erial of the artist. With such materials Dickens was
exactly suited; he was at home on high-road and lane, street and field-
path, in inns and yeomen's warm hospitable houses. Never a humour
escaped him, and he had such a wealth of fun and high spirits in these
glad days as never any other possessed before. He was not in the least a
bookish man, not in any degree a scholar; but Nature taught him, and
while he wrote with Nature for his teacher, with men and women for his
matter, with diversion for his aim, he was unsurpassable--nay, he was
unapproachable.

He could not rest here; he was, after all, a child of an age that grew
sad, and earnest, and thoughtful. He saw abuses round him--injustice,
and oppression, and cruelty. He had a heart to which those things were
not only abhorrent, but, as it were, maddening. He knew how great an
influence he wielded, and who can blame him for using it in any cause he
thought good? Very possibly he might have been a greater artist if he
had been less of a man, if he had been quite disinterested, and had never
written "with a purpose." That is common, and even rather obsolete
critical talk. But when we remember that Fielding, too, very often wrote
"with a purpose," and that purpose the protection of the poor and
unfriended; and when we remember what an artist Fielding was, I do not
see how we can blame Dickens. Occasionally he made his art and his
purpose blend so happily that his work was all the better for his
benevolent intentions. We owe Mr. Squeers, Mrs. Squeers, Fanny Squeers,
Wackford and all, to Dickens's indignation against the nefarious school
pirates of his time. If he is less successful in attacking the Court of
Chancery, and very much less successful still with the Red Tape and
Circumlocution Office affairs, that may be merely because he was less in
the humour, and not because he had a purpose in his mind. Every one of a
man's books cannot be his masterpiece. There is nothing in literary talk
so annoying as the spiteful joy with which many people declare that an
author is "worked out," because his last book is less happy than some
that went before. There came a time in Dickens' career when his works,
to my own taste and that of many people, seemed laboured, artificial--in
fact, more or less failures. These books range from "Dombey and Son,"
through "Little Dorrit," I dare not say to "Our Mutual Friend." One is
afraid that "Edwin Drood," too, suggests the mal