; and that on no consideration whatever will Mr. Dickens be induced
to appoint an extra night in any place in which he shall have been
announced to read for the last time." According to promise, in the
autumn, these well-remembered Farewell Readings commenced. They were
intended to run on to the number of one hundred altogether. Beginning
within the first week of October, they were not to end until the third
week of the ensuing May. As it happened, Seventy-Four Readings were
given in place of the full hundred. On Tuesday, the 6th of October,
1868, the series was commenced. On Thursday, the 22nd of April, 1869,
its abrupt termination was announced, by a telegram from Preston, that
caused a pang of grief and anxiety to the vast multitude of those to
whom the very name of Charles Dickens had, for more than thirty years,
been endeared. The intimation conveyed through that telegram was the
fact of his sudden and alarming illness. Already, in the two preceding
months, though the public generally had taken no notice of the
circumstance, three of the Readings had, for various reasons, been
unavoidably given up--one at Hull, fixed for the 12th of March, and
previously one at Glasgow, fixed for the 18th, and another at Edinburgh,
fixed for the 19th of February. Otherwise than in those three instances,
the sequence of Readings marked on the elaborate programme had been most
faithfully adhered to; the Reader, indeed, only succumbing at last under
the nervous exhaustion caused by his own indomitable perseverance.

It is, now, matter of all but absolute certainty that his immense
energies, his elastic temperament, and his splendid constitution had
all of them, long before this, been cruelly overtaxed and overweighted.
Unsuspected by any of us at the time, he had, there can be little doubt
of it, received the deadliest shock to his whole system as far back
as on the 9th of June, 1865, in that terrible railway accident at
Staplehurst, on the fifth anniversary of which fatal day, by a strange
coincidence, he breathed his last. His intense vitality deceived himself
and everybody else, however, until it was all too late. The extravagant
toil he was going through for months together--whirling hither and
thither in express trains, for the purpose of making one exciting
public appearance after another, each of them a little world of animated
impersonations--he accomplished with such unfailing and unflagging
vivacity, with such an easy step, s