charity, by
his exquisite Christmas stories, of which _The Chimes_, _The Christmas
Carol_, and _The Cricket on the Hearth_ are the best.

His dramatic power has been fully illustrated by the ready adaptations of
his novels to the stage; they are, indeed, in scenes, personages, costume,
and interlocution, dramas in all except the form; and he himself was an
admirable actor.

HIS VARIED POWERS.--His tenderness is touching, and his pathos at once
excites our sympathy. He does not tell us to feel or to weep, but he shows
us scenes like those in the life of Smike, and in the sufferings and death
of Little Nell, which so simply appeal to the heart that we are for the
time forgetful of the wand which conjures them before us.

Dickens is bold in the advocacy of truth and in denouncing error; he is
the champion of honest poverty; he is the foe of class pretension and
oppression; he is the friend of friendless children; the reformer of
those whom society has made vagrants. Without many clear assertions of
Christian doctrine, but with no negation of it, he believes in doing good
for its own sake,--in self-denial, in the rewards which virtue gives
herself. His faults are few and venial. His merry life smacks too much of
the practical joke and the punch-bowl; he denounces cant in the
self-appointed ministers of the gospel, but he is not careful to draw
contrasted pictures of good pastors. His opinion seems to be based upon a
human perfectibility. But for rare pictures of real life he has never been
surpassed; and he has instructed an age, concerning itself, wisely,
originally, and usefully. He has the simplicity of Goldsmith, and the
truth to nature of Fielding and Smollett, without a spice of
sentimentalism or of impurity; he has brought the art of prose fiction to
its highest point, and he has left no worthy successor. He lived for years
separated from his wife on the ground of incompatibility, and, during his
later years at Gadshill, twenty miles from London, to avoid the
dissipations and draughts upon his time in that city.

SECOND VISIT TO AMERICA.--In 1868 he again visited America, to read
portions of his own works. He was well received by the public; but society
had learned its lesson on his former visit, and he was not overwhelmed
with a hospitality he had so signally failed to appreciate. And if we had
learned better, he had vastly improved; the genius had become a gentleman.
His readings were a great pecuniary succe