A Sacred Spot.
On June 19, 1870, five days after Dickens's interment in the Abbey, Dean Stanley delivered this funeral discourse, which lauded "the genial and loving humourist whom we now mourn," for showing by his own example "that even in dealing with the darkest scenes and the most degraded characters, genius could still be clean, and mirth could be innocent. . . ." Pointing to the fresh flowers that adorned the novelist's grave on that Sunday, Dean Stanley assured his listeners that "the spot would thenceforth be a sacred one with both the New World and the Old, as that of the representative of literature, not of this island only, but of all who speak our English tongue."