The Sun.
London, England, 1870-06-20 00:00:00

TO WN TALI.

(From the Western Mail of Saturday.)

LONDON, Friday Evening.
The suddenness, the appalling suddenness, of the death
of Charles Dickens, has realised, perhaps, more distinctly
than anything else Could have done the hold he had ob-
tained under the royal sign manual of his genius,. not
merely over the admiration, but over the tender affec-
tions of his fellow-creatures. His dying thus abruptly in
the fulness of his powers, and in the zenith of his popu-
larity, has fallen like a home-grief on the hearts of the
million. There is something very noticeable, here, in
London, in the number of people one sees in the streets
and public places who have gone into mourning, who
have assumed the signs of the heavy sorrow they have at
heart, and in common. Again, when London awoke in
the forenoon of Tuesday last to the knowledge that
early that morning the wish of the nation had been
quietly realizeel, by the mortal remains of the great
author having been laid in the grave in Westminster
Abbey, you should have seen the thronging hundreds and
thousands who crowded in relays into Poet's Corner, to
cast a loving look down upon the oaken coffin, bearing
upon its lid the beloved name, Charles Dickens, with the
date of his birth, 7th February, 1812, and the date of his
death, 9th June, 1870—with those loving looks, there being
rained down there many a tear and many a flower, some
of the flowers being tenderly kissed before they were
dropped into the grave. Readers of Charles Dickens, who
had never set eyes upon him, mourned over the news of
his death as over a personal bereavement. Those conse-
quently, who, like myself, were admitted to the happiness
and privilege of his affectionate friendship, have no words
in which to express the magnitude and bitterness of the
loss, that to them is simply irreparable. The appalling
abruptness of the blow to myself is hardly to be expressed.
I who had seen him in his usual health, and in his blithest
spirits only a very few days previously; I who had heard
from him on the very day of his death, in a letter
(probably the last letter he ever wrote) penned
by him just before he was stricken down insensible,
overnight on the fatal Wednesday, and received by
me on the afternoon of the yet more fatal Thursday.
At three o'clock on that very day I was to be with him,
by his own appointment ; upon my going to keep which,
at the eagerly looked-for hour indicated, that noble heart
—one of the noblest it has been my happy lot to
know and love—wail already, unconsciously to itself,
near its last pulsation. Merely thinking of this great
loss is an anguish hardly to be expressed, being, I repeat,
simply irreparable. To those who knew and loved him,
the man himself was far, immeasurably beyond, all his
radiant writings massed together; and those books of his

have secured him an enduring place among the most be-
loved of the great masters of imaginative literature—
among the greatest of the great original creators of cha-
racter in all literature. Adieu to that noble heart, now
resting calmly among its peers, in its only fitting resting-
place—the grand old Abbey at Westminster !
You are probably aware that it is in a great measure
owing to the generous consideration and the eager promp-
titude of Dean Stanley that the public wish was gratified
by the finding of a grave, nowhere else than in Poet's
Corner, for the great delineator of English life in all its
varieties in the nineteenth century. You will be in-
terested to learn from me, what is not in any way, I
believe, known as yet to the general public, that it was
only very recently indeed that Charles Dickens and the Dean
of Westminster were introduced to each other. Mr.
Frederick Locker, who is now the editor of the Graphic,
is married to a sister of Lady Augusta Stanley, the wife
of the Dean of Westminster, and it was at Mr.
Locker's dinner-table that Mr. Dickens and the Dean
were, only a few weeks since, for the first time
brought together. Immediately the melancholy
tidings spread through London on Friday morning—those
tidings that saddened all hearts, and brought the tears
igllitibaff. IfodreeT
for his recent introduction to " the most delightful man ho
had ever met 1"

As an evidence of the popular interest awakened in re-
gard to anything in the shape of a memento of the deceased
favourite of the nation, I may mention, in regard to one
of our first photographers, that his studio is besieged now
every morning before the doors are opened, his desk being
covered with letters and telegrams, from all parts of the
country, for album portraits and carte de visite likenesses
of that bright, handsome, animated, manly face of
Dickens, so familiar to us all, but that we shall never
again look upon, save in these shadowy reflections ! As
the great novelist said himself so very recently, when he
closed his reading in St. James's Hall, with a few charm-
ing words of farewell, words exquisitely quoted as the
motto of the memorial card sold the other day at the
door of Westminster Abbey immediately after the
funeral :

"From these garish lights I vanish now for evermore."
It is consolatory to learn that the late alarming ru-
mours as to the health of Baron Justus Liebig, are mon-
strously exaggerated. Instead of being in the hopeless
condition described, the great chemical philosopher is,
everyone now hears with delight, in a fair way to
recovery.

