Rensselaer Union, Volume 2, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 June 1870 — Death of Charles Dickens. [ARTICLE]

Death of Charles Dickens.

Charles Dickens is dead. The announcement will come as a shock of grief to thousands of homes. He has left no brother among mortals whose loss would be so keenly and so widely felt as a personal affliction. No other man has enthroned himself in so many hearts; no other man has visited so many households and been so welcomed there as a beloved guest. Charles Dickens was essentially and peculiarly the friend of the poor; the representative of the common people. Before his time, the great popular writers had contented themselves with painting the upper classes; the weaknesses and strength, the greatness and littleness, the friendships, trials, scandals and amours of the nobility. Over all the novels of the ante-Dickens period, was thrown the glamour of the purple. Walter Scott dipped somewhat into the lives of the lowly people of his time, but even his novels were written for a far different constituency than those of the author of Oliver Twist Bulwer rarely stepped down from his majestic height to talk with the povertystricken wretches of his time. But with Dickens came democracy in fiction. And he not only wrote about the common people, but he wrote for the common people. He let in light to all the dark crannies and rookeries of low life in England. He led twenty million readers through the leprous dens of infamy and blight, and gave them no rest until they carried relief. For thirty years the inmates of English._prispnß have been less oppressed; the urchins of the ragged schools have been less meanly clad and fed; the plundered victims of the Chancery Court are less persecuted; the helpless creatures in the alms-houses have been less wretched in their misery, because Charles Dickens was their champion. He moved constantly in their behalf in palace and hovel, in the church and at the bar, .at court and in all the seats of power, and his appealing voice had a potency that no other human voice had ever yet attained.

Charles Dickens has gone hence—but what a family he has left! Up and down the world they troop, representatives of every variety of the human race. As Mrs. Dombey left her character transmitted in her child when “ clinging fast to that slight spar within her arms, she drifted out upon the dark and unknown sea that rolls round the world,” so has Dickens, weighing anchor and trimming sail upon the same sea, left a wonderful procession of immortals. Pickwick and Sam Weller, flanked by the devout but bibulous S tiggins; the unpleasant Darker, the wonderfill little Cleopatra, and the florid Joey B.; Thomas Gradgrind, with his extravagant love of facts, Josiah Bounderby, -Esquire, of Coketown, and that miserable little comfort Sissy Bleary; Scrooge, shadowed by the ghost of Marley, escorted by the ghost of Christmas Past, and followed timidly by Tiny Tim; the diabolical Squeers, and Nicholas, Nickleby, giving him his dues; stalwartand generous Johnjßrowdie, starved and frightened Bmike, the embarrassed Kate at her first cooking, and the Brothers Cheery bledrepresentatives of the grandest men that God ever sent to bless the world; Pecksniff and the party at Todgers’s; the jolly Mark Tapley and the melancholy Bairey Gamp; David Copperfield, Little Emily, Uriah Heep, Micawber, Little Dorrit, and all the other marvelous creations —they defy death, and live forever to tell the world who Charles Dickens was. No peed of a eulogist, when a soul going to the sunny land leaves such eloquent witnesses. Dickens will be mourned, but he will not be forgotten. He wrote for all the world, and tor all time, and he will be tenderly remembered as long as the English language shall retain its form, and humor and pathos shall move the heart of man.— Chicago Post.

An old familiar story is brought to mind by the death of Bishop Kemper. It was in his family that an incident happened which has been often told, in prose and poetry. Jacob Kemper, the Bishop’s grandfather, with his young family, had settled, two years after coming to the country, on a farm at Beekman, in Dutchess county, N. Y. While - living there, the little Maria Sophia, about six years oi ago, was in the habit of eating her bowl of rice and milk, after dinner, seated on the door sill, and used to tell of “ die sdiaiM Schlange" (the beautiful suakc) that came and ate her rice. Her mother watched to see what the child's strange words could mean, and, to her horror, saw a large rattlesnake with its head in the bowl eating with the child, who, when her visitor took more than its share, slapped it on the head with her spoon. When the meal was finished, the snake went quietly away. The intimacy was too dangerous to be allowed continue, and Mr. Kemper killed the snake. The rattle, with eleven or twelve rings, was long preserved in the family.

An English sailor boy. not jet fourteen? sh it and killed another lad, on the levee at New Orleans, a few days ago. The young desperado had to pull the trigger several times before his pistol Wfcft off.