NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THE author who had attained by far the greatest popularity ever won in a lifetime, Charles Dickens, died on Thursday, at his house at Gadshill, after an illness of little more than twenty-four hours. His death is attributed to a paralytic stroke. He had had threatenings of some such seizure a short time ago, but seemed quite to have recovered his health ; and, certainly if the three numbers already issued of his new tale,—" The Mystery of Edwin Drood,"—be any gauge of the power of his brain, he had not been so vigorous for many years back. Many of his old admirers, who had in some degree fallen off from Mr. Dickens, had been attracted by the freshness and originality of his new tale, and had returned to their allegiance. Born at Portsmouth, in 1812, the son of one of the staff in the Pay department of the Navy, Mr. Dickens was educated at Chatham and at Rochester College, and afterwards intended for a solicitor, but at his own wish abandoned this calling for that of Parliamentary reporter to the True Sun, and afterwards to the Mirror of Parliament and the Morning Chronicle. The " Pickwick Papers," written when he was only twenty-four, made him famous, and since that time he has been author only, excepting the brief interval of his editorial enter- prise as first editor of the Daily News,—a kind of post for which, of course, he was utterly unsuited. The popularity of his weekly serial, Household Words,—a title afterwards changed to All the Year Round,—hag been something enormous, and probably no writer in any country ever earned so great a fortune by his pen as Mr. Dickens. Perhaps he is the only English writer of whom it can be truly said that in any one line in which Shake- speare was not only great, but at his greatest, this other was greater than he. But as a humourist, we think it is true of Dickens, —Juliet's nurse and Mrs. Gamp are both great creations, but Mrs. Gamp is the greater of the two.
