We ought not to omit to mention what any reader may well surmise, that Charles Dickens is inimitable in enlivening correspondence or table-talk with humorous anecdote, appropriate to the occasion. We subjoin a few specimens. The first is from one of his letters to Douglas Jerrold, and is dated Paris, 14th February, 1847:—“I am somehow reminded of a good story I heard the other night from a man who was a witness of it, and an actor in it. At a certain German town last autumn there was a tremendous _furore_ about Jenny Lind, who, after driving the whole place mad, left it, on her travels, early one morning. The moment her carriage was outside the gates, a party of rampant students, who had escorted it, rushed back to the inn, demanded to be shown to her bedroom, swept like a whirlwind upstairs into the room indicated to them, tore up the sheets, and wore them in strips as decorations. An hour or two afterwards a bald old gentleman, of amiable appearance, an Englishman, who was staying in the hotel, came to breakfast at the _table d’hôte_, and was observed to be much disturbed in his mind, and to show great terror whenever a student came near him. At last he said, in a low voice, to some people who were near him at the table, ‘You are English gentlemen, I observe. Most extraordinary people, these Germans! Students, as a body, raving mad, gentlemen!’ ‘Oh, no!’ said somebody else; ‘excitable, but very good fellows, and very sensible.’ ‘By God, sir!’ returned the old gentleman, still more disturbed, ‘then there’s something political in it, and I am a marked man. I went out for a little walk this morning after shaving, and while I was gone’—he fell into a terrible perspiration as he told it—‘they burst into my bedroom, tore up my sheets, and are now patrolling the town in all directions with bits of ’em in their button-holes!’ I needn’t wind up by adding that they had gone to the wrong chamber.” Dickens now and then administers a little gentle rebuke to affectation, in a pleasant but unmistakable manner. Here is an instance of how he silenced a bilious young writer, who was inveighing against the world in a very “forcible feeble manner.” During a pause in this philippic against the human race, Dickens said across the table, in the most self-congratulatory of tones:—“I say—what a lucky thing it is you and I don’t belong to it? It reminds me,” continued the author of Pickwick, “of the two men, who on a _raised_ scaffold were awaiting the final delicate attention of the hangman; the notice of one was aroused by observing that a bull had got into the crowd of spectators, and was busily employed in tossing one here, and another there; whereupon one of the criminals said to the other—‘I say, Bill, how _lucky it is_ for us that we _are up here_.’” * * * * *