Bret Hart has been generally accepted as the one American writer who
possessed above all others the faculty of what may be called heart
appeal, the power to give to his work that quality of human interest
which enables the writer and his writings to live in the memory of the
reading public for all time. By reason of that gift of his Bret Harte
has been popularly compared with his great contemporary beyond the
seas, greatest of all sentimentalists among writers of fiction,
Charles Dickens.

Just how far the younger author selected the elder for his ideal, built
upon him, so to speak, & held his example constantly before his mental
vision, may be always a matter of debate amongst students of literature.
There can be no question of the genuineness of the Californian writer's
admiration of him who made the whole world laugh or weep with him at
will. It is recorded Harte that at seven years of age he had read
"Dombey & Son," and so, as one of his biographers, Henry Childs Merwin,
observes, "began his acquaintance with that author who was to influence
him far more than any other." Merwin further declares that "the reading
of Dickens stimulated his boyish imagination and quickened that sympathy
with the weak and suffering, with the downtrodden, with the waifs and
strays, with the outcasts of society, which is remarkable in both
writers. The spirit of Dickens breathes through the poems and stories of
Bret Harte just as the spirit of Bret Harte breathes through the poems
and stories of Kipling. Bret Harte had a very pretty satirical vein
which might easily have developed, have made him an author of satire
rather than of sentiment. Who can say that the influence of Dickens,
coming at the early, plastic period of his life, may not have turned
the scale?"