“‘I returned suddenly to town yesterday afternoon,’ he wrote to the artist at the end of October, ‘to look at the latter pages of “Oliver Twist’ before it was delivered to the booksellers, when I saw the majority of the plates in the last volume for the first time. With reference to the last one--Rose Maylie and Oliver--without entering into the question of great haste, or any other cause, which may have led to its being what it is, I am quite sure there can be little difference of opinion between us with respect to the result. May I ask you whether you will object to designing this plate afresh, and doing so _at once_, in order that as few impressions as possible of the present one may go forth? I feel confident you know me too well to feel hurt by this inquiry, and with equal confidence in you I have lost no time in preferring it.’ This letter, printed from a copy in Dickens’s handwriting, fortunately committed to my keeping, * entirely disposes of a wonderful story, originally promulgated in America, with a minute conscientiousness and particularity of detail that might have raised the reputation of Sir Benjamin Backbite himself. Whether all Sir Benjamin’s laurels, however, should fall to the original teller of the tale, or whether any part of them is the property of the alleged authority from which he says he received it, is unfortunately not quite clear. There would hardly have been a doubt, if the fable had been confined to the other side of the Atlantic, but it has been reproduced and widely circulated on this side also, and the distinguished artist whom it calumniates by fathering its invention upon him, either not conscious of it, or not caring to defend himself, has been left undefended from the slander. By my ability to produce Dickens’s letter, I am spared the necessity of characterizing the tale, myself, by the one unpolite word (in three letters) which alone would have been applicable to it.” * Mr. Forster printed a facsimile of the letter in his second volume.