I must say a few, a very few words of what Dickens appeared to me as a man.

I think that an epithet, which, much and senselessly as it has been misapplied and degraded, is yet, when rightly used, perhaps the grandest that can be applied to a human being, was especially applicable to him.

He was a _hearty_ man, a large-hearted man that is to say.

He was perhaps the largest-hearted man I ever knew.

I think he made a nearer approach to obeying the divine precept, "Love thy neighbour as thyself," than one man in a hundred thousand.