mestic life, which had been at first very happy, became more and more
irritating, until he separated from his wife in 1858. To get inspiration,
which seemed for a time to have failed, he journeyed to Italy, but was
disappointed. Then he turned back to the London streets, and in the five
years from 1848 to 1853 appeared _Dombey and Son, David Copperfield_, and
_Bleak House_,--three remarkable novels, which indicate that he had
rediscovered his own power and genius. Later he resumed the public
readings, with their public triumph and applause, which soon came to be a
necessity to one who craved popularity as a hungry man craves bread. These
excitements exhausted Dickens, physically and spiritually, and death was
the inevitable result. He died in 1870, over his unfinished _Edwin Drood_,
and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

DICKENS'S WORK IN VIEW OF HIS LIFE. A glance through even this
unsatisfactory biography gives us certain illuminating suggestions in
regard to all of Dickens's work. First, as a child, poor and lonely,
longing for love and for society, he laid the foundation for those
heartrending pictures of children, which have moved so many readers to
unaccustomed tears. Second, as clerk in a lawyer's office and in the
courts, he gained his knowledge of an entirely different side of human
life. Here he learned to understand both the enemies and the victims of
society, between whom the harsh laws of that day frequently made no
distinction. Third, as a reporter, and afterwards as manager of various
newspapers, he learned the trick of racy writing, and of knowing to a
nicety what would suit the popular taste. Fourth, as an actor, always an
actor in spirit, he seized upon every dramatic possibility, every tense
situation, every peculiarity of voice and gesture in the people whom he
met, and reproduced these things in his novels, exaggerating them in the
way that most pleased his audience.

When we turn from his outward training to his inner disposition we find two
strongly marked elements. The first is his excessive imagination, which
made good stories out of incidents that ordinarily pass unnoticed, and
which described the commonest things--a street, a shop, a fog, a lamp-post,
a stagecoach--with a wealth of detail and of romantic suggestion that makes
many of his descriptions like lyric poems. The second element is his
extreme sensibility, which finds relief only in laughter and tears. Like
shadow and sunshine these fol