Of course, had it been in these days of hurried publication, Dickens would hardly have given the matter a second thought. The average illustrator of to-day is curiously superior to the requirements of his author. He either does not read the episodes that he is called upon to illustrate, or, if he reads them, he does not grasp their meaning, or, if he grasps their meaning, the meaning does not meet with his approval. At any rate, he constantly makes a hash of the whole thing. Take for example _Penelope’s English Experiences_, by Miss Kate Wiggin, now lying before me. Look at the illustration, opposite p. 58, of Lady de Wolfe’s butler, who struck terror into Penelope’s soul because _he did not wear a livery_, and try, if you can, to recognise him in the shoulder-knotted, stripe-waistcoated, plush-breeched, silk-stockinged menial with an “unapproachable haughtiness of demeanour,” which the illustrator has portrayed. {39} Nor is this one of a few exceptional cases: their number might be multiplied _ad infinitum_. But to return to _The Battle of Life_. Curiously enough, there is another little episode connected with this book, never, I believe, noticed before, which accentuates our impression of the generosity of Dickens’s character. Three years after its publication a somewhat scurrilous little volume (now excessively rare), bearing the allusive title _The Battle of London Life; or Boz and his Secretary_, issued from the press. It was illustrated by six lithographs signed with the name of George Augustus Sala. It was a poor enough performance, but attracted attention by its _ad captandum_ title, and the portrait of “Boz in his Study.” It is an imaginary and far from complimentary account of Dickens’s employment of a secretary, whose occupation it is to show him round the haunts of vice in London, by way of providing “local colour” for the novels. Eventually the secretary turns out to be a detective, who has been told off by the Government to discover the nature of the novelist’s intimacy with the revolutionist, Mazzini. It is a vulgar little {40} brochure, and, for all its futility, must have been very distasteful to the idol of the day. It was therefore the more magnanimous of Dickens to ignore the part which Sala had in it, and to speak so generously of him as we find him doing in the _Life_, besides employing him and pushing him, as he did largely later on, in his periodicals. A smaller man would not have allowed himself to forget such youthful indiscretions, for “memory always obeys the commands of the heart.” Judged as a work of art, _The Battle of Life_ is perhaps the least successful of Dickens’s “Christmas Books.” Edward FitzGerald’s opinion of it was shown in an autograph letter which came into the market only the other day. “What a wretched affair is _The Battle of Life_!” he writes; “it scarce even has the few good touches that generally redeem Dickens.”