When I think of this man, and all the lasting good and abounding pleasure he has brought into the world, I wonder at the superstition that dares to arraign him.  A sound philosopher once said:  “He that thinks any innocent pastime foolish has either to grow wiser, or is past the ability to do so”; and I have always counted it an impudent fiction that playfulness is inconsistent with greatness.  Many men and women have died of Dignity, but the disease which sent them to the tomb was not contracted from Charles Dickens.  Not long ago, I met in the street a bleak old character, full of dogmatism, egotism, and rheumatism, who complained that Dickens had “too much exuberant sociality” in his books for him, and he wondered how any one could get through Pickwick.  My solemn friend evidently preferred the dropping-down-deadness of manner, which he had been accustomed to find in Hervey’s “Meditations,” and other kindred authors, where it always seems to be urged that life would be endurable but for its pleasures.  A person once commended to my acquaintance an individual whom he described as “a fine, pompous, gentlemanly man,” and I thought it prudent, under the circumstances, to decline the proffered introduction.

But I will proceed with those outbursts of bright-heartedness vouchsafed to us in Dickens’s letters.  To me these epistles are good as fresh “Uncommercials,” or unpublished “Sketches by Boz.”

    1 Devonshire Terrace, York Gate, Regent’s Park, London, 1st
    September, 1842.

My Dear Felton:  Of course that letter in the papers was as foul a forgery as ever felon swung for....  I have not contradicted it publicly, nor shall I. When I tilt at such wringings out of the dirtiest mortality, I shall be another man—­indeed, almost the creature they would make me.

I gave your message to Forster, who sends a despatch-box full of kind remembrances in return.  He is in a great state of delight with the first volume of my American book (which I have just finished), and swears loudly by it.  It is True, and Honorable I know, and I shall hope to send it you, complete, by the first steamer in November.

Your description of the porter and the carpet-bags prepares me for a first-rate facetious novel, brimful of the richest humor, on which I have no doubt you are engaged.  What is it called?  Sometimes I imagine the title-page thus:—­

OYSTERS
IN
EVERY STYLE
or
OPENINGS
OF
LIFE
by
YOUNG DANDO.

As to the man putting the luggage on his head, as a sort of sign, I
adopt it from this hour.