en momentarily, at the
printed pages, simply turning the leaves mechanically as they lay open
before him on the picturesque little reading-desk. Besides the Sixteen
Readings actually given, there were Four others which were so far
meditated that they were printed separately as "Readings," though the
reading copies of them that have been preserved, were never otherwise
prepared by their author-compiler for representation. One of these
the writer remembers suggesting to the Novelist, as a characteristic
companion or contrast to Dr. Marigold,--meaning "Mrs. Lirriper."
Another, strange to say,--about the least likely of all his stories one
would have thought to have been thus selected,--was "The Haunted Man." A
third was "The Prisoner of the Bastile," which would, for certain, have
been one of Dickens's most powerful delineations. The fourth, if only
in remembrance of the Old Bailey attorney, Mr. Jaggers, of the convict
Magwitch, and of Joe the blacksmith, the majority would probably have
been disposed to regret almost more than Mrs. Lirriper. Though the
lodging-house keeper would have been welcome, too, for her own sake,
as who will not agree in saying, if merely out of a remembrance of the
"trembling lip" put up towards her face, speaking of which the good
motherly old soul exclaims, "and I dearly kissed it;" or, bearing in
mind, another while, her preposterous reminiscence of the "impertinent
little cock-sparrow of a monkey whistling with dirty shoes on the clean
steps, and playing the harp on the area railings with a hoop-stick."
Actually given or only meditated, the whole of these twenty
Readings--meaning the entire collection of the identical marked copies
used by the Novelist himself on both sides of the Atlantic--have, for
the verification of this retrospect, been placed for the time being in
the writer's possession. Selecting from among them those merely which
are familiar to the public, from their having been actually produced,
he here proposes cursorily to glance one by one through the well-known
series of Sixteen.

THE CHRISTMAS CAROL.

It can hardly be any matter for wonder that the "Christmas Carol" was,
among all the Readings, the author's own especial favourite! That it
was so, he showed from first to last unmistakeably. He began with it in
1853, and ended with it in 1870, upon the latter occasion appending to
the long since abbreviated narrative, that other incomparable evidence
of his powers as a h