er of a dynamiter or an exiled prince.
The human and hospitable English waiter is vanishing. And Dickens might
perhaps have saved him, as he saved Christmas.

I have taken this case of the waiter in Dickens and his equally
important counterpart in England as an example of the sincere and genial
sketches scattered about these short stories. But there are many others,
and one at least demands special mention; I mean Mrs. Lirriper, the
London landlady. Not only did Dickens never do anything better in a
literary sense, but he never performed more perfectly his main moral
function, that of insisting through laughter and flippancy upon the
virtue of Christian charity. There has been much broad farce against the
lodging-house keeper: he alone could have written broad farce in her
favour. It is fashionable to represent the landlady as a tyrant; it is
too much forgotten that if she is one of the oppressors she is at least
as much one of the oppressed. If she is bad-tempered it is often for the
same reasons that make all women bad-tempered (I suppose the
exasperating qualities of the other sex); if she is grasping it is often
because when a husband makes generosity a vice it is often necessary
that a wife should make avarice a virtue. All this Dickens suggested
very soundly and in a few strokes in the more remote character of Miss
Wozenham. But in Mrs. Lirriper he went further and did not fare worse.
In Mrs. Lirriper he suggested quite truly how huge a mass of real good
humour, of grand unconscious patience, of unfailing courtesy and
constant and difficult benevolence is concealed behind many a
lodging-house door and compact in the red-faced person of many a
preposterous landlady. Any one could easily excuse the ill-humour of the
poor. But great masses of the poor have not even any ill-humour to be
excused. Their cheeriness is startling enough to be the foundation of a
miracle play; and certainly is startling enough to be the foundation of
a romance. Yet I do not know of any romance in which it is expressed
except this one.

Of the landlady as of the waiter it may be said that Dickens left in a
slight sketch what he might have developed through a long and strong
novel. For Dickens had hold of one great truth, the neglect of which
has, as it were, truncated and made meagre the work of many brilliant
modern novelists. Modern novelists try to make long novels out of subtle
characters. But a subtle character soon comes to an end, be