Page:The Story of the Cheeryble Grants.djvu/28

8 con-espondent's father was one, met round the hospitable table of Mr. Gilbert Winter; and our venerable critic was then a youth in his teens. And, while the vivid impressions of early days, preserved through a long life-time, in what De Quincey calls “the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain,” are not to be lightly set aside, yet our correspondent need not take it amiss that his conviction — that the Grants, as well as his father, met Charles Dickens on the evening in question at Mr. Winter’s — cannot be allowed to set aside the deliberate public averment of the novelist, published nine years after the event, and while the younger Cheeryble — Daniel Grant — was still a well-known figure on the streets of Manchester.

Perhaps the following pages may serve, in some measure, to show with what unerring accuracy the genius of Dickens seized and illustrated the central and dominating elements in the delightful personalities of William and Daniel Grant. Their simple and winsome brotherly love, tender filial reverence, and genial open-handed generosity, like the rays of a goodly brilliant, shot a lustrous beauty through their lives — lives, upright, honourable and laborious, lived out in the common gray of everyday existence. And as surely as twin-stars revolve round a common centre of gravity so surely did the lives of these brothers move round