of mind he never showed any lack.  They were evinced, on one occasion, at the readings, when an alarm of fire arose.  They shone conspicuous here.  He quieted two ladies who were in the same compartment of the carriage; helped to extricate them and others from their perilous position; gave such help as he could to the wounded and dying; probably was the means of saving the life of one man, whom he was the first to hear faintly groaning under a heap of wreckage; and then, as he tells in the “postscript” to the book, scrambled back into the carriage to find the crumpled MS. of a portion of “Our Mutual Friend."[31] But even pluck is powerless to prevent a ruinous shock to the nerves.  Though Dickens had done so manfully what he had to do at the time, he never fully recovered from the blow.  His daughter tells us how he would often, “when travelling home from London, suddenly fall into a paroxysm of fear, tremble all over, clutch the arms of the railway carriage, large beads of perspiration standing on his face, and suffer agonies of terror....  He had ... apparently no idea of our presence.”  And Mr. Dolby tells us also how in travelling it was often necessary for him to ward off such attacks by taking brandy.  Dickens had been failing before only too surely; and this accident, like a coward’s blow, struck him heavily as he fell.

But whether failing or stricken, he bated no jot of energy or courage; nay, rather, as his health grew weaker, did he redouble the pressure of his work.  I think there is a grandeur in the story of the last five years of his life, that dwarfs even the tale of his rapid and splendid rise.  It reads like some antique myth of the Titans defying Jove’s thunder.  There is about the man something indomitable and heroic.  He had, as we have seen, given a series of readings in 1858-59; and he gave another in the years 1861 to 1863—­successful enough in a pecuniary sense, but through failure of business capacity on the part of the manager, entailing on the reader himself a great deal of anxiety and worry.[32] Now, in the spring of 1866, with his left foot giving him unceasing trouble, and his nerves shattered, and his heart in an abnormal state, he accepted an offer from Messrs. Chappell to read “in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Paris,” for L1,500, and the payment of all expenses, and then to give forty-two more readings for L2,500.  Mr. Dolby, who accompanied Dickens as business manager in this and the remaining tours, has told their story in an interesting volume.[33] Of course the wear was immense.  The readings themselves involved enormous fatigue to one who so identified himself with what he read, and whose whole being seemed to vibrate not only with the emotions of the characters in his stories, but of the audience.  Then there was the weariness of long railway journeys in all seasons and weathers—­journeys that at first must have been rendered doubly tedious, as he could not bear to travel by express trains.  Yet, notwithstanding