. Harris; no howls."

Yours faithfully, [C. D.]

FOOTNOTES:

[127] One of the pleasantest, _to me_, of Dickens's letters is that in
which, extravagant anti-Tory as he was, he refuses to let a contributor
echo the too common grudges at Lockhart (see _inf._ under Stevenson).
But it is very short, and perhaps of no general interest.

[128] Referring, I suppose, to the well-known and "inimitable" (but by
no means indispensable) flourish of his signature.

[129] "The comedy" is Bulwer-Lytton's _Not so Bad as we Seem_, acted by
Dickens and other amateurs for charity at Devonshire House seventy years
ago, and about to be reproduced _in loco_ as these proofs are being
revised.

CHARLES KINGSLEY (1819-1875)

There are some people who, while thinking that the author of
_Westward Ho!_ has not, at least recently, been given his
due rank in critical estimation, admit certain explanations
of this. As a historian and in almost all his writings
Kingsley was inaccurate,--almost (as his friend and
brother-in-law Froude was once said to be) "congenitally
inaccurate"; in his novels and elsewhere he went out of his
way to tread on the corns of all sorts of people; he
constantly ventured out of his depth in such subjects as
philosophy and theology; and he suffered a terrible defeat
by rashly engaging, and by tactical ineptitude, in his
contest with Newman. His politics, in which matter at one
time he engaged hotly, were those of a busier and more
educated Colonel Newcome. His poems, which were his least
unequal work, seem never to have attracted due notice.

But none of his foibles--not even corn-treading--is a fatal
defect in familiar letter-writing: consequently he has good
chance here, and his _Letters and Memoirs_ have been
deservedly often reprinted. It is true that letters cannot
show in full the really exceptional versatility which
enabled the same man to write _Yeast_ and _Westward Ho!_,
_Andromeda_ and _The Water Babies_, the best of the Essays
and the best of the Ser