y can be found in an English and American habit
common until recently: that of painting the South Americans at once as
ruffians wading in carnage, and also as poltroons playing at war. They
blame them first for the cruelty of having a fight; and then for the
weakness of having a sham fight. Such, however, since the French
Revolution and before it, has been the fatuous attitude of certain
Anglo-Saxons towards the whole revolutionary tradition. Sim Tappertit
was a sort of answer to everything; and the young men were mocked as
'prentices long after they were masters. The rising fortune of the South
American republics to-day is symbolical and even menacing of many
things; and it may be that the romance of riot will not be so much
extinguished as extended; and nearer home we may have boys being boys
again, and in London the cry of "clubs."

THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER

_The Uncommercial Traveller_ is a collection of Dickens's memories
rather than of his literary purposes; but it is due to him to say that
memory is often more startling in him than prophecy in anybody else.
They have the character which belongs to all his vivid incidental
writing: that they attach themselves always to some text which is a fact
rather than an idea. He was one of those sons of Eve who are fonder of
the Tree of Life than of the Tree of Knowledge--even of the knowledge of
good and of evil. He was in this profoundest sense a realist. Critics
have talked of an artist with his eye on the object. Dickens as an
essayist always had his eye on an object before he had the faintest
notion of a subject. All these works of his can best be considered as
letters; they are notes of personal travel, scribbles in a diary about
this or that that really happened. But Dickens was one of the few men
who have the two talents that are the whole of literature--and have them
both together. First, he could make a thing happen over again; and
second, he could make it happen better. He can be called exaggerative;
but mere exaggeration conveys nothing of his typical talent. Mere
whirlwinds of words, mere melodramas of earth and heaven do not affect
us as Dickens affects us, because they are exaggerations of nothing. If
asked for an exaggeration of something, their inventors would be
entirely dumb. They would not know how to exaggerate a broom-stick; for
the life of them they could not exaggerate a tenpenny nail. Dickens
always began with the nail or the broom-stick. He alw