ind, the
flying stones and sand, "the tremendous sea itself," that came rolling
in with an awful noise absolutely confounding to the beholder! In
all fiction there is no grander description than that of one of the
sublimest spectacles in nature. The merest fragments of it conjured up
the entire scene--aided as those fragments were by the look, the tones,
the whole manner of the Reader. The listener was there with him in
imagination upon the beach, beside David. He was there, lashed and
saturated with the salt spray, the briny taste of it on his lips, the
roar and tumult in his ears--the height to which the breakers rose,
and, looking over one another bore one another down and rolled in, in
interminable hosts, becoming at last, as it is written in that wonderful
chapter (55) of David Copperfield, "most appalling!" There, in truth,
the success achieved was more than an elocutionary triumph--it was the
realisation to his hearers, by one who had the soul of a poet, and the
gifts of an orator, and the genius of a great and vividly imaginative
author, of a convulsion of nature when nature bears an aspect the
grandest and the most astounding. However much a masterly description,
like that of the Great Storm at Yarmouth, may be admired henceforth by
those who never had the opportunity of attending these Readings, one
might surely say to them, as AEschines said to the Rhodians, when they
were applauding the speech of his victorious rival: "How much greater
would have been your admiration if only you could have heard him deliver
it!"

THE READINGS IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA.

How it happened that Charles Dickens came to give any readings at
all from his own writings has already, in the preceding pages, been
explained. What is here intended to be done is to put on record, as
simply and as accurately as possible, the facts relating to the labours
gone through by the Novelist in his professional character as a Public
Reader. It will be then seen, immediately those facts have come to
be examined in their chronological order, that they were sufficiently
remarkable in many respects, as an episode in the life of a great
author, to justify their being chronicled in some way or other, if only
as constituting in their aggregate a wholly unexampled incident in the
history of literature.

No writer, it may be confidently asserted, has ever enjoyed a wider
popularity during his own life-time than Charles Dickens; or rather it
might be s