It wads only just in time to admit of his succeeding the
late Mark Lemon as editor of Punch that Shirley Brooks
recovered from a very complicated, and at one time
alarming, illness.

Are public readings prejudicial to the health of the
reader, 1 wonder? Here was another recently prostrated
by his exertions, or by nervous excitement, coupled with
frequent whirlings hither and thither on railways—Mr.
Bellew, to wit, who was obliged for a while to interrupt
his labours and lay up.
Strange how, in any particularly dull assembly, a very
small joke will go a very long way. Only within a few
days from the present time, the Lord Chief Justice, in a
trial that was going on before him in regard to some arbit-
rary decision by a bench of magistrates who happened to
be military men, remarked parenthetically that he sup-
posed it was a specimen of martial law, whereupon the
whole court was in a roar of laughter, as though that
were the wittiest remark possible. Sir Alexander, who
is, conversationally, as brilliant as any one in society,
must have been heartily ashamed of the disproportioned
mirth excited by this flippant little morfeau of persiflage.
Another artistic gallery has been opened, thus late in
the season, in the case of the New British Institution—
the formidable attraction of the Royal Academy, hard by,
still continuing. It is curious, by the way, to notice the
wide divergence of opinion, in regard to one and the same
subject of criticism, now in the judgment pronounced
upon a picture in this and in that critique, now in the
estimate formed of a book by this and by that reviewer.
The Atheneum, for example, pronounces adversely, and
that, moreover, in the very strongest terms, in regard to
an artist who is eulogised in terms the most extravagant
by another of our contemporaries. " Lothair," again,
have we not seen that work cried up one day by the Times
as a literary masterpiece, and cried down the next by
Blackwood as an outrage at one and the same time on the
English Parliament and upon English literature ? Be-
tween contradictions so astounding who shall decide ?
The eccentric and bewildering circumstance, in the latter
instance, being this, that the eulogist, i.e., the Times, is
presumably the opponent of the ex-Premier -; while, on
the other hand, the assailant, i.e., Blackwood, is presum-
ably (until there came forth this slating against him) the
apologist, or champion, or organ of that same right hon.
gentleman.

- Comparing photography with portrait painting, one
world naturally feel disposed to give the palm for accuracy
to the former, and for artistic effect to the latter. Let
anyone, however, contrast the ordinary carte-de-visite
photos of Mrs. Rousby, now charming all eyes at the
Queen's Theatre, in " 'Twixt Axe and Crown," with the
elaborate portrait of her on the walls of the Academy,
from the hand of a great artist like Mr. Frith, the Royal
Academician. The picture is in an extraordinary degree
unsatisfactory, the photographs, almost any of them,
being exquisite. Yet, remembering Romsey's deliciously
beautiful delineations of Lady Hamilton—Nelson's
Lady Hamilton—one feels instinctively that the
lovely creature thus pourtrayed by a pencil
of one enamoured by her charms, fared better
at Romsey's hands than she could possibly have
done when posed and focussed by the most skilled pho-
tographer.
Welcome intelligence was that given to the world of
art and to the world of students in modern history yes-
terday by Lord Clinton, in a letter to the Times, wherein
it was announced by the noble correspondent of the leading
journal that the supposed lost picture of Sir Charles East-
lake, representing the Great Napoleon, as he appeared in
1815, at the commencement of his captivity, on board
H.M.S. Bellerophon, is not lost at all, being in possession
of the noble lord making this announcement.
One grieves to see market being made, immediately
after death, of a beloved reputation. The thought occurs
to me with asort of pang when I observe, upon the morrow
of Charles Dickens's burial in Westminster Abbey, the ad-
vertising of all sorts of little catch-penny publications
purporting to give memorials of him—anecdotal records
just simply stamped up in a-hurry to catch the curiosity
of the general multitude, the latter naturally enough
snatching at any information about their lost and
tenderly-lamented favourite. The biography of Charles
Dickens must be written somewhat more de-
liberately, and ought to be commenced only when
the first anguish of our regrets shall by the mere
lapse of assuaging time, have become in some degree
mitigated. Written by some one intimate with the
theme and competent to pronounce his opinion upon a
genius so unique in its originality, and upon writings so
matchless in their combination of the pathetic and the
humorous, the "Life of Charles Dickens " admits of being
rendered a work as charming in its way as even one of the
best of his own inimitable masterpieces. Looking for-
ward to the time when some such -...onsoling narrative may
be produced, I turn my thoughts again for the moment to
that newly opened and rapidly closed grave in the rc_Tt's
Corner, breathing over it, out of my heart,werds of loving
and grateful farewell.