The Life of Charles Dickens.

p. 482, from Volume III: It is also to be noted as in the same spirit, that it was not the loud but the silent heroisms he most admired. Of Sir John Richardson, one of the few who have lived in our days entitled to the name of a hero, he [Dickens] wrote from Paris in 1856. ‘Lady Franklin sent me the whole of that Richardson memoir; and I think Richardson’s manly friendship, and love of Franklin, one of the noblest things I ever knew in my life. It makes one’s heart beat high, with a sort of sacred joy.’ (It is the feeling as strongly awakened by the earlier exploits of the same gallant man to be found at the end of Franklin’s first voyage, and never to be read without the most exalted emotion.)