CHARLES DIUKENS.

Westport Times, Volume VIII, Issue 1199, 4 August 1874, Page 4

CHARLES DIUKENS.

Charles Dickens—how did he die ? This question is put by a contemporary, and answered thus:—The life of Charles Dickons teems with interest ; his death gives a most salutary lesson. An eminent medical writer gives a short summary of the various shocks to the system of Dickens, which naturally weakened him and predisposed his frame to affliction, aud gives the most conclusive evidenco that paralysis, which ended the great litterateur's earthly career, was due almost exclusively' to that very act of his life which drew admiring thousands to listen to to the delineations in person of the lea.ling characters of las published work.-. On leaving the platform after reading " Copperheld," so laborious, earnest, and pathetic were the exertions made by Dickens, his whole soul being thrown into the work that the pulsations of his heart numbered 9U, being 24 in excess of the ordinary pulse, 72 ; after " Marigold," 9D ; " Sikes and Nancy," 118 ; " Oliver Twist," 121. " Thus, while his audiences were rejoicing over his talented histrionic display, the ell'orts of the reader himself were driving nails into his coffin, breaking down the delicate walls of the nervous system of the brain, flooding that great organ with an inundation of fluid, which doomed tho birth-place of ihekwick and a host of other interesting characters of English fictitious historr.