command of the subject of this memorial.
In one or two instances that might be named the assumption was all
but identity. An aptitude of this particular kind, as everyone can
appreciate upon the instant, would by necessity come wonderfully in aid
of the illusive effect produced by readings that were in point of fact
the mere vehicle or medium for a whole crowd of vivid impersonations.
Anyone, moreover, possessing gifts like these, of a very peculiar
description, not only naturally but inevitably enjoys himself every
opportunity that may arise for displaying them to those about him,
to his friends and intimates. "Man is of a companionable, conversing
nature," says Goethe in his novel of The Renunciants, "his delight is
great when he exercises faculties that have been given him, even though
nothing further came of it." Seeing that something further readily did
come of it in the instance of Charles Dickens, it can hardly be matter
for surprise that the readings and impersonations which were first of
all a home delight, should at length quite naturally have opened up
before the popular author what was for him an entirely new, but at the
same time a perfectly legitimate, career professionally.

Recitations or readings of his own works in public by a great writer
are, in point of fact, as old as literature itself. They date back to
the very origin of polite letters, both prose and poetic. It matters
nothing whether there was one Homer, or whether there may have been a
score of Homers, so far as the fact of oral publication applies to
the Iliad and the Odyssey, nearly a thousand years (900) before the
foundation of Christianity. By the lips of a single bard, or of a series
of bards, otherwise of public declaimers or reciters, the world was
first familiarised with the many enthralling tales strung together in
those peerless masterpieces. Again, at a period of very nearly five
hundred years (484) before the epoch of the Redemption, the Father of
History came to lay the foundation, as it were, of the whole fabric
of prose literature in a precisely similar manner--that is to say, by
public readings or recitations. In point of fact, the instance there is
more directly akin to the present argument. A musical cadence, or even
possibly an instrumental accompaniment, may have marked the Homeric
chant about Achilles and Ulysses. Whereas, obviously, in regard to
Herodotus, the readings given by him at the Olympic games were readings
in t