me. I recognize in your enthusiastic approval of the creatures of
my fancy, your enlightened care for the happiness of the many, your
tender regard for the afflicted, your sympathy for the downcast,
your plans for correcting and improving the bad, and for
encouraging the good; and to advance these great objects shall be,
to the end of my life, my earnest endeavour, to the extent of my
humble ability. Having said thus much with reference to myself, I
shall have the pleasure of saying a few words with reference to
somebody else.
There is in this city a gentleman who, at the reception of one of
my books – I well remember it was the Old Curiosity Shop – wrote to
me in England a letter so generous, so affectionate, and so manly,
that if I had written the book under every circumstance of
disappointment, of discouragement, and difficulty, instead of the
reverse, I should have found in the receipt of that letter my best
and most happy reward. I answered him, and he answered me, and so
we kept shaking hands autographically, as if no ocean rolled
between us. I came here to this city eager to see him, and [LAYING
HIS HAND IT UPON IRVING’S SHOULDER] here he sits! I need not tell
you how happy and delighted I am to see him here to-night in this
capacity.
Washington Irving! Why, gentlemen, I don’t go upstairs to bed two
Page 14
Dickens, Charles – Speeches, Literary & Social
nights out of the seven – as a very creditable witness near at hand
can testify – I say I do not go to bed two nights out of the seven
without taking Washington Irving under my arm; and, when I don’t
take him, I take his own brother, Oliver Goldsmith. Washington
Irving! Why, of whom but him was I thinking the other day when I
came up by the Hog’s Back, the Frying Pan, Hell Gate, and all these
places? Why, when, not long ago, I visited Shakespeare’s
birthplace, and went beneath the roof where he first saw light,
whose name but HIS was pointed out to me upon the wall? Washington
Irving – Diedrich Knickerbocker – Geoffrey Crayon – why, where can
you go that they have not been there before? Is there an English
farm – is there an English stream, an English city, or an English
country-seat, where they have not been? Is there no Bracebridge
Hall in existence? Has it no ancient shades or quiet streets?
In bygone times, when Irving left that Hall, he left sitting in an
old oak chair, in a small parlour of the Boar’s Head, a little man
with a red nose, and an oilskin hat. When I came away he was
sitting there still! – not a man LIKE him, but the same man – with
the nose of immortal redness and the hat of an undying glaze!
Crayon, while there, was on terms of intimacy with a certain
radical fellow, who used to go about, with a hatful of newspapers,
wofully out at elbows, and with a coat of great antiquity. Why,
gentlemen, I know that man – Tibbles the elder, and he has not
changed a hair; and, when I came away, he charged me to give his
best respects to Washington Irving!
Leaving the town and the rustic life of England – forgetting this
man, if we can – putting out of mind the country church-yard and
the broken heart – let us cross the water again, and ask who has
associated himself most closely with the Italian peasantry and the
bandits of the Pyrenees? When the traveller enters his little
chamber beyond the Alps – listening to the dim echoes of the long
passages and spacious corridors – damp, and gloomy, and cold – as
he hears the tempest beating with fury against his window, and
gazes at the curtains, dark, and heavy, and covered with mould –
and when all the ghost-stories that ever were told come up before
him – amid all his thick-coming fancies, whom does he think of?
Washington Irving.
Go farther still: go to the Moorish Mountains, sparkling full in