himself, his readings, the sound of his
voice, the ring of his footstep, the glance of his eye, are all still
vividly within the recollection of the majority of those who will
examine the pages of this memorial. Everything, consequently, which is
set forth in them is penned with a knowledge of its inevitable revision
or endorsement by the reader's own personal remembrance. It is in the
full glare of that public remembrance that the present writer refers to
the great novelist as an impersonator of his more remarkable creations.
Everybody who has seen him, who has heard him, who has carefully watched
him, though it may be but at a single one of these memorable readings,
will recognise at a glance the accuracy or the inaccuracy of the
delineation.

It is observable, in the first instance, in regard to Charles Dickens,
that he had in an extraordinary degree the dramatic element in his
character. It was an integral part of his individuality. It coloured his
whole temperament or idiosyncracy. Unconsciously he described himself,
to a T, in Nicholas Nickleby. "There's genteel comedy in your walk and
manner, juvenile tragedy in your eye, and touch-and-go farce in your
la'ugh," might have been applied to himself in his buoyant youth quite
as readily and directly as to Nicholas. The author, rather than the hero
of Nickleby, seems, in that happy utterance of the theatrical manager,
to have been photographed. It cannot but now be apparent that, as an
unpremeditated preliminary to Dickens's then undreamt-of career as
a reader of his own works in public and professionally, the Private
Theatricals over which he presided during several years in his own home
circle as manager, prepared the way no less directly than his occasional
Readings, later on, at some expense to himself (in travelling and
otherwise) for purely charitable purposes. His proclivity stagewards,
in effect, the natural trending of his line of life, so to speak, in
the histrionic or theatrical direction, was, in another way, indicated
at a yet earlier date, and not one jot less pointedly. It was so, we
mean, at the very opening of his career in authorship, when having just
sprung into precocious celebrity as the writer of the Sketches and of
the earlier numbers of Pickwick, he contributed an opera and a couple of
farces with brilliant success to the boards of the St. James's Theatre.
Braham and Parry and Hullah winged with melody the words of "The Village
Coquettes;" whi