I cannot forbear, before I resume my seat, adverting to a sad theme (the recent death of Daniel Maclise) to which his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales made allusion, and to which the president referred with the eloquence of genuine feeling. Since I first entered the public lists, a very young man indeed, it has been my constant fortune to number amongst my nearest and dearest friends members of the Royal Academy who have been its grace and pride. They have so dropped from my side one by one that I already, begin to feel like the Spanish monk of whom Wilkie tells, who had grown to believe that the only realities around him were the pictures which he loved, and that all the moving life he saw, or ever had seen, was a shadow and a dream.
For many years I was one of the two most intimate friends and most constant companions of the late Mr. Maclise. Of his genius in his chosen art I will venture to say nothing here, but of his prodigious fertility of mind and wonderful wealth of intellect, I may confidently assert that they would have made him, if he had been so minded, at least as great a writer as he was a painter. The gentlest and most modest of men, the freshest as to his generous appreciation of young aspirants, and the frankest and largest-hearted as to his peers, incapable of a sordid or ignoble thought, gallantly sustaining the true dignity of his vocation, without one grain of self-ambition, wholesomely natural at the last as at the first, “in wit a man, simplicity a child,” no artist, of whatsoever denomination, I make bold to say, ever went to his rest leaving a golden memory more pure from dross, or having devoted himself with a truer chivalry to the art goddess whom he worshipped.
[These were the last public words of Charles Dickens.]
CHARLES DICKENS AS A LETTER-WRITER, AND AS A POET.
I.—AS A LETTER-WRITER.
In the graceful but difficult art of letter-writing Charles Dickens has proved himself as accomplished a master as he has of public speaking, which the two or three specimens given in our Introduction, together with the following extracts from his correspondence with two distinguished friends, Washington Irving and Douglas Jerrold, will sufficiently show.
In the spring of 1841, some months before Mr. Dickens had decided upon his first visit to the United States, Washington Irving, who was then personally unknown to him, addressed him a letter, full of warm sympathy and generous acknowledgment of his genius, and of the pleasure Dickens’s writings had afforded him. A few extracts from Mr. Dickens’s reply are given below.
In February, 1842, Mr. Dickens had the gratification of making the personal acquaintance of his illustrious correspondent, who was induced to overcome his objection to public speaking, and to take the chair at a banquet given in Dickens’s honour by some of the citizens of New York. Irving, however, entirely broke down in his speech, and could do little more than propose the toast of the evening.
There were probably never two men of more congenial mind and common sympathies than the author of the “Sketch Book,” and the author of “Pickwick;” and it is pleasant to think that the chance of things should have brought them together for a time in so unexpected a way.
In Mr. Dickens’ reply he tells Washington Irving that:—