DICKENS AND FECHTER
At length came Dickens himself, and the diary takes up the tale:—
November 18, 1867.—Today the steamer is telegraphed with Dickens on board, and the tickets for his readings have been sold. Such a rush! A long queue of people have been standing all day in the street—a good-humored crowd, but a weary one.[24] The weather is clear but really cold, with winter’s pinch in it.
November 19.— ... Yesterday I adorned Mr. Dickens’s room with flowers, which seemed to please him. He was in the best of good spirits with everything.
Thursday, November 21.—Mr. Dickens dined here. Agassiz, Emerson, Judge Hoar, Professor Holmes, Norton, Greene, dear Longfellow, last not least, came to welcome. Dickens sat on my right, Agassiz at my left. I never saw Agassiz so full of fun....
Dickens bubbled over with fun, and I could not help fancying that Holmes bored him a little by talking at him. I was sorry for this, because Holmes is so simple and lovely, but Dickens is sensitive, very. He is fond of Carlyle, seems to love nobody better, and gave the most irresistible imitation of him. His queer turns of expression often convulsed us with laughter, and yet it is difficult to catch them, as when, in speaking of the writer of books, always putting himself, his real self, in, “which is always the case,” he said; “but you must be careful of not taking him for his next-door neighbor.”
He spoke of the fineness of his Parisian audience:—“the most delicately appreciative of all audiences.” He also gave a most ludicrous account of a seasick curate trying to read the service on board ship last Sunday. He tells us Browning is really about to marry Miss Ingelow, and of Carlyle, that he is deeply saddened, irretrievably, by the death of his wife. Just as we were in a tempest of laughter over some witticism of his, he jumped up, seized me by the hand, and said good-night. He neither smoked nor drank. “I never do either from the time my readings ‘set in,’” he said, as if it were a rainy season....
Among other interesting personal facts Dickens told us that he had last year burned all his private letters. An appeal from the daughter of Sydney Smith for some of his letters set him thinking on the subject, and one day when there was a big fire—[sentence unfinished].