to
lie before heaven and earth."

This denial, coming from a man of truth and honor like Charles Dickens,
must, once for all, dispose of that convenient way of accounting for the
sad estrangement.

The reasons for the unhappy state of things were of a much more
complicated nature than this. Only the most intimate of his friends ever
knew them in full, and of course they were debarred from making them
public. But Professor Ward of Cambridge University, who has written a
very kind and appreciative Life of Dickens, and one which gives a far
more pleasing idea of his character than the bulky and egotistical Life
by Forster, gives a clue to the whole trouble in the following
statement. He says:--

"If he ever loved his wife with that affection before which
so-called incompatibilities of habits, temper, or disposition fade
into nothingness, there is no indication of it in any of the
numerous letters addressed to her. Neither has it ever been
pretended that he strove in the direction of that resignation which
love and duty made possible to David Copperfield, or even that he
remained in every way master of himself, as many men have known how
to remain, the story of whose wedded life and its disappointments
has never been written in history or figured in fiction."

And this troublous condition of things was very much intensified by
Dickens having fallen violently in love with Mary Hogarth, Mrs.
Dickens's youngest sister. This beautiful girl died at their house at
the early age of seventeen. No sorrow seems ever to have touched the
heart and possessed the imagination of Charles Dickens like that for the
loss of this dearly loved girl. "I can solemnly say," he wrote to her
mother a few months after her death, "that waking or sleeping I have
never lost the recollection of our hard sorrow, and I never shall."
"If," he writes in his diary at the beginning of a new year, "she was
with me now,--the same winning, happy, amiable companion, sympathizing
with all my thoughts and feelings more than any one I ever knew did or
will,--I think I should have nothing to wish but a continuance of such
happiness." Throughout life her memory haunted him with great vividness.
After her death he wrote: "I dreamed of her every night for many weeks,
and always with a kind of quiet happiness, which became so pleasant to
me that I never lay down without a hope of the vision returning." The
year before