[23] A few passages from it, relating to Dickens, are included in James T. Fields: Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches. When they are occasionally repeated here, it is in their original form, and not as Mrs. Fields edited them for publication.
[24] On this very day Lowell wrote in the course of a letter to Fields: “James tells me you had a tremendous queue this morning. Don’t fail to get me tickets, and for the first night. I should like to see his reception. It will leave a picture on the brain. And why should I not be there to welcome him, as well as Tom, Dick, or Harry?”
[25] Even after Dickens’s return to England, his sayings found their way into Mrs. Fields’s journal; as, for example:—
“July 4, 1868.—J. made me laugh this morning (it was far too hot to laugh) by telling me that Dickens said of Gray, the poet, ‘No man ever walked down to posterity with so small a book under his arm!’”
[26] See Forster’s Life, III, 368, for the same story told by Dickens in a letter to Lord Lytton, without naming Longfellow as the narrator.
[27] In Yesterdays with Authors (see pp. 230-31), Fields made use, with revisions and omissions, of this portion of his wife’s diary.
[28] Mrs. Stowe’s unhappily historic article on “The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life” appeared in the Atlantic Monthly for September, 1869.
[29] On April 20, 1870, Longfellow wrote to Fields (See Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, etc., edited by Samuel Longfellow, III, 148):—
“Some English poet has said or sung:
‘At the close of the day, when the hamlet is still,