Mineral Point weekly tribune. (Mineral Point, Wis.) 1859-1868, 1864-02-24
DICKENS ON THACKERAY.
4 Graceful and Touching Tribute.

. 1t has been desired BY some of the pei
sonal friends of the great English writer who
established this magazine, that its brief record
of his having been stricken from among men,
should be written by the Old comrade and
brother-in-arms who pens these lines, and OF
whom he often wrote himself and always
with the warmest generosity.
- saw him first, nearly twenty-eight wears
ago, when he proposed TO become the illus
| traitor of my earliest book. | saw him last,
I shortly before Christmas, at the Athenaum
| Club, when he told me that he had been in
bed three days-that, after these attacks he
was troubled with cold shiverngs which
quite took the power of work out of him
and that he had 1t IN his mind to try new
remedy, which he laughingly described. He
was very cheerful and looked very bright
In the night OF that day week he died.
The long interval between those two pc
RODS is marked III my remembrance of him
by many occasions when he was Supremacy
humorous, when he was irresstibly extrava-
giant, when he was softened and serious, when
he was charming with children But, by
none do | recall him more tenderly than by
/ two three that start out of the crowd when
/ he unexpectedly presented himself in my
room, announcing how that some passage in a
| certain book had made him cry Yesterday
| and how that he bad come TO dinner be
| cause he couldn't help it, and must talk some
/ passage over NO one can ever nave seen
him more genial, natural, cordial, fresh and
honestly impulsive, than | have seen him at
| those times. No one can be surer than [, Of
| the greatness and the goodness of the heart
that then disclosed itself.
. We had our differences of opinion.
thought that he too much feigned want of
earnestness, and that he made a pretence OF
| undertaking his art, which was not good for
| the art that he held in trust. But when he
tall tI.., fr,N,x,
ly, and have a lively image of him in my
mind, twisting both his hands in his hs ir. and
stamping about laughing, TO make END of the
| discussion.
w hen we were associated in remembrance
/ of the late Mr. Douglas Jerrold, he delivered
public lecture in London, in the course of
which he read his very best contribution to
Punch, describing the grown up cares of a
poor family of young children. No one hear
| ing him could have doubted his natural gen
| tleness, or his thoroughly unaffected manly
| sympathy with the weak and lowly. He read
! the paper most pathetically, and with a sim
/ plicity of tenderness that certainly moved
| one of his audience to tears. This was pres
! emily after his standing for Oxford from
which place he had despatched his agent to me,
with droll note Ito which he afterwards adj
! ded verbal postscript, urging me to come
and make a speech, and tell them who he was
/
electors had ever heard of him, and he
thought there might be many as six or
eight who had heard of me- He introduced
the lecture Just mentioned, with reference
to his late electioneering failure, which was
full of good sense, good spirits and good hu-
NOR
He had particular delight in boys and
! an excellent way with them. l remember
his once asking me with fantastic gravity,
I VIII ba baI nI,J A.
boy then was, whether | felt as he did, in re-
gard of never seeing boy without wanting
instantly to give him a sovereign. | thought
of this when looked down into his grave,
over the shoulder of boy to whom he had
been kind.
These are slight remembrances but it is
to little familiar things suggestive of the
voice, look, manner, never, never more to be
encountered on this earth, that the mind first
turns in a bereavement. And greater things
that are known of him, in the way of his warm
affections, his quiet endurance, his unselfsh
thoughttulness for others, and his munifcent
hand, may not be told.
. If, in the reckness yivacity of his youth
his satirical pen had ever gone astray or done
amiss. be had caused it to prefer its own petit
tion for forgiveness, long before
g I've writ the foolish fancy of his brain
The amless jest that striking, hath caused pain;
The idle word that he'd wish back again.
g In no pages should take it upon myself
at this time to discourse of his books, of his
refined knowledge of character, of his subtle
acquaintance with the weakness of human
nature, of his delightful playfulness as ar es-
sayist, of his quaint and touching ballads, of
| his mastery over the English language least
/ of all, in these pages, enriched by his bril-
liant qualities from the first of the series, and
beforehand accepted by the public through
| the strength of his great name
D. - f, T,I al.
all that he had written of his latest and last
story That it would be very sad to any one
that it is inexpressibly so to the wrter-in
| its evidences of maturcd designs never to be
accomplished of Intentions begun to be eX-
ecuted and destined never To be completed,
of careful pre- Daration for long roads of thought
that he was never to traverse, and for shining
goals that he was never to reach, viii be
readily believed. The pain, however, that I
have felt in perusing it, has not been deeper
than the conviction that he was in the health
lest vigor of his powers when he wrought on
this last labor In respect of earnest feeling,
far-seeing purpose, character, incident, and
certain loving picturesqueness blending the
whole, | believe it TO be much the best of all
his orks. That he fully meant it to be so,
that he had become strongly attached to it,
| and that he bestowed great pains upon it, |
trace in almost every page. 1t contains one
I
distress, and which Is a masterpiece. There
are two children in it, touched with hand
as loving and tender as ever a father caressed
his little child with There is some young
love, as pure aud innocent and pretty as the
truth. And it is very remarkable that by
reason of the singular construction of the
story, more than one main incident usually
| belonging to the end of such a fiction is an
/ ticipated in the beginning and thus there is
/ an approach to completeness in the fragment,
I as TO the satisfaction of the readers mind
/ concerning the most interesting persons,
( which could hardly have been better attained
/ if the writer's breaking off had been foreseen
The last line he wrote, and the last proof
/ he corrected, are among these papers through
I which have so sorrowfully made my way.
/ The condition of the little pages of manu-
! script where death stopped his hand, shows
, that ne had carried them about, and often
/ taken them out of his pocket here and there,
! for patient revision aid interlineation. The
/ last words he corrected N print were, And
/ my heart throbbed with an exquisite bliss
/ God grant that on that Christmas Eve, when
he laid his head lack on his pillow and threw
/ up his arms as he had been wont TO do when
very weary, some consciousness of duty done