dinner) I felt as much confidence as if I had done the thing a hundred times.”  This of course helped him much as a reader, and gave him full command over all his gifts.  But the gifts were also assiduously cultivated.  He laboured, one might almost say, agonized, to make himself a master of the art.  Mr. Dolby, who acted as his “manager,” during the tours undertaken from 1866 to 1870, tells us that before producing “Dr. Marigold,” he not only gave a kind of semi-public rehearsal, but had rehearsed it to himself considerably over two hundred times.  Writing to Forster Dickens says:  “You have no idea how I have worked at them [the readings]....  I have tested all the serious passion in them by everything I know, made the humorous points much more humorous; corrected my utterance of certain words; ...  I learnt ‘Dombey’ like the rest, and did it to myself often twice a day, with exactly the same pains as at night, over, and over, and over again.”

The results justified the care and effort bestowed.  There are, speaking generally, two schools of readers:  those who dramatize what they read, and those who read simply, audibly, with every attention to emphasis and point, but with no effort to do more than slightly indicate differences of personage or character.  To the latter school Thackeray belonged.  He read so as to be perfectly heard, and perfectly understood, and so that the innate beauty of his literary style might have full effect.  Dickens read quite differently.  He read not as a writer to whom style is everything, but as an actor throwing himself into the world he wished to bring before his hearers.  He was so careless indeed of pure literature, in this particular matter, that he altered his books for the readings, eliminating much of the narrative, and emphasizing the dialogue.  He was pre-eminently the dramatic reader.  Carlyle, who had been dragged to “Hanover Rooms,” to “the complete upsetting,” as he says, “of my evening habitudes, and spiritual composure,” was yet constrained to declare:  “Dickens does it capitally, such as it is; acts better than any Macready in the world; a whole tragic, comic, heroic, theatre visible, performing under one hat, and keeping us laughing—­in a sorry way, some of us thought—­the whole night.  He is a good creature, too, and makes fifty or sixty pounds by each of these readings.”  “A whole theatre”—­that is just the right expression minted for us by the great coiner of phrases.  Dickens, by mere play of voice, for the gestures were comparatively sober, placed before you, on his imaginary stage, the men and women he had created.  There Dr. Marigold pattered his cheap-jack phrases; and Mrs. Gamp and Betsy Prig, with throats rendered husky by much gin, had their memorable quarrel; and Sergeant Buzfuz bamboozled that stupid jury; and Boots at the Swan told his pretty tale of child-elopement; and Fagin, in his hoarse Jew whisper, urged Bill Sikes to his last foul deed of murder.