Page:Essays and criticisms by Wainewright (1880).djvu/11

Rh to be a more authentic and satisfactory way of setting about the erection of a monument: where one had to do with a business, too, in which truth was to the full as strange as romance.

But an even wider departure from the facts is manifest in a novelette by Dickens, called "Hunted Down," (originally contributed to the New York Ledger). Of course, the story, as a story, is amusing enough, and reduces to tatters (in Dickens's usual way) the hero's idiosyncrasy of wearing a middle parting; but Wainewright's real career would have been far more so. Dickens, perhaps, thought differently—thought, at least, that the enterprising American firm which is said to have given £1000 for the little work of fiction, would not have cared to give such a sum for a poor array of biographical details.

Whatever Wainewright's sins might be, a want of knowledge and cultivation was hardly to be reckoned among them. His conversance with literature was far in excess of any possessed either by Mr. Justice Talfourd or by Mr. Walter Thornbury.

There can, I think, be no reasonable doubt that the ascription of the essays in the London Magazine, purporting to have been written by and, to the pen of Wainewright is quite correct; and from editorial hints in the Magazine, under dates of February, 1822, and January, 1823, one might feel disposed to suspect that the same hand was concerned in