Page:Works of Charles Dickens, ed. Lang - Volume 31.djvu/474

442 "Every night since I had dreamed of that friend." This was Dickens's sister-in-law, Miss Mary Hogarth. If Mr. Forster is right, the dream of her never entirely ceased to occur, as in the text. That it should pass away with the communication of the secret is in accordance with the Highland superstition of the second sight. A seer will lose the faculty if he reveals his first vision.

Cornwall. Dickens visited Cornwall, with Forster, Maclise, and Stanfield, and in festive circumstances, in 1843. The anecdote here is probably autobiographical, but it does not seem possible to trace the Swiss experiences, and the story of the Welsh haunting, or "strange influence." There are many such anecdotes, vaguely suggesting that the stress of passion in the past "photographs itself, we know not how, on we know not what," and occasionally becomes sensible to sensitive minds.

"Athol brose."

This is a mixture of cream, honey, and whiskey. "This is the true balm of Gilead, John," said a sportsman to a Highlander. "I rather think, sir," answered the Gael, "that that is a figure of sanctifying grace."

A school "where everybody, large and small, was cruel." Not much is known of Dickens's school-days, but nobody suggests that cruelty prevailed at Wellington House Academy, in Mornington Place, where he was only a day-boy. Yet, except at David Copperfield's last school, cruelty pervades Dickens's descriptions of school-life. It seems as if certain early experiences of flogging masters and of bullies, as well as of Chadbands and Stigginses, had slipped out of his biography.