TO THE DAUGHTERS OF CHARLES DICKENS,

MY GODDAUGHTER MARY

AND

HER SISTER KATE,

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED BY THEIR FRIEND,

AND THEIR FATHER'S FRIEND AND EXECUTOR,

JOHN FORSTER.

• If a Life be delayed till interest and envy are at an end, we may hope for impartiality, but 'must expect little intelligence; for the incidents which give excellence to biography are ofa volatile and evanescent kind, .'-JOHNSON (Rambler, 60).

II.

'I cannot conceive a more perfect mode of writing any man's life, than not only relating all the most important events of it in their order, but interweaving what he privately wrote, ' and said.'-BOSWELL (Life of Johnson).

This Third Volume throws a new light and character to me over the Work at 'large. I incline to consider this Biography as taking rank, in essential respects parallel to 'Boswell himself, though on widely different grounds. Boswell, by those genial abridgements ' and vivid face to face pictures of Johnson's thoughts, conversational ways and modes of appearance among his fellow-creatures, has given, as you often hear me say, such a delineation of a man's existence as was never given by another man. By quite different resources, 'by those sparkling, clear, and sunny utterances of Dickens's own (bits of auto-biography 'unrivalled in clearness and credibility) which were at your disposal, and have been inter'calated every now and then, you have given to every intelligent eye the power of looking 'down to the very bottom of Dickens's mode of existing in this world; and, I say, have per⚫ formed a feat which, except in Boswell, the unique, I know not where to parallel. So long as 'Dickens is interesting to his fellow men, here will be seen, face to face, what Dickens's manner of existing was. His bright and joyful sympathy with everything around him; his 'steady practicality, withal; the singularly solid business talent he continually had; and, deeper than all, if one has the eye to see deep enough, dark, fateful, silent elements, tragical 'to look upon, and hiding, amid dazzling radiances as of the sun, the elements of death itself. 'Those two American journeys especially transcend in tragic interest, to a thinking reader, 1 most things one has seen in writing 1'-THOMAS CARLYLE (Letter to the Author, 16 February, 1874).