[Illustration: CHARLES DICKENS IN HIS STUDY, 1854.

[Illustration: CHARLES DICKENS AS "CAPTAIN BOBADIL" IN "EVERY MAN IN HIS HUMOUR.

"Now, you listen here," he said, "I'm in a dickens of a fix.

I told what I had read in the paper: that our country rivalled Dickens's in queer names, and that it wasn't for a land that had Boggs and Bigger and Bragg for governors, and Stubbs, Snoggles, Scroggs, and Pugh among its respectable citizens, to accuse Dickens of caricature.

As Graham finished Mark Twain's last letterthe one to Mr. Fields, dated 1874he noticed that the next letter from Dickens to Mr. Fields was dated 1867seven years prior.

We have it in many shapes, from "Dickens for Children" to "The Children's Longfellow."

An interesting meeting between Thackeray and Dickens at this time (1836) suggests the relative importance of the two writers.

[Footnote 7: See a deeply interesting paper on Dickens by 'G.G.' in the New York Critic, Jan. 1902.

Seymour, who was illustrating the Pickwick Papers, had just died, and Thackeray called upon Dickens with a few drawings and asked to be allowed to continue the illustrations.

They play the dickens with a fellow's wind.

GroundA "Pretty" BallCharles Dickens on CricketDumkins and Podder, LimitedHow Dumkins Hit a "Sixer"Downfall of "Podder"Bourton-on-the-Water C.C.A Plague of WaspsThe Treatment of Cricket GroundsThe Author's RecipeReflections on Modern Cricket.

When "Vanity Fair" was issuing, Mrs. Carlyle wrote her husband: "Very good indeed; beats Dickens out of the world"; but his greatest effort was "Esmond," which accordingly is accounted "the most perfect, artistically, of his fictions."

"You frightened the dickens out of me, Verslun," he cried.