"However, after some weeks, he expressed a wish for my sanction to his endeavours to redeem, in a careful and moderate way, some of the reading engagements to which he had been pledged before those threatenings of brain-mischief in the North of England.
"As he had continued uniformly to seem and to feel perfectly well, I did not think myself warranted to refuse that sanction: and in writing to enforce great caution in the trials, I expressed some apprehension that he might fancy we had been too peremptory in our injunctions of mental and bodily repose in April; and I quoted the following remark, which occurs somewhere in one of Captain Cook's Voyages. 'Preventive measures are always invidious, for when most successful, the necessity for them is the least apparent.'
"I mention this to explain the letter which I send herewith,[284] and which I must beg you to return to me, as a precious remembrance of the writer with whom I had long enjoyed very friendly and much valued relations.
"I scarcely need say that if what I have now written can, in any way, be of use to you, it is entirely at your service and disposal—nor need I say with how much interest I have read the first volume of your late friend's Life. I cannot help regretting that a great pressure of professional work at the time, prevented my making a fuller record of a case so interesting."
The twelve readings to which Sir Thomas Watson consented, with the condition that railway travel was not to accompany them, were farther to be delayed until the opening months of 1870. They were an offering from Dickens by way of small compensation to Messrs. Chappell for the breakdown of the enterprise on which they had staked so much. But here practically he finished his career as a public reader, and what remains will come with the end of what is yet to be told. One effort only intervened, by which he hoped to get happily back to his old pursuits; but to this, as to that which preceded it, sterner Fate said also No, and his Last Book, like his Last Readings, prematurely closed.