Works of Charles Dickens - Charles Dickens [6927]
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.]
Footnotes:
{1} Sir David Wilkie died at sea, on board the Oriental, off Gibraltar, on the 1st of June, 1841, whilst on his way back to England. During the evening of the same day his body was committed to the deep. --ED.
{2} The Britannia was the vessel that conveyed Mr. Dickens across the Atlantic, on his first visit to America--ED.
{3} Master Humphrey's Clock, under which title the two novels of Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop originally appeared.--ED.
{4} "I shall always entertain a very pleasant and grateful recollection of Hartford. It is a lovely place, and I had many friends there, whom I can never remember with indifference. We left it with no little regret." American Notes (Lond. 1842). Vol. I, p. 182.
{5} See the Life and Letters of Washington Irving (Lond. 1863), p. 644, where Irving speaks of a letter he has received "from that glorious fellow Dickens, in reply to the one I wrote, expressing my heartfelt delight with his writings, and my yearnings toward himself." See also the letter itself, in the second division of this volume.--ED.
{6} TENNYSON, Lady Clara Vere de Vere, then newly published in collection of 1842.--ED
{7} "That this meeting, while conveying its cordial thanks to Charles Dickens, Esq., for his presence this evening, and for his able and courteous conduct as President, cannot separate without tendering the warmest expression of its gratitude and admiration to one whose writings have so loyally inculcated the lessons of benevolence and virtue, and so richly contributed to the stores of public pleasure and instructions."
{8} The Duke of Devonshire.
{9} Charlotte Corday going to Execution.
{10} The above is extracted from Mrs. Stowe's "Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands,", a book in which her eaves-dropping propensities were already developed in a sufficiently ugly form.--ED.
{11} Alas! the "many years" were to be barely six, when the speaker was himself destined to write some memorial pages commemorative of his illustrious friend (Cornhill Magazine, February, 1864.)--ED.
{12} Mr. Henry Dodd had proposed to give five acres of land in Berkshire, but, in consequence of his desiring to attach certain restrictions, after a long and unsatisfactory correspondence, the Committee, on 13th January following, rejected the offer. (Communicated.)
{13} Claude Melnotte in The Lady of Lyons, Act iii. sc. 2.
{14} Mr. B. Webster.
{15} Romeo and Juliet, Act III. Sc. 1.
{16} Robert Browning: Bells and Pomegranates.
{17} R. H.
{18} Carlyle's French Revolution. Book X., Chapter I.
{19} Henry Thomas Buckle.
{20} This and the Speeches which follow were accidentally omitted in their right places.
{21} Hazlitt's Round Table (Edinburgh, 1817, vol ii., p. 242), On Actors and Acting.
{22} An allusion to a well-known Sonnet of Wordsworth, beginning-- "The world is too much with us--late and soon," &c.--ED.
{23} Alluding to the forthcoming serial story of Edwin Drood.
{24} The Honourable John Lothrop Motley.
{25} February 26th, 1851. Mr. Macready's Farewell