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 *peat his stories from memory, and he was asked out to breakfasts, teas, and dinners, to meet other important people of the day. He was delighted, because he loved to be appreciated. Dickens was specially kind to him and asked Andersen to stay with him. Andersen wrote about England to his friends in Denmark: "Here I am regarded as a Danish Walter Scott, while in Denmark I am supposed to be a sort of third-class author." He fumed and fretted in quite a childish way that the Danish papers did not pay more attention to his reception in England; it made him feel quite ill, he says.

So after writing an immense poem and another novel, which both failed, he devoted himself to the Fairy Tales.

Andersen in his own "Life" says about his Fairy Tales, that he would willingly have given up writing them, but that they forced themselves upon him. He knew that the critics would object to the style of the writing, and that was why, at the beginning, he had called the stories "Fairy Tales for Children," but he had meant them as much for the grown-ups. He found that people of different ages were equally amused by them—the older ones by the deeper meaning, and children by the fancies, so like their own, and the amusing, lively style of the writing. Indeed, Andersen's great gift is that he appeals to so many different sorts of people, that he himself has so many sides. He is tender, sad, and wistful, but also absurd,