The Sun.
London, England, 1870-06-24 00:00:00

most simple and the most complex of problems—and
who after amusing us thirty years, died in the
prime of life. Yet Mr. Dickens cannot fairly
be said to have been overworked for many
years past. His closing years were spent in
that beautiful part of his native land where many of the
scenes in his novels are laid, and where it was his wish
when his time came, to die. In his youth he had chosen
a home for his mature age, and determined to win it. He
succeeded, but the days which are " swifter than a
weaver's shuttle" left him little time to enjoy the fruits of
his labours. He had known many sorrows, or how could
he have written much that stands recorded in his name ?
As for his faults, who are we that we should reckon them
now ? He is gone, and we all feel that one of the greatest
of our number has passed from time, with its defective
judgments, to eternity, with its serene and unerring wis-
dom. Although Charles Dickens is henceforth but a name
in the world's history, it is a name lit with imperishable
renown, and it will be spoken with gratitude and affec-
tion as long as our language endures.—New York Times.

CHARLES DICKENS ON LITTLE NELL.
A New York journal quotes a passage from one of
Charles Dickens's speeches at a Boz banquet in Boston
during his first visit to America :—" There is one other ,
point connected with the labours (if I. may call them
so) that you hold in such generous esteem, to which
I cannot help adverting. I cannot help expressing the
delight, the more than happiness, it was to me to
find so strong an interest awakened on this side of
the water in favour of that little heroine of mine to
whom your President has made allusion, who died in her •
youth. I had letters about that child, in England, from
the dwellers in log-huts among the morasses and swampi
and densest forests and deep solitudes of the Far West.
Many a sturdy hand, hard with the axe and spade and
browned by the Summer's sun, has taken up the pen
and written to me a little history of domestic joy or
sorrow, always coupled, I am proud to say, with some
thing of interest in that little tale, or some, comfort o
happiness derived from it ; and the writer has alwaY
addressed me, not as a writer of books for sale, resident
some four or five thousand miles away, but as a friend to
whom he might freely impart the joys and sorrows of
his own fireside. Many a mother I could
reckon them now by dozens, not by units—has
done the like ; and has told me how she lost
such a child at such a time, and where she lay
buried, and how good she was, and how, in this or that
respect, she resembled Nell. Ido assure you that no
circumstance of my life has given me one hundredth part
of the gratification I have derived from this source. I
was wavering at the time whether or not to wind up my
clock and come and see this country ; and this decided
me. I feel as if it were a positive duty, as if I were•
bound to pack up my clothes, and come and see my
friends; and even now I have such an odd sensation in
connection with these things that you have no chance of
spoiling me. I feel as though we were agreeing—as in-
deed we are, if we substitute for fictitious characters the
classes from which they are drawn—about third parties,
in whom we bad a common interest. At every new act
of kindness on your part, I say it to myself : That's for
Oliver—l should not wonder if that was meant for Smike
—I have no doubt that it was intended for Nell, and so
became a much happier, certainly, but a more sober and
retiring man than ever I was before."

"LOTHAIR

'-A MASTERPIECE OF

NATION AND PHILOSOPHY.

Aristotle gave the first place among works of imagina-
tion to tragedy, but that was in an age when the stage
dealt with the great social, religious, and political problems
which agitated the lives of nations. He did not prefer
the drama for its form, for its spirit, but for the conse-
quence and dignity of its themes, for its intimate relation
with the higher intellectual life of the people, whom it
instructed in the growth of such ideas as seemed great in
the history of their race. But since tragedy was sepa-
rated from that original purpose it has gone downward
in the scale. In this age people will not consent to be
harrowed by woes with which they have no personal or
family sympathy and no deeper interest than that of
casual spectators. Intellectually we are all Sybarites, and
the stage is a sham. But the relation to popular life
that anciently vivified tragedy has not departed from
literature altogether ; it has only changed its place,
and it has changed it in accordance with the conditions of
our time. This change has carried it into the novel. El-
an age of wide-spread and teeming populations the print-
ing press is to the masses what the stage was to the far
smaller communities of antiquity ; and thus when the
poet appears he finds the agencies ready adapted to enable
him to get a grander hearing than any of which antiquity
could conceive.
The use that may thus be made of the familiar form of
fiction in vogue among the people is illustrated in
" Lothair." Here we see a great thinker, who can write
a novel without dwindling to the level of the novel writers
in purpose or form, because he has a higher, grander view
of his vocation ; and who can treat the loftiest themes of
philosophy and statecraft in the easy, graceful, acceptable
style that will not only carry them, but make them
current and familiar, in places where the dry dis-
quisitions of the philosopher cannot enter, and the formal
utterances of the statesman was unknown. In " Lothair "
Mr. Disraeli personifies all the elements and forces of
European society; not only as they are, but as they have
been for ages. In his pages we see the contest that has
rended every people of the Continent still in progress.
These are the natural human longing for and tendency
towards progress and improvement, and its parasites, the
professional organizers of revolutions. There are also the
natural religious sentiment and the great institution, the
Church that thrives and lives upon it, also too much as a
parasite ; and there is society drawn and repelled from
one to another, as•each appears attractive or repulsive to
its always coloured and prejudicial vision. All are intro-
duced in their ancient struggle. They struggle through
the drama; and the drama settles no point of all that they
struggle over, and leaves them struggling still, because it is
for the poet or the philosophic historian to present to us
his impresssions of reality, to tell the great story and
not to take sides, since'he cannot dive into the secrets of
fate to say who is right or who wrong. He can tell us
that he does not always know who is the hero and who
the villain, and riddle so wisely that the parsons shall
thank him for a discourse against Rome, while Rome might
as well thank him for the statement of her cause against
her vilifiers • and aristocracy shall be grateful for the ex-
posure of the revolution, and the revolution rejoice in his
delineation of the crumbling and weakness of aristocracy.
The novel is certainly the great form of the age for the
teaching of any grand lesson or the delineation of any
great character or series of characters in the religious,
political, and social life of nations ; and, in this view of
it; how pitiful by comparison with such a grand work of
imagination as Lothair " are the novels of men like
Bulwer and Dickens. Bulwer has no more exalted voca-
tion than to picture the snobs of British society, evidently
always supposing them to be gentlemen ; and Dickens
plods on for ever, doing the same thing for creatures that
are either brutes or clowns, according to the humour or
the moment, becoming under the impulse of fury, com-
mon cut-throats, or melting in the warmth of coarse sen-
suality to all the varied comic phases peculiar to the
greasiest vulgarity. But what are the elegant fops who
dawdle up and down the pages of Bulwer, or all the kit-
chen maids and thieves of Dickens taken together, with
all their vanities, vices, passions, and appetites, that men
should care for them or have patience over such pitiful
pictures ? The contrast of " Lothair," a masterpiece of
imaginative working in the great themes that are vital in
every society, will set before the world at a proper value
the books of authors without theme or purpose, who draw
marionnettes rather than men.—New York Herald.

An important novelty is announced at the Gaiety.
Mr. Charles Reale has written a new drama for the
theatre, and Mr. Hermann Vezin, one of the very best
actors on the stage, is announced to play the principal
character.—London, Figaro.
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