Page:Cousins's Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature.djvu/128

116 amounted to £20,000; but the effect on his health was such that he was obliged, on medical advice, finally to abandon all appearances of the kind. In 1869 he began his last work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which was interrupted by his death from an apoplectic seizure on June 8, 1870.

One of D.'s most marked characteristics is the extraordinary wealth of his invention as exhibited in the number and variety of the characters introduced into his novels. Another, especially, of course, in his entire works, is his boundless flow of animal spirits. Others are his marvellous keenness of observation and his descriptive power. And the English race may well, with Thackeray, be "grateful for the innocent laughter, and the sweet and unsullied pages which the author of David Copperfield gives to [its] children." On the other hand, his faults are obvious, a tendency to caricature, a mannerism that often tires, and almost disgusts, fun often forced, and pathos not seldom degenerating into mawkishness. But at his best how rich and genial is the humour, how tender often the pathos. And when all deductions are made, he had the laughter and tears of the English-speaking world at command for a full generation while he lived, and that his spell still works is proved by a continuous succession of new editions.

. B. 1812, parliamentary reporter c. 1835, pub. Sketches by Boz 1836, Pickwick 1837-39, and his other novels almost continuously until his death, visited America 1841, started Household Words 1849, and All the Year Round 1858, when also he began his public readings, visiting America again in 1867, d. 1870.

Life by John FosterForster [sic] (1872), Letters ed. by Georgina Hogarth (1880-82). Numerous Lives and Monographs by Sala, F. T. Marzials (Great Writers Series), A. W. Ward (Men of Letters Series), F. G. Kitton, G. K. Chesterton, etc.

 Author:Kenelm Digby (1603-1665).—Miscellaneous writer, b. near Newport Pagnell, s. of Sir Everard D., one of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators, was ed. at Oxf., travelled much, and was engaged in sea-fighting. Brought up first as a Romanist, then as a Protestant, he in 1636 joined the Church of Rome. During the Civil War he was active on the side of the King, and on the fall of his cause was for a time banished. He was the author of several books on religious and quasi-scientific subjects, including one on the Choice of a Religion, on the Immortality of the Soul, Observations on Spenser's Faery Queen, and a criticism on Religio Medici. He also wrote a Discourse on Vegetation, and one On the Cure of Wounds by means of a sympathetic powder which he imagined he had discovered.

 Author:Charles Wentworth Dilke (1789-1864) (1789-1864).—Critic and writer on literature, served for many years in the Navy Pay-Office, on retiring from which he devoted himself to literary pursuits. He had in 1814–16 made a continuation of Dodsley's Collection of English Plays, and in 1829 he became part proprietor and ed. of The Athenæum, the influence of which he greatly extended. In 1846 he resigned the editorship, and assumed that of The Daily News, but contributed to The Athenæum his famous papers on Pope, Burke, Junius, etc., and shed much new light on his subjects. His 