Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/191

Rh and derived its name from the fact that the scene of the was laid at. To it the author afterwards appended a supplement, likewise in three s, which he called Corinthiaci. The only complete edition of the fragments of Dicæarchus is that at  in 1841 by Max Fuhr. An excellent dissertation on them will be found in Osann, ''Beiträge zur Griech. und Rom. Literatur''.  DICK, (1775-1857), a popular writer on astronomy and other scientific subjects, was born in 1775. He was educated for the ministry in connection with the Secession (now United Presbyterian) Church of Scotland, and was ordained at Stirling in 1803. About two years afterwards his connection with the church was severed, and he became a teacher, first at Methven, a village in Perthshire, and afterwards at Perth. In 1824 he published in two volumes the Christian Philosopher, a work whose "aim was," in his own words, "to illustrate the harmony which subsists between the system of nature and the system of revelation, and to show that the manifestations of God in the material universe ought to be blended with our view of the facts and doctrines recorded in the volume of inspiration." The success of this work enabled him to resign his labours as teacher, and in 1827 he removed to Broughty Ferry, a suburb of Dundee, where he devoted his whole time to literary and scientific pursuits. Besides the Christian Philosopher, he is author of the Philosophy of a Future State (1828), the Improvement of Society by the Diffusion of Knowledge (1833), Celestial Scenery (1837), The Sidereal Heavens (1840), and several smaller treatises. These works were all intended to supplement and extend the aims of the Christian Philosopher, and. may be regarded as endeavours by means of scientific discoveries to illustrate particular aspects of religious truth, and to suggest solutions of difficult religious problems. They are written in a popular and fascinating style, and manifest great aptitude for simplifying scientific subjects, and rendering them interesting to non-scientific readers. Some years before his death, which took place 27th July 1857, a pension was conferred on him by Government.  DICKENS, (1812-1870), the great English novelist, was what would generally be described as a self-educated man, and yet, if by a man's education we understand preparation for the work he has to do in life, he was indebted to circumstances for an education on which it would have been difficult to improve. His father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, stationed at Portsmouth when Charles was born, but soon afterwards at Chatham, and soon after that in London,—a conscientious man, industrious and punctual in his occupation, but too easy tempered and unpractical to expend his income so as to keep pace with the wants of a rapidly increasing family. The boy's mother seems to have been a person of more energy, as well as of considerable accomplishments; she taught him the rudiments of Latin, and tried to establish a boarding school in Gower Street. The one parent was the original of Micawber, the other the original of Mrs Nickleby. With all their united efforts they could not keep out of distress; the boarding school scheme came too late; and when Dickens was nine years old the family was living in abject poverty in Bayham Street, Camden Town, then one of the poorest London suburbs, and their difficulties were increasing upon them. Charles was sent out to earn six shillings a week in a blacking warehouse, tying blue covers on pots of paste-blacking. For two years the child led a very hard, uncared-for life at this uncongenial work. He bitterly felt that it was uncongenial, for he was a very precocious boy, had read many books, and had formed an ambition to be "a learned and distinguished man." It must have been very galling to him, with his prematurely developed sensibilities and aspirations, to be thrown among such companions as Bob Fagin and Poll Green. And perhaps he was right in afterlife to wonder at the thoughtlessness of his parents in subjecting him to such a humiliation. His sufferings were so acute, and made such an impression on him, that years afterwards he could not think of them without crying; and there were certain quarters of the town through which he used to pass to his daily work, and where he used to loiter with less than enough to eat, that he habitually shunned for their painful memories. "It is wonderful to me," he wrote when in the height of his fame, "how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me that, even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion enough on me—a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally—to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school. Our friends, I take it, were tired out. No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar school, and going to Cambridge."

And indeed, if his parents could have foreseen the future, they would have had cause to be much more satisfied. For when the fragile little boy was sent into his cousin's blacking warehouse, he entered a better school, as it happened, than his father could have chosen for him. It was an infinitely more painful school than Harrow or Eton, but for one whose destined work was to describe the poorer houses and streets of London, and the many varieties of life, odd and sad, laughter-moving and pitiful, that swarmed in them, it was a more instructive school, it was the true road to knowledge. The chances were that a delicate boy like him succumbed to his wretchedness, and that a clever boy like him became a rogue and vagabond; but he survived these dangers and became a great novelist. Instead of sinking into the depths of the thronging atoms, he rose above them, or kept apart from them, observed them, and became their describer.

It is impossible to say how this watchful habit began, and when it connected itself with his love of literary distinction. We have Dickens's own testimony that he was a singularly observant child, and that at a very early period he had an ambition to become "a learned and distinguished man," but it would be going too far to suppose that from his childhood he held himself apart and kept a keen eye on the doings of others with a view to making capital out of his observations. At first in all likelihood the distinction which he coveted was a kind of distinction that seemed to him possible only through the medium of grammar-schools and universities. To the last no doubt he regretted this want of academical study, and believed that it had placed him at a disadvantage. Still accident is so very much better a schoolmaster than design, that from the first it gave him also the literary training needful to make him a painter of manners. His father, the navy pay clerk, had a small collection of books, with which the "very small and not over-particularly taken care of boy" had made himself familiar while he was living at Chatham, before his experiences in Camden Town and the blacking warehouse. Among these books were Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, Robinson Crusoe, the Arabian Nights, Mrs Inchbald's Farces, and the Tales of the Genii. This literature did not glide over the boy's mind like water over marble; it found congenial soil, and fell into it as seed. He lived the life of his favourite characters. "I have been Tom Jones," he says, putting his own case into the mouth of David Copperfield "(a child's Tom Jones, a