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New Zealand Tablet, Volume II, Issue 69, 22 August 1874, Page 10

CHiELEa Dickens. — Charles Dickens — how did he die? This question is put by a contemporary, and answered thu3 : — The life of Charles Dickens 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, and gives the most conclusive evidence that paralysis, which ended the great litterateur'' a earthly career, was due almost exclusively to that very act of his life which drew admiring thousands to listen to the delineations in person of the leading characters of his published works. On leaving the platform after reading " Copperfield," so laborious, earnest, and pathetic were the exertions made by Dickens, his whole soul being thrown into the work that the pulsations of bis heart numbered 96, being 24 in excess of the ordinary pulse, 72 ; after " Marigold," 99 j " Sikes and Nancy," 118; " Oliver Twist," 124. Thus, while his audiences were rejoicing over his talonted histrionic display, the efforts of the reader himself were driving nails iuto his cofSu, breaking down the delicate walls of the nervous system of the brain, ftoodiug that great organ with an inundation of fluid, which doomed the birth-place of Pickwick , and v a host of other iuteresting charaotera of English fictitious history.