But with us, and I believe with you, his popularity from time to time revives, and no educated man or woman can ignore him. The fact that he has appealed so strongly to the imagination of America is alone a proof of the universality of his genius; for, like Shakespeare and the classics of all countries, his works are the property, not of one people, but of the world. He is not perfect; we should not love him so much if he were. He has faults of style, of arrangement, even of taste. It is easy to criticise; but because of his very excellences, his humour, his pathos, his wide sympathy, his hatred of injustice and oppression, it seems almost presumption to endeavour to sing his praises. May I conclude with those prophetic words he puts into the mouth of Martin Chuzzlewit on leaving your country, which he made his own by denouncing its failings as unsparingly as he did those of his own mother land, in the hope that both you and we, America and England, would conquer them and become the common benefactors of humanity. “‘I am thinking,’ said Mark, ‘that if I was a painter and was called upon to paint the American Eagle, how should I do it?’ ‘Paint it as like an Eagle as you could, I suppose.’ ‘No,’ said Mark, ‘that wouldn’t do for me, sir. I should want to draw it like a Bat for its shortsightedness, like a Bantam for its bragging, like a Magpie for its honesty, like a Peacock for its vanity, like an Ostrich for putting its head in the mud and thinking nobody sees it.’ ‘And like a Phœnix for its power of springing from the ashes of its faults and vices and soaring up into the sky.’ ‘Well, Mark, let us hope so.’” APPENDIX TO LECTURE VI To shew Dickens’ care in collecting his facts the following report of a case relating to Yorkshire Schools is of interest. It was supplied to the author by C. S. Kenny, Esq., Downing Professor of the Laws of England, Cambridge. CHAPTER II. THE RELEVANCY OF EVIDENCE [_Evidence must be confined to the points in issue._] BOLDRON _v._ WIDDOWS WESTMINSTER N. P. SITTINGS. 1824. 1 CARRINGTON AND PAYNE 65. This was an action for defamation. The declaration stated that the plaintiff kept a school, and had divers scholars; and that the defendant spoke of him in his business of a schoolmaster certain words there set out. The words were variously laid in different counts; but they were, in substance, that the scholars were ill fed, and badly lodged, had had the itch, and were full of vermin. Some of the counts laid the loss of certain scholars as special damage. Pleas--the general issue; and justifications, that the whole of the words were true.